Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [140]
Under Grove's stewardship, Intel by the late 1990s was worth $115 billion, more than IBM. It produced almost 90 percent of the world's PC microprocessors—churning out a quadrillion transistors every month, with seven million of them etched onto silicon microchips smaller than a dime. Among the foreign giants that Intel towered over in the 1990s were Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, and Siemens. Today, despite fierce competition and sporadic crises, Intel remains the world's largest producer of microprocessors.30
Like the printing press and the steam engine in their eras, the microchip was the core invention of the computer age. It underlay all the new software and hardware that would give us CDs, DVDs, VCRs, iPods, iTunes, TiVo, digital cameras, cell phones, BlackBer-ries, and other products that would forever change the way human beings live, think, and communicate. It drove the explosion of a new Internet-connected global economy and what Thomas Friedman has called the “new talent era.”
Grove was just one of a sea of immigrant venture-capital success stories that flooded America with wealth and catapulted the country to undisputed global economic and technological preeminence in the last decades of the twentieth century. Of the thousands of engineering and technology companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005, an amazing 52.4 percent had at least one key founder who was an immigrant. Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla and Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia emigrated from India. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, came to America from Britain. In 1998, a young Russian student named Sergey Brin took a leave of absence from Stanford's computer science Ph.D. program to found a small Internet search company with his fellow graduate student Larry Page. Today that company—Google—employs more than ten thousand people and has a market capitalization of more than $136 billion.
Of course, the thousands of nerds, geeks, and visionaries that created Silicon Valley included plenty of third-, fifth-, and seventh-generation Americans. Fred Terman, Stanford University's influential engineering dean in the 1950s, was not an immigrant; neither was Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. Nor were the gigantic fortunes made in the 1980s and 1990s limited to immigrants. On the contrary, the unprecedented explosion in wealth displayed once again the unique ability of the American economy to reward enterprise and talent from any background, whether homegrown or imported. Of the four hundred richest Americans in 2000, an extraordinary two-thirds had built their fortunes from nothing.31
America's technological and economic dominance has translated directly into military supremacy. Today, the United States has ten Nimitz-chss, nuclear-powered supercarriers, each one capable of carrying more than seventy fighter jets. No other country has a single aircraft carrier remotely comparable to these behemoths. The United States has a fleet of stealth aircraft, undetectable by radar, armed with one-ton radar-guided bombs. No other country has any. The United States also has by far the world's largest, most advanced arsenal of “smart” bombs, cruise missiles, unmanned high-altitude “drones,” satellite surveillance systems, armored tanks equipped with night vision and laser range-finders, and nuclear-powered attack submarines—none of which would have been possible without the new microprocessor technology.32
In short, the United States’ rise to world dominance depended heavily on its winning the high-tech race. Then, on September 11, 2001, technology was turned on the United States.
TEN
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan
We have now canvassed all of history's hyperpowers, observing that every one of them owed its rise to world dominance in critical part to tolerance.