Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (55 page)

The consumer also benefits from this. Products and services become cheaper and production and distribution more efficient if there is global competition. Simply trying to prop up obsolete businesses and overpaid jobs creates complacency, waste, and inefficiency. Subsidizing failing industries only prolongs the inevitable, delays the pain of collapse, and actually makes thing worse.

There is another irony. Many high-paying, skilled service-sector jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified candidates. Often, the educational system does not produce enough skilled workers, so companies have to cope with a less-educated workforce. Corporations go begging for skilled workers whom the educational system often does not produce. Even in a depressed economy, there are jobs that go unfilled by skilled workers.

But one thing is clear. In a postindustrial economy, many of the old blue-collar factory jobs are gone for good. Over the years, economists have toyed with the idea of “reindustrializing America,” until they realize that you cannot turn back the hands of time. The United States and Europe went through the transition from a largely industrial to a service economy decades ago, and this historic shift cannot be reversed. The heyday of industrialization has passed, forever.

Instead, efforts have to be made to reorient and reinvest in those sectors that maximize intellectual capitalism. This will be one of the most difficult tasks for governments in the twenty-first century, with no quick-and-easy solutions. On one hand, it means a major overhaul of the education system, so that workers can retrain and also so that high school students do not graduate into the unemployment lines. Intellectual capitalism does not mean jobs only for software programmers and scientists but in a broad spectrum of activities that involve creativity, artistic ability, innovation, leadership, and analysis—i.e., common sense. The workforce has to be educated to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, not to duck them. In particular, science curricula have to be overhauled and teachers have to be retrained to become relevant for the technological society of the future. (It’s sad that in America there is the old expression, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”)

As MIT economist Lester Thurow has said, “Success or failure depends upon whether a country is making a successful transition to the man-made brainpower industries of the future—not on the size of any particular sector.”

This means creating a new wave of innovative entrepreneurs who will create new industries and new wealth from these technological innovations. The energy and vitality of these people must be unleashed. They must be allowed to inject new leadership into the marketplace.

WINNERS AND LOSERS: NATIONS

Unfortunately, many countries are not taking this path, instead relying exclusively on commodity capitalism. But since commodity prices, on average, have been dropping for the past 150 years, their economies will eventually shrink with time, as the world bypasses them.

This process is not inevitable. Look at the examples of Germany and Japan in 1945, when their entire populations were near starvation, their cities were in ruins, and their governments had collapsed. In one generation, they were able to march to the front of the world economy. Look at China today, with its 8 to 10 percent galloping growth rate, reversing 500 years of economic decline. Once widely derided as the “sick man of Asia,” in another generation it will join the ranks of the developed nations.

What distinguishes these three societies is that each was cohesive as a nation, had hardworking citizens, and made products that the world rushed to buy. These nations placed emphasis on education, on unifying their country and people, and on economic development.

As UK economist and journalist McRae writes, “The old motors of growth—land, capital, natural resources—no longer matter. Land matters little because the rise in agricultural yields has made it possible to produce far more food in the industrial world than it needs. Capital no longer matters because it is, at a price, almost infinitely available from the international markets for revenue-generating projects …. These quantitative assets, which have traditionally made countries rich, are being replaced by a series of qualitative features, which boil down to the quality, organization, motivation, and self-discipline of the people who live there. This is borne out by looking at the way the level of human skills is becoming more important in manufacturing, in private sector services, and in the public sector.”

However, not every nation is following this path. Some nations are run by incompetent leaders, are culturally and ethnically fragmented to the point of dysfunction, and do not produce goods that the rest of the world wants. Instead of investing in education, they invest in huge armies and weapons to terrorize their people and maintain their privileges. Instead of investing in an infrastructure to speed up the industrialization of their country, they engage in corruption and keeping themselves in power, creating a kleptocracy, not a meritocracy.

Sadly, these corrupt governments have squandered much of the aid provided by the West, as small as it is. Futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler note that between 1950 and 2000, more than $1 trillion in aid was given to poor nations by rich ones. But, they note, “we are told by the World Bank that nearly 2.8 billion people—almost half the population of the planet—still live on the equivalent of two dollars a day or less. Of these, some 1.1 billion survive in extreme or absolute poverty on less than one dollar.”

The developed nations, of course, can do much more to alleviate the plight of developing nations rather than paying lip service to the problem. But after all is said and done, ultimately the main responsibility for development must come from wise leadership among the developing nations themselves. It goes back to that old saying, “Give me a fish, and I will eat for a day. Teach me how to fish, and I will eat forever.” This means that instead of simply giving aid to developing nations, the stress should be on education and helping them develop new industries so they can become self-sufficient.

Developing nations may be able to take advantage of the information revolution. They can, in principle, leapfrog past the developed nations in many areas. In the developed world, telephone companies had to tediously wire up every home or farm at great cost. But a developing nation does not have to wire up its country, since cell phone technology can excel in rural areas without any roads or infrastructure.

Also, developing nations have the advantage that they do not have to rebuild an aging infrastructure. For example, the subway systems of New York and London are more than a century old and badly in need of repairs. Today, renovating these creaky systems would cost more than building the original system itself. A developing nation may decide to create a subway system that is sparkling new with all the latest technology, taking advantage of vast improvements in metals, construction techniques, and technology. A brand-new subway system may cost much less than the systems of a century ago.

China, for example, was able to benefit from all the mistakes made in the West when building a city from the ground up. As a result, Beijing and Shanghai are being built at a fraction of the original cost of building a major city in the West. Today, Beijing is building one of the largest, most modern subway systems in the world, benefiting from all the computer technology created in the West, in order to serve an exploding urban population.

The Internet is another way for developing nations to take a shortcut to the future, bypassing all the mistakes made in the West, especially in the sciences. Previously, scientists in the developing world had to rely on a primitive postal system to deliver scientific journals, which usually arrived months to a year after publication, if they arrived at all. These journals were expensive and highly specialized, so that only the largest libraries could afford them. Collaborating with a scientist from the West was almost impossible. You had to be independently wealthy, or extremely ambitious, to obtain a position at a Western university to work under a famous scientist. Now it is possible for the most obscure scientist to obtain scientific papers less than a second after they are posted on the Internet, from almost anywhere in the world, for free. And, via the Internet, it is possible to collaborate with scientists in the West whom you have never met.

THE FUTURE IS UP FOR GRABS

The future is wide open. As we mentioned, Silicon Valley could become the next Rust Belt in the coming decades, as the age of silicon passes and the torch passes to the next innovator. Which nations will lead in the future? In the days of the Cold War, the superpowers were those nations that could wield military influence around the world. But the breakup of the Soviet Union has made it clear that in the future the nations that will rise to the top will be those that build their economies, which in turn depends on cultivating and nourishing science and technology.

So who are the leaders of tomorrow? The nations that truly grasp this fact. For example, the United States has maintained its dominance in science and technology in spite of the fact that U.S. students often score dead last when it comes to essential subjects like science and math. Proficiency test scores in 1991, for example, showed thirteen-year-old students in the United States ranking fifteenth in math and fourteenth in science, just above Jordanian students, who ranked eighteenth in both categories. Tests taken since then annually confirm these dismal numbers. (It should also be pointed out that this ranking corresponds roughly to the number of days that students were in school. China, which ranked number 1, averaged 251 days of instruction per year, while the United States averaged only 178 days per year.)

It seems like a mystery that, despite these awful numbers, the United States continues to do well internationally in science and technology, until you realize that much of the U.S. science comes from overseas, in the form of the “brain drain.” The United States has a secret weapon, the H1B visa, the so-called genius visa. If you can show that you have special talents, resources, or scientific knowledge, you can jump ahead of the line and get an H1B visa. This has continually replenished our scientific ranks. Silicon Valley, for example, is roughly 50 percent foreign born, many coming from Taiwan and India. Nationwide, 50 percent of all Ph.D. students in physics are foreign born. At my university, the City University of New York, the figure is closer to 100 percent foreign born.

Some congressmen have tried to eliminate the H1B visa because, they claim, it takes jobs away from Americans, but they do not understand the true role that this visa plays. Usually, there are no Americans qualified to take the highest-level jobs in Silicon Valley, which we’ve seen often go unfilled as a consequence. This fact was apparent when former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tried to pass a similar H1B visa immigration law for Germany, but the measure was defeated by those who claimed that this would take jobs away from native-born Germans. Again, the critics failed to understand that there are often no Germans to fill these high-level jobs, which then go unfilled. These H1B immigrants do not take away jobs, they create entire new industries.

But the H1B visa is only a stopgap measure. The United States cannot continue to live off foreign scientists, many of whom are beginning to return to China and India as their economies improve. So the brain drain is not sustainable. This means that the United States will eventually have to overhaul its archaic, sclerotic education system. At present, poorly prepared high school students flood the job market and universities, creating a logjam. Employers continually bemoan the fact that they have to take one year to train their new hires to bring them up to speed. And the universities are burdened by having to create new layers of remedial courses to compensate for the poor high school education system.

Fortunately, our universities and businesses eventually do a commendable job of repairing the damage done by the high school system, but this is a waste of time and talent. For the United States to remain competitive into the future, there have to be fundamental changes in the elementary and high school system.

To be fair, the United States still has significant advantages. I was once at a cocktail party at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and met a biotech entrepreneur from Belgium. I asked him why he left, given that Belgium has its own vigorous biotech industry. He said that in Europe, often you don’t get a second chance. Since people know who you and your family are, if you make a mistake, you could be finished. Your mistakes tend to follow you, no matter where you are. But in the United States, he said, you can constantly reinvent yourself. People don’t care who your ancestors were. They just care what you can do for them now, today. This was refreshing, he said, and one reason why other European scientists move to the United States.

In the West, there is the expression “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But in the East, there is another expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” These two expressions are diametrically opposed to each other, but they capture some of the essential features of Western and Eastern thought.

In Asia, the students often have test scores that soar beyond those of their counterparts in the West. However, much of that learning is book learning and rote memorization, which will take you only to a certain level. To reach the higher levels of science and technology, you need creativity, imagination, and innovation, which the Eastern system does not nurture. So although China may eventually catch up with the West when it comes to producing cheap factory-made copies of goods first manufactured in the West, it will lag for decades behind the West in the creative process of dreaming up new products and new strategies.

I once spoke at a conference in Saudi Arabia, where another featured speaker was Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. He is something of a rock star among the developing nations, since he helped to forge the modern nation of Singapore, which ranks among the top nations in science. Singapore, in fact, is the fifth-richest nation in the world, if you calculate the per capita gross domestic product. The audience strained to hear every word from this legendary figure.