In the midst of hypergrowth, an ascendant China is eating all the physical resources it can get to feed its industrial machine. This great capitalist sponge seems to understand better than the U.S. that a key input for economic growth is human as well as physical: a trained population of knowledge workers.
We need to change that American indifference into action.
China's trade surplus with the United States was $162 billion in 2004, a 30.6 percent increase over the previous year. It also constituted this country's largest bilateral deficit, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Suffice it to say, China has emerged as our greatest economic threat.
With a population of well over a billion, China has enough arms and legs to lay brick and bang hammers. But as they transition from souvenirs to semiconductors, the Chinese know the importance of having workers who can contribute important value-added labor to this effort: knowledge-worker proficiency built upon a keen math and science foundational training.
If we're going to win this battle, we need to make robotics hotter than Paris Hilton and genetics more fun than "American Idol."
For decades, some of the best Chinese students have been sucked out as the brain drain lured them into U.S. higher education and then into rewarding jobs in the U.S. science and tech economy. India, another growth marvel and U.S. competitor, has also lost a significant number of its youth to education and careers in the West.
However, in an unlucky coincidence of history, the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks brought barriers to foreign students' easy access to U.S. undergraduate and graduate technology programs in everything from engineering to mathematics. Our security concerns about foreign students studying in the U.S. understandably trumped our desire to have foreign students fill our engineering schools, stay here and contribute to our world-leading economic machine. That needs to be fixed.
As a result, for the first time in history, U.S. engineering programs saw a significant decrease in applications to doctoral programs--a full 22 percent drop in 2004. Non-U.S. students dominate these engineering programs, and Indian students' applications dropped by 36 percent that year while Chinese students' applications dropped by more than 45 percent.
In the easy flow of labor, capital and information across national borders, this is a very disturbing trend. Unless we soon turn this cruise ship to oblivion around, the nation will become as dependent on foreign technology workers to fuel our economy as it is on foreign oil--with even more devastating consequences.
Ironically, at a time when the U.S. government has started limiting American companies' ability to distribute employee stock options--the incentives that have helped spur the technology growth of the past 30 years--the Chinese have started providing their employees with stock options. Take that, Chairman Mao!
Despite their grievous lack of both democracy and respect for intellectual property, the Chinese deserve our congratulations for what they have done in education. China has pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times. In just 10 years, it has focused its resources and increased the number of undergraduate- and graduate-degreed individuals enormously--a fivefold increase in one decade.
Since the U.S. federal government refuses to prioritize this issue, we need to get the U.S. business community to step up its leadership.
U.S. businesses, led by the tech community, should implement a technology education initiative. I propose that a multibillion-dollar K-12 philanthropic initiative focus on improving science and math curricula, creating model tech-teaching programs and delivering student tutoring via the Internet. In addition, it should provide lifetime stipends to college grads who choose to teach tech subjects in public schools located in low-income urban and rural communities.
However, it's not enough to create first-class K-12 tech training in science and math. We also need to create a huge increase in student interest in these "difficult" subjects. If we're going to win this battle, we need to make robotics hotter than Paris Hilton and genetics more fun than "American Idol."
Maybe then the federal government will step in with the kind of funding that ensures success. And maybe then we will join our economic competition in realizing that building a robust public education system, with a serious emphasis on technology, may be our most patriotic act.
Biography Christopher Nordlinger completed his Ph.D. in international economics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University while serving as a Fulbright scholar in Europe and Africa. He leads technology education programs for Cisco Systems and chairs the Science, Technology and Environment Task Force of the Fulbright Association. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of Cisco. He can be reached at christopher@thepromiseofeducation.com.
The problem is not US education program, it is the opportunities after graduation. In the 60's engineers could expect the same standard of living as a physician. The result was the space race and great innovation in the US resulting in many of the technologies that are available today, the IC.
Today, an engineering grad is lucky if he can even find technology employment after 10 years. If he does not make the switch to management or consulting he is out of luck. Even if the person does spend money and effort to maintain skills and capabilities, the US company would rather hire a new grad or a foreign worker and exploit that person rather than a more senior and seasoned individual. The ethic in most companies exploit and spit out the technically capable.
Have you ever seen an ROI performed on a marketing campaign or a financial project? Technology and engineers are forced to prove their worth daily by the enlightened management of firms such as GM and Ford. The result of this approach is now evident.
Motto:As an engineer, I say, "Don't let your children grow up to be engineers."
A wonderful proposal, but idealism in the US is pandered to the general populous, not practiced. On the contrary, we continue to create an entire generations of individuals who haven't been taught to think for themselves, and as such a society that is controlled by idealism.
Education in America suffers from the idealistic political climate in which every child has the chance to make an 'A' in every subject. However, in order to reach this goal we had to lower the mark so that the majority of children would be able to achieve this. The small handful of bright individuals is quickly lulled into complacency before they even hit puberty. In the mean time, the large majority of mediocre students are duped into a false sense of accomplishment. This sense of security is quickly dashed away in the real world when they awake to a harsh reality where nothing is free, and you are expected to "sink or swim".
Education should be fun, I will not disagree, but it should also be difficult. Who ever heard of an athlete running one lap around the gym, or by working out with foam weights in order to prepare for the "Mediocre Olympics". Determination, integrity, perseverance and strength are borne though struggle and adversity. Calculating the force of a magnetic field on an electron, the amount of energy released during a chemical reaction, or the age of a particle based on radioactive decay is not easy. America however continues to lower the standards of education in the name of political correctness.
China does not have this problem, because they realize that not all men are created equal in terms of intellectual giftedness. They choose to capitalize on those few bright students who will become the next great scientists of our age. They also realize that education is a privilege, not a right, that you should have to earn what grades you get, not be given them. When you compare these Chinese students with American students in terms of GPA you might, idealistically, be fooled into believing that the US has a superior education system. Upon closer examination of reality though, you would find that a 'C' in China is more like an 'A' in the United States. China has no problems at all with forcing children to deal with the reality of mediocrity, because it gives them something to strive for. The bar must be set high in order to produce the highest quality of education.
No, the problem is not with incentive, and throwing billions of dollars at the problem will only make it worse. By fueling the fire which we have created we will only empower another generation of trendy, pot smoking, pill popping youth completely devoid of any personality or free thought who just happen to be tech-savvy.
"Upon closer examination of reality though, you would find that a 'C' in China is more like an 'A' in the United States."
I was a teaching assistant in China for 2 1/2 months. My experience was homework copied exactly down to the individual grammatical and spelling errors and students who, for the most part, could not program if their lives depended on it. (This was a programming class. Ironically, a complaint from (some of) them was that I was going too slowly. A simple quiz rather disabused me of the possibility that they were right.)
Yes, there was one brighter student (and another who was brightening up), but even he had a long way to go.
The institution that I was attending had exported its program to a university in China. (That is how I got over there as a teaching assistant.) They later terminated the relationship, because the Chinese university was not willing to uphold our standards.
This is just my experience, but I have read similar on TESOL-realted Websites. There are, undoubtedly, excellent Chinese students as well, but let us not paint China falsely.
When I came to this country more than 30 years ago, this was the destination for anyone that wanted to be anything in the computer field. In the last four or five years, I have observed a younger generation that has consciously avoided getting involved into serious technical or engineering education. It can be partly attributed to the draining of many, if not all, technical jobs to cheaper destinations such as China, India & Eastern Europe. What is required is a concerted effort by the United States to compete in all walks of life globally, and not be complacent to become a service economy. The government and private industry must strive for excellence in all walks of life; and, competition is no stranger to the United States; it got to be a super power by competing well globally; it only has to understand the new world order and compete well in this newer order.
I agree that China is the greatest economic threat to the USA. However, just because China does not have a democratic government, that does not preclude them from coping our capitalist system to improve their economic livelihood, even if surpasses ours. The country with the greatest economy will always be an economic threat to countries with lesser economies. We have always expected our economy to be the best because of past history and our belief in the democratic system.
American indifference is primarily citizen indifference. I do not believe our government is indifferent to action the economic arena. Our safety is more important than our economic standing. Foreign students should not access to our advanced technology, unless they become American citizens. If the youth of America, on the whole, is not interested in engineering and mathematics, then we need to focus on computer automation technology to fill in the human intelligence gap in areas where needed. We cannot force our youth to become engineers, but China can force their's.
Further, big-business has more control and influence on societies and economies that any democratic government has. Today big-business is global and incorporated and concerned only with the bottom line, so they will use foreign offshore employees without a second thought.
"We" can never make robotics hotter than Paris Hilton and genetics more fun than "American Idol" because sex-sells. However, if we create robots that look like Paris Hilton and American Idols, we can sell them to the public as long as we pay for copyrights.
I don't think that the challenge is to make engineering "sexier" than Paris Hilton. The challenge is to teach your children that hard work and meaty problem solving are paths to achieving cool things. And that they don't need to follow the herd into a brainless future.
The perspective of the author is self-serving and incorrect. The most important foreign policy initiative for the Federal Government is to spread individual freedom, democratic government, and the rule of law. As China develops democratic institutions, young chinese will not want to immigrate to the United States because they can exercise their indivdual freedoms within their own society and culture. China will develop its own higher education institutions and will not need American higher education or research institutes or American companies. There is alot of evidence that these instituions have problems anyway. American "policy" cannot change or stop the process. Why should the Chinese immigrate to some strange country where everybody speaks English and not Cantonese or Mandarin? Would you? You need to go back to the Fletcher School and relearn democracy? Even kindegarten students can understand this stuff!!
Businesses have little interest in keeping all americans "wealthy"
They only want a lot of money for the guys at the top and the shareholders. The fact that their market could dissappear from under them as people lose their job did not register with them it seems.
Like nature, economy is a cycle. If you break the cycle somewhere, do not expect things to go smooth.
As an engineer I am discouraging my children from going there full blast. Some polish is needed as everything will be computerized. The rest? Done in China or India... (production, R&D, support, etc...)
Yet another group of middle class falling by the way side. What next? Doctors, Nurses, Lawyers...
There are some good news: when all is said and done (in a long while) there will hardly be any difference in quality of life anywhere, so we will get back again. It's the slump part that's annoying. I suppose that it would be like middle-east country: a set of extremely rich *elite* from both parties acting as presidents while the rest grows poorer (Do you know that there are many entry level jobs where the salary has not increased in 10 years? Maybe it's time to kill off un-needed inflation that makes a lot of us artificially poorer, but don't give me deflation either lol)
As long as corporations are allowed to import cheap slave labor from India or China (or Bulgaria or the moon), no sensible American will tell their children to go into Engineering or Science.
I have a BSCS and an MSEE. My son and I were in the Robot Wars a few years ago, but he recognizes that there is no future in technology if you are a US citizen. He's thinking of becoming a lawyer. I hope that he can get a job as a prosecutor, at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. . .
I've been to China, and I have worked with recent immigrants from China on several occasions. Chinese culture presents various problems which make it unlikely that they will be able to create an innovative technology industry. The most serious problem is "Nobody wants to give bad news to the boss syndrome", which makes it very, very difficult to figure out what the project status really is.
I don't worry about China. I worry about Washington. Crooked corporations have hired crooked lobbyists to pay off crooked politicians who brought over 800,000 H1-Bs to take away American jobs. They are planning to do it again, as far as they can get away with it.
The danger here is not that the Chinese will all get cars and run up the global price of gasoline. The danger is that some H1-B from China will take your job, at which point the price of gasoline is irrelevant, because you will have _no money_.
I remember the 70s and 80s and the "Japanese Economic Threat." Threats like these are illusory: as economies develop they go through changes, just like the US economy has gone through changes. Though it's true that a market economy can exist without democracy (this is a model widely expounded in SE Asia before the economic crisis), over the long term autocratic governments tend to breed corruption (already widespread in China) and nepotism. In other words, China has a long road ahead of it. Hopefully, that road will not include any large-scale catastrophes, as China is an engine of Asian and world growth.
One point I think Nordlinger's article raises is that many people believe that economic growth is a zero-sum game. China's success (now further propelled by the fact that their "brightest" students are not studying in the US) means that they are a threat to the US. What is that threat, explicitly? If China catches up, what exactly does that mean? I assert that it means that there is more competition, more markets, better made products, and more growth generally. I welcome the competition. I like buying well-made cheap products. And I like buying luxury goods. I disagree that the US does not have enough engineering students/scientists. I know many of them, both young and old, foreign-born and domestic. Additionally, the schools are doing a great job. If industry wants more engineers and scientists, then industry will provide more funds, or pressure the government into funding education. In my experience, there are a lot of funds available already, and more opportunities available than ever before.
Nordlinger seems to feel that there is a lack of funding for k-12 and low-income and rural areas. Though I don't disagree, especially regarding low-income urban areas, I wonder if funding would be better spent on projects aimed at helping the adults and guardians of those children to emphasize the importance of education for succeeding in this world. I say this because I have many well-educated friends who came from poor families (including my father). I also wonder at how, in a country where the teaching of creationism is still considered as an alternative to evolution in some areas, more money is going to help.
is that we would have to lower our standard of living for virtually all workers, no matter what their level of education is. Their engineers and scientists are making a lot less than ours, although I don't know if it's in the same proportions that their factory workers are making compared to the few we have left (when the last factory worker who's left in the U.S. is laid off, please turn off the dim light bulb you're using to do your job - the wealthy need the watt for their big-screen TVs).
All is not so great in the Land of the Great Wall, though, either. A five-fold increase in a small number of educated people isn't that big a deal (for the moment), and the total number of people with a standard of living equivalent to that of the average person in the U.S. is just a fraction of that in the U.S. (for now). They still have well over a billion peasants that they really have no idea how they're going to feed in a world where energy prices (and therefore, the cost of petroleum-based fertilizers - which account for the vast majority used on high-productivity farms world-wide) are destined to only increase over the long term as competition for it increases (just look at what's going on with natural gas distribution among Russia, the Ukraine, and the rest of Europe this week, much less the price of oil over the last year or two). China is desperate to develop oil fields in the South China Sea (which it may or may not even own, but is certainly claiming, and doing everything it can to exploit ASAP before anyone else can - possession _is_ nine tenths of the law). However, it can't do so without Western technology, and there's only so much that can be taught in universities - there's theory, and then there's practice, and if the U.S. owns anything, it's experience in exploiting technology for maximum effect, and we've become pretty darned good at it over the last couple of centuries, starting with things like water-powered mills, steamships, and railroad locomotives. China is still using steam locomotives in some rural areas, and using lots of coal-fired electric power plants and steel smelters because they have more domestic coal than oil. They've been buying shut-down, century-old U.S. coal-fired steel smelters for years, since we mostly use electric-arc and induction smelters now for what's left of our mainly specialty metals production.
The pollution problem in China may take care of their population excess, if peasants there keep migrating to the cities looking for work. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s are dying of emphysema and other breathing and cardiovascular trauma directly related to industrial pollution and smoking (even if you don't directly smoke in Asia, you are definitely a pack-a-day second-hand smoker - I thought living a couple of years in Europe was bad, until I lived for seven years in Asia - I felt like I had to get a nicotine patch when I got back to the U.S., even though I've never smoked directly in my life!).
Peasants who don't have the ability to learn higher-end, better-paying jobs (e.g., electronics manufacturing, clerical, services, etc.) are realizing that they can be destitute and at least have a chance to try growing food, and can live with their family and friends back in their rural homes (assuming they aren't being destroyed by a hydroelectric dam or other modernization project), and so are abandoning the worst manufacturing jobs. There was recent footage of hiring bureaucrats sitting at their desks with nothing to do because no one was showing up for the menial jobs available like they were just a year or so ago. Everyone who has been able to learn how to do things like export consumer goods manufacturing for Wal-Mart, etc., has already moved up into those jobs, and those people are scarce enough that companies are discovering that they need to pay better wages, provide benefits, and foot the bill for the costs that companies everywhere eventually have to pay to retain talented employees. There really is no free lunch, over the long haul, and once China's own skyrocketing health care costs, due to their poisoning of their own population, can no longer be ignored, they may find that the $1,500 a car sold that GM is spending for employee health care is a bargain. Maybe they can educate their way out of this problem and make a lot more people employable in better jobs, but you have to educate the educators, first, and it's not clear whether they're doing that fast enough to maintain the five-fold increase in the educated general population every ten years. Those educators (some of whom have to be foreign, and therefore, more expensive, especially for high-tech curricula) aren't contributing directly to the bottom line now, don't contribute indirectly until decades after the fact when the educated workers start producing products and services, and education costs a lot to perform up-front (if it's really being done right, and there are stories about the educational system being at least as corrupt and full of cronyism as the rest of the Communist Party apparatus, if not downright ineffective compared with foreign schools).
Then, there is the coming demographic catastrophe resulting from the intersection of the one-child policy (which can apparently be side-stepped if you can prove the ability to support more than one child - or pay off the right party member) and the advent of ultrasound technology that allows female fetuses to be selectively aborted. The result is that there are 40% more males than females in the generation that is becoming sexually mature. That means that there aren't anywhere near enough females to become girlfriends, wives, and mothers to go around, and the xenophobic tendencies of Asian cultures (in general - there are certainly exceptions, especially in the diaspora around the globe, but Chinese culture is very strong, and not many Chinese would consider dating someone outside their culture, much less marry and have kids with them). Every government that has had a significant imbalance in its population's sexes has eventually faced a cataclysmic collapse, and too many men usually translates into thinning of the herd via war, one way or another, be it civil war, war with neighbors, or regional conflicts. One particularly heinous example of what this means is that North Korean women are being kidnapped by, or sold to, Chinese men for what amounts to sexual slavery - when you're starving, anything else might seem worth the price, but you're probably not enjoying life much. It's only going to get worse, a lot worse, in the coming decades (other countries with the largest populations don't have one-child policies, but ultrasound machines are also being used extensively there, so China is going to have company, which is not A Good Thing).
Other than that, it's not so bad in China, as long as you're a Party member, and being a big cheese in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) isn't too shabby, either, since all foreign companies have to make the "appropriate arrangements" with the PLA officers who own the industries/markets/ neighborhoods they want to enter. The brightest beacon for the U.S. is that Chinese businesses are hiring current and former executives of U.S. corporations so that they can learn mismanagement from the pros. The only thing I can't figure out is, who are the Chinese executives going to outsource their workers' jobs to, India, or someplace with even more poverty, like maybe Equatorial Africa, or North Korea?
Web giant is spending $120 million to beef up its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, according to filings with the city reviewed by the San Jose Mercury News.
The Samsung Galaxy mini 2 S6500 could make its debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, according to a leaked promotional image.
Tor's "obfsproxy" technology would make encrypted data look innocuous and let it dodge government censors. That could help citizens in Iran reach blocked sites as antigovernment protests reportedly loom.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
George Lucas has just released his version of "Star Wars" in 3D, but c'mon--the guy believes Greedo shot first. Why not make your own Star Wars world? In the first installment of a Crave series, a crack team of crafters fight the power and turn paper bags into the Rebel Alliance's Admiral Ackbar. It's a sack!
Today, an engineering grad is lucky if he can even find technology employment after 10 years. If he does not make the switch to management or consulting he is out of luck. Even if the person does spend money and effort to maintain skills and capabilities, the US company would rather hire a new grad or a foreign worker and exploit that person rather than a more senior and seasoned individual. The ethic in most companies exploit and spit out the technically capable.
Have you ever seen an ROI performed on a marketing campaign or a financial project? Technology and engineers are forced to prove their worth daily by the enlightened management of firms such as GM and Ford. The result of this approach is now evident.
Motto:As an engineer, I say, "Don't let your children grow up to be engineers."
Education in America suffers from the idealistic political climate in which every child has the chance to make an 'A' in every subject. However, in order to reach this goal we had to lower the mark so that the majority of children would be able to achieve this. The small handful of bright individuals is quickly lulled into complacency before they even hit puberty. In the mean time, the large majority of mediocre students are duped into a false sense of accomplishment. This sense of security is quickly dashed away in the real world when they awake to a harsh reality where nothing is free, and you are expected to "sink or swim".
Education should be fun, I will not disagree, but it should also be difficult. Who ever heard of an athlete running one lap around the gym, or by working out with foam weights in order to prepare for the "Mediocre Olympics". Determination, integrity, perseverance and strength are borne though struggle and adversity. Calculating the force of a magnetic field on an electron, the amount of energy released during a chemical reaction, or the age of a particle based on radioactive decay is not easy. America however continues to lower the standards of education in the name of political correctness.
China does not have this problem, because they realize that not all men are created equal in terms of intellectual giftedness. They choose to capitalize on those few bright students who will become the next great scientists of our age. They also realize that education is a privilege, not a right, that you should have to earn what grades you get, not be given them. When you compare these Chinese students with American students in terms of GPA you might, idealistically, be fooled into believing that the US has a superior education system. Upon closer examination of reality though, you would find that a 'C' in China is more like an 'A' in the United States. China has no problems at all with forcing children to deal with the reality of mediocrity, because it gives them something to strive for. The bar must be set high in order to produce the highest quality of education.
No, the problem is not with incentive, and throwing billions of dollars at the problem will only make it worse. By fueling the fire which we have created we will only empower another generation of trendy, pot smoking, pill popping youth completely devoid of any personality or free thought who just happen to be tech-savvy.
I was a teaching assistant in China for 2 1/2 months. My experience was homework copied exactly down to the individual grammatical and spelling errors and students who, for the most part, could not program if their lives depended on it. (This was a programming class. Ironically, a complaint from (some of) them was that I was going too slowly. A simple quiz rather disabused me of the possibility that they were right.)
Yes, there was one brighter student (and another who was brightening up), but even he had a long way to go.
The institution that I was attending had exported its program to a university in China. (That is how I got over there as a teaching assistant.) They later terminated the relationship, because the Chinese university was not willing to uphold our standards.
This is just my experience, but I have read similar on TESOL-realted Websites. There are, undoubtedly, excellent Chinese students as well, but let us not paint China falsely.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
American indifference is primarily citizen indifference. I do not believe our government is indifferent to action the economic arena. Our safety is more important than our economic standing. Foreign students should not access to our advanced technology, unless they become American citizens. If the youth of America, on the whole, is not interested in engineering and mathematics, then we need to focus on computer automation technology to fill in the human intelligence gap in areas where needed. We cannot force our youth to become engineers, but China can force their's.
Further, big-business has more control and influence on societies and economies that any democratic government has. Today big-business is global and incorporated and concerned only with the bottom line, so they will use foreign offshore employees without a second thought.
"We" can never make robotics hotter than Paris Hilton and genetics more fun than "American Idol" because sex-sells. However, if we create robots that look like Paris Hilton and American Idols, we can sell them to the public as long as we pay for copyrights.
Like nature, economy is a cycle. If you break the cycle somewhere, do not expect things to go smooth.
As an engineer I am discouraging my children from going there full blast. Some polish is needed as everything will be computerized. The rest? Done in China or India... (production, R&D, support, etc...)
Yet another group of middle class falling by the way side. What next? Doctors, Nurses, Lawyers...
There are some good news: when all is said and done (in a long while) there will hardly be any difference in quality of life anywhere, so we will get back again. It's the slump part that's annoying. I suppose that it would be like middle-east country: a set of extremely rich *elite* from both parties acting as presidents while the rest grows poorer (Do you know that there are many entry level jobs where the salary has not increased in 10 years? Maybe it's time to kill off un-needed inflation that makes a lot of us artificially poorer, but don't give me deflation either lol)
cheap slave labor from India or China (or
Bulgaria or the moon), no sensible American will
tell their children to go into Engineering or
Science.
I have a BSCS and an MSEE. My son and I were in
the Robot Wars a few years ago, but he recognizes
that there is no future in technology if you are
a US citizen. He's thinking of becoming a
lawyer. I hope that he can get a job as a
prosecutor, at the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. . .
I've been to China, and I have worked with recent
immigrants from China on several occasions.
Chinese culture presents various problems which
make it unlikely that they will be able to
create an innovative technology industry.
The most serious problem is "Nobody wants to
give bad news to the boss syndrome", which makes
it very, very difficult to figure out what the
project status really is.
I don't worry about China. I worry about
Washington. Crooked corporations have hired
crooked lobbyists to pay off crooked politicians
who brought over 800,000 H1-Bs to take away
American jobs. They are planning to do it
again, as far as they can get away with it.
The danger here is not that the Chinese will all
get cars and run up the global price of gasoline.
The danger is that some H1-B from China will take
your job, at which point the price of gasoline
is irrelevant, because you will have _no money_.
One point I think Nordlinger's article raises is that many people believe that economic growth is a zero-sum game. China's success (now further propelled by the fact that their "brightest" students are not studying in the US) means that they are a threat to the US. What is that threat, explicitly? If China catches up, what exactly does that mean? I assert that it means that there is more competition, more markets, better made products, and more growth generally. I welcome the competition. I like buying well-made cheap products. And I like buying luxury goods. I disagree that the US does not have enough engineering students/scientists. I know many of them, both young and old, foreign-born and domestic. Additionally, the schools are doing a great job. If industry wants more engineers and scientists, then industry will provide more funds, or pressure the government into funding education. In my experience, there are a lot of funds available already, and more opportunities available than ever before.
Nordlinger seems to feel that there is a lack of funding for k-12 and low-income and rural areas. Though I don't disagree, especially regarding low-income urban areas, I wonder if funding would be better spent on projects aimed at helping the adults and guardians of those children to emphasize the importance of education for succeeding in this world. I say this because I have many well-educated friends who came from poor families (including my father). I also wonder at how, in a country where the teaching of creationism is still considered as an alternative to evolution in some areas, more money is going to help.
All is not so great in the Land of the Great Wall, though, either. A five-fold increase in a small number of educated people isn't that big a deal (for the moment), and the total number of people with a standard of living equivalent to that of the average person in the U.S. is just a fraction of that in the U.S. (for now). They still have well over a billion peasants that they really have no idea how they're going to feed in a world where energy prices (and therefore, the cost of petroleum-based fertilizers - which account for the vast majority used on high-productivity farms world-wide) are destined to only increase over the long term as competition for it increases (just look at what's going on with natural gas distribution among Russia, the Ukraine, and the rest of Europe this week, much less the price of oil over the last year or two). China is desperate to develop oil fields in the South China Sea (which it may or may not even own, but is certainly claiming, and doing everything it can to exploit ASAP before anyone else can - possession _is_ nine tenths of the law). However, it can't do so without Western technology, and there's only so much that can be taught in universities - there's theory, and then there's practice, and if the U.S. owns anything, it's experience in exploiting technology for maximum effect, and we've become pretty darned good at it over the last couple of centuries, starting with things like water-powered mills, steamships, and railroad locomotives. China is still using steam locomotives in some rural areas, and using lots of coal-fired electric power plants and steel smelters because they have more domestic coal than oil. They've been buying shut-down, century-old U.S. coal-fired steel smelters for years, since we mostly use electric-arc and induction smelters now for what's left of our mainly specialty metals production.
The pollution problem in China may take care of their population excess, if peasants there keep migrating to the cities looking for work. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s are dying of emphysema and other breathing and cardiovascular trauma directly related to industrial pollution and smoking (even if you don't directly smoke in Asia, you are definitely a pack-a-day second-hand smoker - I thought living a couple of years in Europe was bad, until I lived for seven years in Asia - I felt like I had to get a nicotine patch when I got back to the U.S., even though I've never smoked directly in my life!).
Peasants who don't have the ability to learn higher-end, better-paying jobs (e.g., electronics manufacturing, clerical, services, etc.) are realizing that they can be destitute and at least have a chance to try growing food, and can live with their family and friends back in their rural homes (assuming they aren't being destroyed by a hydroelectric dam or other modernization project), and so are abandoning the worst manufacturing jobs. There was recent footage of hiring bureaucrats sitting at their desks with nothing to do because no one was showing up for the menial jobs available like they were just a year or so ago. Everyone who has been able to learn how to do things like export consumer goods manufacturing for Wal-Mart, etc., has already moved up into those jobs, and those people are scarce enough that companies are discovering that they need to pay better wages, provide benefits, and foot the bill for the costs that companies everywhere eventually have to pay to retain talented employees. There really is no free lunch, over the long haul, and once China's own skyrocketing health care costs, due to their poisoning of their own population, can no longer be ignored, they may find that the $1,500 a car sold that GM is spending for employee health care is a bargain. Maybe they can educate their way out of this problem and make a lot more people employable in better jobs, but you have to educate the educators, first, and it's not clear whether they're doing that fast enough to maintain the five-fold increase in the educated general population every ten years. Those educators (some of whom have to be foreign, and therefore, more expensive, especially for high-tech curricula) aren't contributing directly to the bottom line now, don't contribute indirectly until decades after the fact when the educated workers start producing products and services, and education costs a lot to perform up-front (if it's really being done right, and there are stories about the educational system being at least as corrupt and full of cronyism as the rest of the Communist Party apparatus, if not downright ineffective compared with foreign schools).
Then, there is the coming demographic catastrophe resulting from the intersection of the one-child policy (which can apparently be side-stepped if you can prove the ability to support more than one child - or pay off the right party member) and the advent of ultrasound technology that allows female fetuses to be selectively aborted. The result is that there are 40% more males than females in the generation that is becoming sexually mature. That means that there aren't anywhere near enough females to become girlfriends, wives, and mothers to go around, and the xenophobic tendencies of Asian cultures (in general - there are certainly exceptions, especially in the diaspora around the globe, but Chinese culture is very strong, and not many Chinese would consider dating someone outside their culture, much less marry and have kids with them). Every government that has had a significant imbalance in its population's sexes has eventually faced a cataclysmic collapse, and too many men usually translates into thinning of the herd via war, one way or another, be it civil war, war with neighbors, or regional conflicts. One particularly heinous example of what this means is that North Korean women are being kidnapped by, or sold to, Chinese men for what amounts to sexual slavery - when you're starving, anything else might seem worth the price, but you're probably not enjoying life much. It's only going to get worse, a lot worse, in the coming decades (other countries with the largest populations don't have one-child policies, but ultrasound machines are also being used extensively there, so China is going to have company, which is not A Good Thing).
Other than that, it's not so bad in China, as long as you're a Party member, and being a big cheese in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) isn't too shabby, either, since all foreign companies have to make the "appropriate arrangements" with the PLA officers who own the industries/markets/ neighborhoods they want to enter. The brightest beacon for the U.S. is that Chinese businesses are hiring current and former executives of U.S. corporations so that they can learn mismanagement from the pros. The only thing I can't figure out is, who are the Chinese executives going to outsource their workers' jobs to, India, or someplace with even more poverty, like maybe Equatorial Africa, or North Korea?
All the Best,
Joe Blow