That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [28]
From Benjamin Franklin and his lightning rod onward, America produced gifted inventors, but government-sponsored research and development only began in a major way during World War II with the Manhattan Project. The effort to build an atomic bomb came about because FDR and his advisers feared that, without it, Nazi Germany would get the bomb first. After the war, as scientific research became crucial for technical advance and the scale and complexity of that research could no longer be adequately sustained by private companies alone, the United States led the way. The low-hanging fruit had already been plucked by tinkerers in garages, and scientific progress now required national laboratories and partnerships between government, universities, and private companies. The programs that Eisenhower added to the nation’s formula for prosperity had the common goal of assisting in the global struggle against the Soviet Union and international communism. Seventy-five years after World War II and two decades after the Cold War, America’s oldest national laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, is doing basic research into solar energy, the smart electric grid, and electric cars. Examples of this public-private partnership make the news pages every day. For instance, as AOL’s DailyFinance.com noted (January 7, 2011), General Motors has licensed a technology from Argonne “that will boost the performance of lithium-ion battery cells that power electric cars” such as GM’s Volt, creating “safer, cheaper batteries with longer operating lives that can also go further between charges.”
Our big challenges today require the kind of national responses that wars have evoked, but without a major ongoing conflict it will be difficult to mobilize the American people to make the difficult policy choices needed to meet them. In seeking to rally support for such policies when he assumed office, President Obama referred to a “Sputnik moment” for the United States. The original “Sputnik moment” spurred thousands of Americans to take up careers in science and engineering, and related businesses, and galvanized the country as a whole to invest in mathematics, science, and technology, as well as to improve the nation’s infrastructure. The purpose was to avoid falling behind the Soviet Union, but one of the by-products was to update the traditional American formula for prosperity, which made the American economy even more creative and productive.
Today the United States has no such rival; but we have to find a way to do now what Sputnik spurred us to do then: update our formula to match the needs of the moment. After all, we are driving on roads and bridges built in the 1950s and even the 1930s. We are cutting back on the very universities that were chartered by Lincoln. We are learning from breakthroughs made by scientists who were inspired by Kennedy’s moon shot or who immigrated to America in the 1970s, spurred by Kennedy’s vision. In short, we are living off upgrades to our formula made a long time ago. While the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress approved in February 2009 included some investments in infrastructure and research and development, much of the spending undertaken to fight the recession went to tax cuts, to unemployment insurance, and to such minuscule improvements as the new lighting on the train platforms in Penn Station in New York City, which makes it easier to see just how grimy, undersized, and outdated they are. The formula has a long lead time; it involves one generation investing on behalf of another. So when we opt for deferring maintenance on the formula rather than making farsighted investments in it, we are denying the next generation the tools it will need to maintain the American dream.
Unfortunately, the political debate in America has strayed absurdly