That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [126]
Source: From the Washington Post, © April 30, 2011 The Washington Post. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.
In 2005, both the Senate and the House encouraged the National Academies (of sciences, engineering, and medicine) and the National Research Council to conduct a study of America’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. They produced a report entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which assessed America’s standing in each of the principal areas of innovation and competitiveness—knowledge capital, human capital, and the existence of a creative “ecosystem.” According to the National Academies website, “Numerous significant findings resulted … It was noted that federal government funding of R&D as a fraction of GDP has declined by 60 percent in 40 years. With regard to human capital, it was observed that over two-thirds of the engineers who receive PhD’s from United States universities are not United States citizens. And with regard to the Creative Ecosystem it was found that United States firms spend over twice as much on litigation as on research.”
The Gathering Storm report eventually led to a bill called the America COMPETES Act, which authorized investments in a broad range of basic research. It did so on the grounds that
a primary driver of the future economy and concomitant creation of jobs will be innovation, largely derived from advances in science and engineering … When scientists discovered how to decipher the human genome, it opened entire new opportunities in many fields including medicine. Similarly, when scientists and engineers discovered how to increase the capacity of integrated circuits by a factor of one million, as they have in the past forty years, it enabled entrepreneurs to replace tape recorders with iPods, maps with GPS, pay phones with cell phones, two-dimensional X-rays with three-dimensional CT scans, paperbacks with electronic books, slide rules with computers, and much, much more.
Most of the original funding for the expanded research recommended by the Gathering Storm report got passed only due to the stimulus legislation enacted after the financial meltdown in 2008—and most of that was for only a limited duration. So in 2010, the same group gathered and issued an update, entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.
“So where does America stand relative to its position of five years ago when the Gathering Storm report was prepared?” the new report asked. “The unanimous view of the committee members participating in the preparation of this report is that our nation’s outlook has worsened. While progress has been made in certain areas … the latitude to fix the problems being confronted has been severely diminished by the growth of the national debt over this period from $8 trillion to $13 trillion.”
To drive home the point, the updated report began with a series of statistics, which included the following:
In 2009 United States consumers spent significantly more on potato chips than the government devoted to energy research and development—$7.1 billion versus $5.1 billion.
China is now second in the world in its publication of biomedical research articles, having recently surpassed Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Spain.
In 2009, 51 percent of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies. Only four of the top ten companies receiving U.S. patents last year were U.S.