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In Singapore, the political and business leaders ask these questions obsessively, as Tom saw during a visit to the country in the winter of 2011. The Singaporean economist Tan Kong Yam pinpointed the reason: Because of its small size and big neighbors, Singapore, he said, is “like someone living in a hut without any insulation. We feel every change in the wind or the temperature and have to adapt. You Americans are still living in a brick house with central heating and don’t have to be so responsive.”

Tom saw the result of Singapore’s obsessive attention to what it must do in order to thrive when he visited a fifth-grade science class in an elementary school in a middle-class neighborhood. All the eleven-year-old boys and girls were wearing white lab coats with their names monogrammed on them. Outside in the hall, yellow police tape had blocked off a “crime scene.” Lying on a floor, bloodied, was a fake body that had been “murdered.” The class was learning about DNA through the use of fingerprints and evidence-collecting, and their science teacher had turned each one into a junior CSI investigator. All of them had to collect fingerprints and other evidence from the scene and then analyze them. Asked whether this was part of the national curriculum, the school’s principal said that it was not. But she had a very capable science teacher interested in DNA, the principal explained, and the principal was also aware that Singapore was making a big push to expand its biotech industries, so she thought it would be a good idea to expose her students to the subject.

A couple of them took Tom’s fingerprints. He was innocent—but impressed.

Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, a Silicon Valley innovation laboratory, has worked with both General Motors and Singapore’s government, and he had this to say: “Being inside General Motors, this huge company, it felt a lot like being inside America today. Adaptation is the key to survival, and the people and companies who adapt the best, survive the best. When you are the biggest company in the world, you become arrogant, and your mind-set is such that no one can convince you that Toyota has anything to teach you. You are focused inward and not outward; you are focused on the politics inside your company rather than on the outside and what your competition is doing. If you become arrogant, you become blind. That was General Motors, and that is, unfortunately, America today … You cannot adapt unless you are constantly monitoring what is happening in your environment. Countries that do that well, such as Singapore, are all about looking out.”

Singapore has no natural resources, and even has to import sand for building. But today its per capita income is just below U.S. levels, built entirely with advanced manufacturing, services, and exports. The country’s economy grew in 2010 at 14.7 percent, led by exports of pharmaceuticals and biomedical equipment. The United States is not Singapore, and it is certainly not about to adopt the more authoritarian features of Singapore’s political system. Nor, like Singapore, are we likely to link the pay of high-level bureaucrats and cabinet ministers to the top private-sector wages (all top government officials in Singapore make more than $1 million a year) or give them annual bonuses tied to the country’s annual GDP growth rate. But we do have something to learn from the seriousness and creativity the Singaporeans bring to elementary education and economic development, and from their attention to the requirements for success in the post–Cold War world. Carlson told us he once met with a senior Singaporean economic minister whom he complimented on the country’s educational and economic achievements. Carlson said the minister “would not accept the compliment.” “Rather, he said, ‘We are not good enough. We must never think we are good enough. We must continuously improve.’ Exactly right—there is no alternative: adapt or die.”

To be sure, countries don’t compete directly with one another in economic terms. When