The real dangers

The problem with crises is that they tend to produce tunnel vision. The near-term problems tend to divert attention from the long term problems, even though the long-term problems may be far more serious and dangerous. That, I think, is what is happening here in America. The nation, and the political system, is all focused on the immediate problems of the current financial crisis, with the growing federal debt and high unemployment, and politicians have been looking for short-term solutions, like extending unemployment insurance and raising taxes.

Far more dangerous, however, are some long term structural problems in America. Yes, we have high unemployment at the moment, but the real problem is that many of those lost jobs will never come back, whatever Washington tries to do. Yes, we have too much federal debt at the moment, but the real problem is that without major readjustments America will never again have the rate of growth that can pay back those debts.

In a nutshell, America is losing manufacturing to other nations with lower wage rates, we are losing our lead in innovation to other nations with better-educated, more highly motivated engineers and scientists, we are losing new businesses to entrepreneurs on other countries with more favorable tax rates and larger skilled labor pools who are willing to work harder for lower wages.

For decades now places like Silicon Valley have been filled with bright foreign engineers, programmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who came to America because they could do better here than in their home country. Now many are migrating back to their home countries to start their own competing companies, creating jobs back in their home countries rather than here in America..

The playing field is changing for America, and we no longer have such a clear advantage. If we don’t adapt, and quickly, we will almost certainly follow the British Empire into second-rate status over the coming decades.

This is a hard problem, and it will take a serious and extended national debate with our best minds to figure out how to adapt effectively. Certainly we need to rethink our educational system from the ground up, free it from the political constraints of teacher’s unions and the ideological constraints of local school boards, reverse the widespread trend to “dumb down” courses to make kids “feel better about themselves” and reverse the trend of colleges to put money-making ahead of academic rigor.

Certainly we need to invest heavily in our crumbling infrastructure, and in fields like basic science, which is what underlies and provides the feedstock for technological innovation.

More difficult are the cultural adjustments we need to make to wean ourselves as a nation from the comfortable indolence we have adopted over the decades when America had little real competition, and return to some of the work ethics we had as a nation in earlier, more difficult times – work ethics which our serious competition in places like India and China still have. This is not a matter of spending money – this is a matter of rethinking and readjusting our core values as a culture, and the values we teach our children in the home.

The real problem at the moment is that our national leaders are still playing petty short-term political power games with each other to see who can promise more to the voters, when what we really need is an all-out, all-hands-on-deck, wartime crisis sort of unified national attack on these long term structural problems.