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and the job market.

"Have we seen any change here? No, not really," said Koon. So Intel has been lobbying

the INS for an increase in the number of advanced foreign engineers allowed into the

United States on temporary work visas. "When we look at the kinds of people that we

are trying to hire here-the master's and Ph.D. levels in photonics and optics

engineering and very large-scale computer architecture-what we are finding is that

as you go up the food chain from bachelor's to master's to Ph.D.'s, the number of

people graduating from top-tier universities in those fields are increasingly

foreign-born. So what do you do? For years [America] could count on the fact that

we still have the best higher-education system in the world. And we made up for our

deficiencies in K through twelve by being able to get all these good students from

abroad. But now fewer are coming and fewer are staying . . . We have no God-given

right to be able to hire all these people, and little by little we won't have the

first-round draft choices. People who graduate in these very technical fields that

are critical to our industries should get a green card stapled to their diploma."

It appears that young people wanting to be lawyers started to swamp those wanting

to be engineers and scientists in the 1970s and early 1980s. Then, with the dot-com

boom, those wanting to go to business school and earn MBAs swamped engineering

students and lawyers in the 1990s.

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One can also hope that the marketplace will address the shortage of engineers and

scientists by changing the incentives.

"Intel has to go where the IQ is," said Koon. Remember, she repeated, Intel's chips

are made from just two things-sand and brains, "and right now the brains are the

problem . . . We will need a stronger and more supportive immigration system if we

want to hire the people who want to stay here. Otherwise, we will go where they are.

What are the alternatives? I am not talking about data programmers or [people with]

B.S. degrees in computer science. We are talking about high-end specialized

engineering. We have just started a whole engineering function in Russia, where

engineers have wonderful training-and talk about underemployed! We are beefing that

up. Why wouldn't you?"

Wait a minute: Didn't we win the Cold War? If one of America's premier technology

companies feels compelled to meet its engineering needs by going to the broken-down

former Soviet Union, where the only thing that seems to work is old-school math and

science education, then we've got a quiet little crisis onour hands. One cannot stress

enough the fact that in the flat world the frontiers of knowledge get pushed out

farther and farther, faster and faster. Therefore, companies need the brainpower that

can not only reach the new frontiers but push them still farther. That is where the

breakthrough drugs and software and hardware products are going to be found. And

America either needs to be training that brainpower itself or importing it from

somewhere else -or ideally both -if it wants to dominate the twenty-first century

the way it dominated the twentieth-and that simply is not happening.

"There are two things that worry me right now," said Richard A. Rashid, the director

of research for Microsoft. "One is the fact that we have really dramatically shut

down the pipeline of very smart people coming to the United States. If you believe

that we have the greatest re-seach universities and opportunities, it all has to be

driven by IQ. In trying to create processes that protect the country from undesirables,

[the government] has done a much better job of keeping out desirables. A really

significant fraction of the top people graduated from our universities [in science

and engineering] were not born here, but stayed here and created the businesses, and

became the professors, that were engines for

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our economic growth. We want these people. In a world where IQ is one of the most

important commodities, you want to get as many smart people as you can."

Second, said Rashid, "We have done a very poor job of conveying to kids the value

of science and technology as a career choice that will make the world a better place.

Engineering and science is what led to so many improvements in our lives. But you

talk to K through twelve kids about changing the world and they don't look at computer

science as a career that is going to be a great thing. The amazing thing is that it

is hard to get women into computer science now, and getting worse. Young women in

junior high are told this is a really wretched lifestyle. As a result, we are not

getting enough students through our systems who want to be computer scientists and

engineers, and if we cut off the flow from abroad, the confluence of those two will

potentially put us in a very difficult position ten or fifteen years from now. It

is a pipeline process. It won't come to roost right away, but fifteen or twenty years

from now, you'll find you don't have the people and the energy in these areas where

you need them."

From Richard Rashid at Microsoft in the Northwest to Tracy Koon at Intel in Silicon

Valley to Shirley Ann Jackson at Rensselaer on the East Coast, the people who

understand these issues the best and are closest to them have the same message: Because

it takes fifteen years to create a scientist or advanced engineer, starting from when

that young man or woman first gets hooked on science and math in elementary school,

we shouldbe embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large

crash program for science and engineering education immediately. The fact that we

are not doing so is our quiet crisis. Scientists and engineers don't grow on trees.

They have to be educated through a long process, because, ladies and gentlemen, this

really is rocket science.

::::: EIGHT

This Is Not a Test

We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your

labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society. Those who came to this

land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have

come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality.

So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back

and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of

his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

-"Great Society" speech, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

As a person who grew up during the Cold War, I'll always remember driving along down

the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a

grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say, "This is a test of the emergency

broadcast system," and then there would be a thirty-second high-pitched siren sound.

Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the Cold War where the announcer

came on and said, "This is not a test." That, however, is exactly what I want to say

here: This is not a test.

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts

before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things

the way we've been doing them-which is to say, not always tending to our secret sauce

and enriching it-will not suffice anymore. "For a country as wealthy as we are, it

is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness," said

Dinakar Singh,

the Indian-American hedge fund manager. "We are in a world that has a system that

now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back

and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that

were true before are still true now-but there are quite a few things you actually

need to do differently . . . You need to have a much more thoughtful national

discussion." The flat world, Singh argued, is now the elephant in the room, and the

question is, What is it going to do to us, and what are we going to do to it?

If this moment has any parallel in American history, it is the height of the Cold

War, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leaped ahead of America in the space race

by putting up the Sputnik satellite. Yes, there are many differences between that

age and our own. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls;

the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being

taken down, and other countries can now compete with us much more directly. The main

challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme communism, namely, Russia,

China, and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing

extreme capitalism, namely, China, India, and South Korea. The main objective in that

era was building a strong state; the main objective in this era is building strong

individuals.

What this era has in common with the Cold War era, though, is that to meet the

challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic, and focused a response

as did meeting the challenge of communism. It requires our own version of the New

Frontier and Great Society adapted to the age of flatness. It requires a president

who can summon the nation to get smarter and study harder in science, math, and

engineering in order to reach the new frontiers of knowledge that the flat world is

rapidly opening up and pushing out. And it requires a Great Society that commits our

government to building the infrastructure, safety nets, and institutions that will

help every American become more employable in an age when no one can be guaranteed

lifetime employment. I call my own version of this approach compassionate flatism.

Getting Americans to rally around compassionate flatism is much more difficult than

getting them to rally around anticommunism. "National

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peril is a lot easier to convey than individual peril," noted Johns Hopkins University

foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. Economics, as noted, is not like war,

because economics can always be a win-win game. But sometimes I wish economics were

more like war. Inthe Cold War, we actually got to see the Soviets parade their missiles

in Red Square. We all got to be scared together, from one end of the country to the

other, and all our politicians had to be focused and serious about marshaling the

resources and educational programs to make sure Americans could keep pace with the

Soviet Union.

But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. The "hot line," which

used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the "help line,"

which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end

of the hotline might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end

of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or

collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace

of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the UN, and it has none of the

sinister snarl of the bad guys in From Russia with Love. There is no Boris or Natasha

saying "We will bury you" in a thick Russian accent. No, that voice on the help line

just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply

says: "Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?"

No, Rajiv, actually, you can't.

When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help

line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the tools

to do that, as I argued in Chapter 6. But, as I argued in Chapter 7, we have not been

tending to those tools as we should. Hence, our quiet crisis. The assumption that

because America's economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will

and must always be that way is as dangerous an illusion today as the illusion that

America would always dominate in science and technology was back in 1950. But this

is not going to be easy. Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going

to be extremely painstaking. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things

differently. It is going to take the sort of focus and national will that President

John F. Kennedy called for in

his famous May 25, 1961, speech to Congress on "urgent national needs." At that time,

America was recovering from the twin shocks of Sputnik and the Soviet space launch

of a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, less than two months before Kennedy's speech. Kennedy

knew that while America had enormous human and institutional assets-far more than

the Soviet Union-they were not being fully utilized.

"I believe we possess all the resources andtalents necessary," said President Kennedy.

"But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or

marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never

specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and

our time so as to ensure their fulfillment." After then laying out his whole program

for putting a man on the moon within ten years, President Kennedy added, "Let it be

clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to

a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy

costs. . . This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and

technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion

from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a

degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized

our research and development efforts."

In that speech, Kennedy made a vow that has amazing resonance today: "I am therefore

transmitting to the Congress a new Manpower Development and Training program, totrain