Thomas Friedman - The World is Flat

“They view this as a once-in-a-lifetime income opportunity/' said Li of the team at Microsoft Research Asia. ”They saw their parents going through the Cultural Revolution. The best they could do was become a professor, do a little project on the side because a professor's pay is horrible, and maybe get one paper published. Now they have this place where all they do is research, with great computers and lots of resources. They have administrators-we hire people to do the dirty work. They just could not believe it. They voluntarily work fifteen to eighteen hours a day and come in on weekends. They work through holidays, because their dream is to get to Microsoft.“ Li, who had worked for other American high-tech firms before coming to Microsoft, said that until starting Microsoft Research Asia, he had never seen a research lab with the enthusiasm of a start-up company.

“If you go in at two a.m. it is full, and at eight a.m. it is full,” he said.

Microsoft is a stronger American company for being able to attract all this talent, said Li. “Now we have two hundred more brilliant people building [intellectual property] and patents. These two hundred people are not replacing people in Redmond. They are doing new research in areas applicable worldwide.”

Microsoft Research Asia has already developed a worldwide reputation for producing cutting-edge papers for the most important scientific journals and conferences. “This is the culture that built the Great Wall,” he added, “because it is a dedicated and direction-following culture.”

Chinese people, explained Li, have both a superiority and an inferiority complex at the same time, which helps explain why they are racing America to the top, not the bottom. There is a deep and widely shared view that China was once great, that it succeeded in the past but now is far behind and must catch up again. “So there is a patriotic desire,” he said. “If our lab can do as well as the Redmond lab, that could be really exciting.”

That sort of inspired leadership in science and engineering education is now totally missing in the United States.

Said Intel chairman Craig Barrett, “U.S. technological leadership, innovation, and jobs of tomorrow require a commitment to basic research funding today.” According to a 2004 study by the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, an industry-academic coalition, basic research performed at leading U.S. universities-research in chemistry, physics, nanotechnology, genomics, and semiconductor manufacturing-has created four thousand spin-off companies that hired 1.1 million employees and have annual world sales of $232 billion. But to keep moving ahead, the study said, there must be a 10 to 12 percent increase each year for the next five to seven years in the budgets of key research-funding agencies: the National Institute for Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the Department of Defense research accounts.

Unfortunately, federal funding for research in physical and mathematical sciences and engineering, as a share of GDP, actually declined by 37 percent between 1970 and 2004, the task force found. At a time when we need to be doubling our investments in basic research to overcome the ambition and education gaps, we are actually cutting that funding.

In the wake of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress's decision to cut the National Science Foundation funding for 2005, Republican congressman Vern Ehlers of Missouri, a voice in the wilderness, made the following statement: “While I understand the need to make hard choices in the face of fiscal constraint, I do not see the wisdom in putting science funding behind other priorities. We have cut NSF despite the fact that this omnibus bill increases spending for the 2005 fiscal year, so clearly we could find room to grow basic research while maintaining fiscal constraint. But not only are we not keeping pace with inflationary growth, we are actually cutting the portion basic research receives in the overall budget. This decision shows dangerous disregard for our nation's future, and I am both concerned and astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research. We cannot hope to fight jobs lost to international competition without a well-trained and educated workforce.”

No, we cannot, and the effects are starting to show. According to the National Science Board, the percentage of scientific papers written by Americans has fallen 10 percent since 1992. The percentage of American papers published in the top physics journal, Physical Review, has fallen from 61 percent to 29 percent since 1983. And now we are starting to see a surge in patents awarded to Asian countries. From 1980 to 2003, Japan's share of world industrial patents rose from 12 percent to 21 percent, and Taiwan's from 0 percent to 3 percent. By contrast, the U.S. share of patents has fallen from 60 percent to 52 percent since 1980.

Any honest analysis of this problem should note that there are some skeptics who believe that the sky is not falling and that scientists and the technology industry might be hyping some of this data, just to get more funding. A May 10, 2004, article in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Daniel S. Greenberg, former news editor of the journal Science and author of the book Science, Money and Politics, who argues that “inside-the-Beltway science (lobbying) has always been insatiable. If you double the NIH (National Institutes of Health) budget in five years (as recently happened), they're (still) screaming their heads off: 'We need more money.'” Greenberg also questioned the science lobbyists' interpretation of a number of statistics.

Quoting Greenberg, the Chronicle said, “To put scientific publishing trends in context... it's important to look not only at overall percentiles but also at the actual numbers of published papers. At first, it may sound startling to hear that China quadrupled its scientific publication rate between 1986 and 1999. But it sounds somewhat less startling if one realizes that the actual number of Chinese papers published rose from 2,911 to 11,675. By comparison, close to a third of all the world's scientific papers were published by Americans-163,526 out of 528,643. In other words, China, a nation with almost four times the population of the United States, published (as of 1999) only one-fourteenth as many scientific papers as the United States.”

While I think a dose of skepticism is always in order, I also think the skeptics would be wise to pay more heed to the flattening of the world and how quickly some of these trends could change. It is why I favor Shirley Ann Jackson's approach: The sky is not falling today, but it might be in fifteen or twenty years if we don't change our ways, and all signs are that we are not changing, especially in our public schools. Help is not on the way. The American education system from kindergarten through twelfth grade just is not stimulating enough young people to want to go into science, math, and engineering. My wife teaches first-grade reading in a local public school, so she gets Education Week, which is read by educators all over America. One day she pointed out an article (July 28, 2004) headlined, “Immigrants' Children Inhabit the Top Ranks of Math, Science Meets.”

It went on to say, “Research conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy shows that 60 percent of the nation's top science students and 65 percent of the top mathematics students are children of recent immigrants, according to an analysis of award winners in three scholastic competitions... the Intel Science Talent Search, the U.S. team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, and the U.S. Physics Team.” The study's author attributed the immigrant students' success “partly to their parents' insistence that they manage study time wisely,” Education Week said. “Many immigrant parents also encouraged their children to pursue mathematics and science interests, believing those skills would lead to strong career opportunities and insulate them from bias and lack of connections in the workplace... A strong percentage of the students surveyed had parents who arrived in the United States on H-1B visas, reserved for professional workers. U.S. policymakers who back overly restrictive immigration policies do so at the risk of cutting off a steady infusion of technological and scientific skill,” said the study's author, Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the foundation. The article quoted Andrei Munteanu, eighteen, a finalist for the 2004 Intel competition, whose parents had moved from Romania to the United States five years earlier. Munteanu started American school in the seventh grade, which he found a breeze compared to his Romanian school. “The math and science classes [covered the same subject matter] I was taking in Romania... when I was in fourth grade,” he said.