“There is one world of science out there,” said Levin, “and this kind of international division of labor makes a lot of sense.” Yale, he said, also insisted that the working conditions at the Chinese labs be world-class, and, as a result, it has also helped to lift the quality of the Chinese facilities. “The living conditions of the lab animals are right up to U.S. standards,” remarked Levin. “These are not mouse sweatshops.”
Every law of economics tells us that if we connect all the knowledge pools in the world, and promote greater and greater trade and integration, the global pie will grow wider and more complex. And if America, or any other country, nurtures a labor force that is increasingly made up of men and women who are special, specialized, or constantly adapting to higher-value-added jobs, it will grab its slice of that growing pie. But we will have to work at it. Because if current trends prevail, countries like India and China and whole regions like Eastern Europe are certain to narrow the gap with America, just as Korea and Japan and Taiwan did during the Cold War. They will keep upping their standards.
So are we still working at it? Are we tending to the secrets of our sauce? America still looks great on paper, especially if you look backward, or compare it only to India and China of today and not tomorrow. But have we really been investing in our future and preparing our children the way we need to for the race ahead? See the next chapter. But here's a quick hint:
The answer is no.
SEVEN: The Quiet Crisis
You could find no better metaphor for the way the rest of the world can now compete head-to-head more effectively than ever with America than the struggles of the U.S. Olympic basketball team in 2004. The American team, made up of NBA stars, limped home to a bronze medal after losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina. Previously, the United States Olympic basketball team had lost only one game in the history of the modern Olympics. Remember when America sent only NCAA stars to the Olympic basketball events? For a long time these teams totally dominated all comers. Then they started getting challenged. So we sent our pros. And they started getting challenged. Because the world keeps learning, the diffusion of knowledge happens faster; coaches in other countries now download American coaching methods off the Internet and watch NBA games in their own living rooms on satellite TV. Many of them can even get ESPN and watch the highlight reels. And thanks to the triple convergence, there is a lot of new raw talent walking onto the NBA courts from all over the world-including many new stars from China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. They go back and play for their national teams in the Olympics, using the skills they honed in America. So the automatic American superiority of twenty years ago is now gone in Olympic basketball. The NBA standard is increasingly becoming a global commodity-pure vanilla. If the United States wants to continue to dominate in Olympic basketball, we must, in that great sports cliche, step it up a notch. The old standard won't do anymore. As Joel Cawley of IBM remarked to me, “Star for star, the basketball teams from places like Lithuania or Puerto Rico still don't rank well versus the Americans, but when they play as a team-when they collaborate better than we do-they are extremely competitive.”