America has fallen asleep at the switch

America has fallen asleep at the switch, and Friedman and Mandelbaum in their book, That Used To Be Us, make clear that it’s because that we have not grasped the significance of the merger between globalization and the Information Technology revolution.  There are 6.8 billion people in the world and two thirds of them now have cell phones.  The authors argue that the world has become hyper-connected and that has profound implications.  They tell us that this turning point in communications, innovation, and commerce is nothing less than the revolution brought about by the Guttenberg printing press in 1440.  To succeed a company must now source, manufacture and sell everywhere.  A CEO’s office has become his iPad!

In other words everything has changed. That’s why corporate profits and productivity have risen and so has unemployment.  The old jobs that have been lost are forever lost.  America didn’t realize how fast the world was changing.  But when the housing and credit bubbles exploded a few years ago, the carnage was plainly visible. 

The new labor market is one that places a premium on workers with college and graduate level degrees.  Forget blue-collar/white-collar, the authors argue, the new paradigm has become one of creators/servers.  To succeed we need to train a nation of creators.  Summing it up, the authors give us Carlson’s Law, from Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International:  “Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.  Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart”.  And that shines a bright light on the inadequacies of our educational system.

Because of globalization and the IT revolution, raising math, science, reading and creativity in ALL American schools is a must.  Education, Friedman and Mandelbaum insist, has become a matter of economic survival.  All of us need more education AND better education.  They state, “We need to lift the bottom faster and the top higher.”

They give us a new definition of stress:  It’s what you’ll feel when you can’t understand the Chinese accent of your first boss out of college.  The point they are making is that we need to realize that we can no longer maintain our economic supremacy by simply attempting to maintain traditional blue and white collar jobs in today’s hyper-connected world.  To grow and prosper in the new world order we have no choice but to educate our citizens to hold jobs that don’t exist yet.  In addition, we have to equip our young people to invent those jobs. If we don’t, other nations will fill that vacuum.

And so they see a world divided between “high-imagination-enabling countries and low-imagination-enabling countries.” Only the former gets us to decent paying jobs going forward.  Friedman and Mandelbaum have put a warning shot across America’s bow. We will heed its warning or pay a terrible price.

LeRoy Goldman

September 27, 2011

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