Recessions, especially the deep downturn that started in 2008, always cause us to scramble. Companies routinely slash spending while governments do the opposite, trying to shock the country's economic heart into beating again through heroic measures such as the recent stimulus package. Concern about a possible "double dip" recession have the hands of corporate CFO's and Washington officials hovering over the panic button again, mere months after the last push.
But our scramble to reduce the impact of the latest disaster distracts us from addressing the deep-seated problems that inexorably create the next disaster, and the one after that. Why waste energy on the distant future, we reason, when we'll never get to that future if we don't solve the problem staring us in the face?
We all focus on addressing here-and-now emergencies because we have no choice. What limits our options are not outside events, such as economic downturns, but internal events that go on inside our brains. As a neuroscientist, I've learned that our brains are hardwired to avoid near term threats and to ignore long term opportunities , because our brains are identical to those of our distant ancestors who faced a daily struggle for survival. When our brains evolved into their present form, about 50,000 years ago, the environment was incredibly harsh and risky, limiting life expectancies to 20-25 years. Diverting attention from day-today survival in those Paleolithic times would have invited disaster. Neuroscientists call this hard-wired preference for quick fixes over long range pursuits temporal myopia: everything past the immediate future looks fuzzy, or even invisible, and is therefore irrelevant.
Unless we overcome our temporal myopia, we'll continue to put band-aids on this economy and it will continue to deteriorate: in other words, we'll continue to treat symptoms and never go for a complete cure.
And what would such a cure look like? Let's start by looking at disease that afflicts us. The fundamental problem with America's economy is a decline in the capabilities and motivation of our workforce. True economic growth -- not the artificial kind spurred by fiscal policy -- stems from innovations such as Google's search engine that create entirely new businesses and markets. Such innovations grow out of technological advances, which in turn emerge from earlier scientific discoveries.
Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, reinforced this idea when he said "Capitalism expands wealth primarily through creative destruction -- the process by which the cash flow from obsolescent, low-return capital is invested in high-return, cutting-edge technologies."
And where do cutting-edge technologies come from? Modern
But the National Academy of Science report, "Is America Falling off a Flat Earth?" points out that science, technology and math education of the American workforce has been in steep decline for decades, as students now choose careers in business, law or media over the high tech jobs that were so attractive in the post-Sputnik 60's and 70's. In stark contrast, workforces of countries such as China are becoming much more tech savvy, such that China now rivals the US and Europe in patents and technical publications. S. James Gates, a physicist who served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said, "If you look at U.S. performance on various international metrics, depending on which one you use, we come out something like 24th or 25th in the world."
In my own informal survey of middle school and high-school students, conducted during school speaking engagements to increase the allure of science, most kids tell me that they plan to steer clear of science because it's "way too hard." Other kids observe that "scientists are nerdy." As a result of these widespread attitudes -- nurtured by Hollywood's portrayal of scientists as socially clueless eccentrics -- innovation-fueled economic growth will increasingly take place outside America's borders, and our economy will spiral into relative decline for the foreseeable future.
We can pull out of this dive, however, if we see through our temporal myopia to some hard facts: we will never motivate the majority of America's youth to give up "cool" careers that promise to make lot of money for "nerdy," un-cool science and technology careers that require hard work in school. We have simply grown too comfortable as a society and lost the fire in our belly.
During World War II, and right after Sputnik, did students, teachers and parents let the prospect of hard work learning science, math and engineering deter them? No, because we faced obvious crises. Harvard Business School Professor, John Kao, author of Innovation Nation: How America is Losing Its Innovative Edge, Why It Matters and How We Can Get it Back said, ""Fifty years ago the Soviet satellite Sputnik burst the nation's bubble of complacency and challenged America's sense of global leadership. But we rose to the challenge with massive funding for education, revamped school curricula in science and math, created NASA and put a man on the moon." Today we face a brain race vs. a space race that is every bit as problematic for America as the first Russian satellite, but this crisis amounts to a "silent Sputnik" that flies under America's radar. Out of sight, out of mind.
I believe that Americans are unlikely to notice, let alone react to such a stealth threat. The only answer is to reach out to motivated Americans, in places like China and India, who don't yet know they're going to be Americans. Let's gear up a recruiting system that combs secondary schools in China, India, Russia, Europe and South America for top science and technology talent, just as college football programs look for the best high school athletes. We'll offer these kids -- who do have fire in their bellies because they've grown up in countries that haven't gotten complacent -- full scholarships to American colleges and a fast track to US citizenship once they complete their studies. This will, in the long run, inject new vitality into our workforce and our economy and help cure our deep economic ills.
Spending taxpayers' money on educating other countries' students will be a tough sell in Washington, but not a tough as getting taxpayers to swallow one trillion dollar stimulus package after another.
Dr. Haseltine, a neuroscientist and former Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology, is the author of Long Fuse Big Bang: Achieving Long-Term Success Through Daily Victories
$18 and hour is 18 times higher than $1 an hour, no matter what voodoo you practice.
Is America ready for change to a more socialistic bent, as Europe did? That remains an unanswered question. Is it even answerable?
This is your highly educated analysis of the problem of America's economy??? I'm not against education being post graduate degree educated myself, but your analysis smacks of absolute cluelessness and the typical right-wing tactic of blaming the victim. The "American worker" hasn't outsourced our jobs, hasn't created tax looopholes which reward outsourcing of manufacturing facilities as well as jobs, etc., etc., etc. Why not try to keep up with what's really going on in this country?
You were ok up to this point which smaks itself of temporal myopia in the face of resource depletion over a broad spectrun natural resources required for BAU 'True economic growth'. Furthermore, how is the workforce supposed to be motivated when big banks like JP morgan openly sell silver contracts on silver that doesn't exist just to depress the price and thus more easily sell their criminally inspired CDO's? Or Goldman Sacks selling toxic tranches overseas and betting against them because they knew that they were completely bogus? Where are the indictments for these crimes? As for training, forget it. Everyone is frantically re-training themselves a great expense for jobs that don't exist! So, screw that idea too.
http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=550
H-1B Hogs Swindling ‘Average’ Americans
H-1B Hogs Swindling ‘Average’ Americans
The other day, John Miano of the Center for Immigration Studies pointed to the duplicity of "Microsoft's attempts to downplay layoffs while calling on newly elected President Obama to provide more foreign labor." Naturally, the man with the reverse-Midas touch can't make labor materialize magically, but he could issue more H-1B visas.
Touted as a means of trawling for the best and the brightest, the H-1B swindle is anything but. "Ordinary talent doing ordinary work" is Professor Norm Matloff's overall assessment of the H-1B crop. A longtime critic of the H-1B racket, Professor Matlof's analysis has been cited extensively.
[snip]
Three percent of a typical Microsoft H-1B visa intake are level four workers—i.e., do work that requires independent judgment. Among the companies that push the hardest for expanding the H-1B program, level-four workers entrusted with critical reasoning are rare.The O-1 visa is the visa reserved for individuals with extraordinary abilities.
Immigration lawyers have made it their business to navigate the labyrinth of visa programs. According to one such law firm, Houston-based Zhang & Associates, the O-1 visa...
There is no limit on O-1 visas, meant for the best and brightest.
I'm here to tell you, people like me ruined the national and world economies for the lower and middle class, and I'm back to convince it's your fault.
No, the best we can hope is to pull up the nose a bit and hit at a less catastrophic angle. But no one is flying this plane.
Truth 1: We need to become more innovative to help pull us out of this economic mess.
Truth 2: We need immigrants because they provide alternative ways of looking at problems and solutions.
Lie: We need immigrants because they are innovative and will help pull us out of this economic mess.
What we REALLY need is for our own current citizens to be more innovative, motivated, and entrepreneurial. That is really hard given the latest round of lawsuits by Facebook over the use of "book" and "face" as website names, and Paul Allen suing everyone else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26engineer.html?_r=1&hp
A bit from the article:
Call it India’s engineering paradox.
Despite this nation’s rise as a technology titan with some of the best engineering minds in the world, its full economic potential is stifled by potholed roads, collapsing bridges, rickety railroads and a power grid so unreliable that many modern office buildings run their own diesel generators to make sure the lights and computers stay on.
It is not for want of money. The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by 2012 and twice that amount in the following five years.
The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least of civil engineers with the skill and expertise to make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and to specification.
Civil engineering was once an elite occupation in India, not only during the British colonial era of carving roads and laying train tracks, but long after independence as part of the civil service. These days, though, India’s best and brightest know there is more money and prestige in writing software for foreign customers than in building roads for their nation...."
Maybe India needs to import some of the older, experienced American civil engineers.
As the article points out people who go to school and care about learning are "nerds" (Think Urkel). The people with the money and respect aren't teachers, doctors, scientist or inventors...they aren't even actors...they are on reality TV. Programs that are only a little smarter than this. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A ) The crux of the problem is the general dumbing down of Americans and importing brains from overseas is only a temporary solution.
The real solution is to change our whole culture, purposefully. We need to stop making celebrities out of people who can make the biggest fools of themselves on camera. We need to start making celebrities out of our Astronauts again. We need to stop promoting media that denigrates people who love to learn for it teaches our children the wrong values. We need to once again make education, science, and engineering things that children want to be.
As long as we demonstrate our lack of appreciation for such technical minded people, and shower attention and money on spectacular idiots we will only have ourselves to blame for what we get. We get an idiocracy.
So in addition to the 15-20 million illegal aliens in this country the game plan is to import more outside help. What's the matter, the remaining talent left in this country isn't working cheap enough for you?
fanned.