Chapter 24 Chapter 9 This is not a drill (1)

We have the power to shape our own civilization, and in order to build our society we need to put our passion and industry into the cause we aspire to.People who came to this land didn't just want to found a new country.They are looking for a new world.So I come to your campus today, and I want to tell you that you can turn the dreams of those who came before you into reality.Let us begin now, so that in the future we can look back and say: It was since then, after a long and hard work, that men's minds were developed and their lives enriched. — Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 Most politicians here don't know the difference between a server and a waiter.That's why kids in South Korea have more access to the internet than kids in the South Bronx.

—Andrew Ranserger, who ran for New York City's public spokesperson in 2005, trying to push a plan to upgrade the city's IT infrastructure (he was not elected). As someone who grew up during the Cold War, I always remember driving down the highway when the music on the radio would stop abruptly and the announcer would say in a grim voice, "This is a test exercise for the emergency broadcasting system. ’, followed by a 30-second high-pitched siren.Fortunately, during the Cold War, we never heard "this is not a drill" from announcers.However, I am here to say - this is not a drill.

The opportunities and challenges that the flattening world brings to the United States are complex.As a result, our previous methods and means of dealing with things are no longer adequate or effective.If we rest on our laurels, then we cannot always keep innovating, making and taking the lead.Di Nick, an Indian-American hedge fund manager."For a country as rich as ours, it is quite surprising that so little is spent on improving national competitiveness," Singh said. We live in a world system in which hundreds of millions of people come together, and we should think hard about what that means.How nice it would be if what was true in the past happened to be true now.However, there are many things now that require you to do things differently than in the past. .You need to think deeper about this. "If there is a time in the history of the United States that is similar to the current situation, it is around 1957, when the Cold War was at its height. At that time, the Soviet Union took the lead in sending artificial earth satellites into space. Of course, that period was very different from ours now: the main challenge facing the United States at that time came from those who were busy building various "Berlin Walls", while the challenge facing the United States today is all The fact that the walls have been knocked down and many people can compete more directly with us on the world stage; the main challenges facing the United States in those days came from the communist countries-the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, and the main challenges facing the United States now The challenge comes from the extreme market-oriented countries - China, India and South Korea; the main goal of that era was to build a strong country, and the main goal of this era is to make each individual highly competitive .

We need to respond to the current challenges with the drive we used to open up new frontiers and build great social history. We need a president who can call on our citizens to study hard and expand their knowledge in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering to occupy the new commanding heights created by the flattening of the world.We also need a great society where our government builds the infrastructure, the social security system, and the institutions that help every American be competitive in an age where the job is not for life.I call upon this world of my imagination to come. It is obviously very difficult to mobilize Americans to unite to build such a society.john.Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael.Mandelbaum said: "The dangers facing nations are more easily communicated than the dangers facing individuals." Economics is not like war. Economics can always be a win-win situation, but sometimes I wish that economics is more like war.During the Cold War, we saw the Soviet Union showing off their missiles on Red Square.

All Americans, from the eastern end of the continent to the western end, were frightened.Our politicians had to carefully and focusedly plan our resources and education to ensure that the United States did not fall behind in the competition with the Soviet Union. But today, there is no threat from Indian ICBMs.The hotline that used to link the Kremlin to the White House via India has been replaced by a service line.In the past, when Leonid was on the other end of the line.Borezhnev was threatening a nuclear war, and now there was a soft voice on the other end of the line, looking to help you retrieve your AOL bill or work with you on a new piece of software.It was less menacing than Khrushchev slamming a shoe on the UN table, or Boris or Natasha saying I'm going to bury you in a heavy Russian accent.This sound is like a cheerful Indian song, so you don't feel any threat or challenge.All you hear is: "Hi, this is Rajiv, what can I do for you?"

No, Rajiv, you can't help me. We don't have a helpline to call on how to deal with the challenges of a flat world.We can only rely on ourselves.As I argued in Chapter 4, we already have the tools to meet this challenge, but also, as I noted in Chapter 5, we have not yet used them.The reality always looks unusually calm before the real crisis arrives.Today, it is a dangerous delusion to think that since the United States has dominated the world economy for more than a hundred years, its leading role will continue.This delusion is exactly the same as the delusion in the 1950s that believed that American technology would always lead the world.However, meeting the challenge will not be easy, keeping our society up to speed with the flattening of the world will take hard work, and we will have to do a lot of things differently than we have done in the past.As President Kennedy demanded in his famous "National Imperatives" speech to Congress on May 25, 1961, we need unity.At that time, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite in human history and sent astronaut Gagarin into space for the first time, which brought great shock to the United States.Thirteen days after Gagarin's launch, President Kennedy gave a speech in which he recognized that although the United States had vast human resources and institutional guarantees far greater than the Soviet Union's, they were underutilized.

"I believe we have all the necessary resources and talents," Kennedy said, "but the truth is we've never planned our resources reasonably well. We haven't set long-term goals or fully utilized resources and time." After he outlined his plan to put a man on the moon within 10 years, Kennedy added: "I ask Congress and all citizens to commit resolutely to this plan and action, which will last for many years and Great investment will be made. This decision requires all citizens to invest in the research, training and construction of natural science, technology, human resources, raw materials and machinery and equipment, and will probably require people to divert their energies from other areas they are currently engaged in. important activities. It means a level of dedication, organization and discipline that we lacked in previous research and development processes.”

In order to achieve the envisaged goal, Kennedy made an oath, and this oath is still true today: "So I will propose to Congress a new human resource development and training plan to train and retrain tens of millions of people. of workers, especially those who have been placed in long-term unemployment as a result of technological progress. Through a new 4-year vocational training, we will replace the obsolete old skills that workers currently have with the new technologies required by industrial automation. " Now is the time to plan for a rainy day, as Kennedy did.Knowing what to keep, what to throw away, what to transform, what to assimilate, where to redouble our efforts, where to focus our efforts, is what I'm going to talk about in this chapter.Although this is intuitive, the trend towards a flattening world is bound to have a huge fission effect between developing and developed countries.Weakness of will leads to falling behind at a faster rate.Developed countries will face more intense challenges from developing countries.Since political stability depends heavily on economic stability, and economies in a flat world are unstable, I can't help but be a little concerned about this.

In short, you will see that this fission will proceed faster and more violently.Thinking back to Microsoft trying to figure out what to do with people writing software for free around the world, we've now entered an era of creative destruction on steroids. Even if your country already has an overall strategy for dealing with a flat world, it will present challenges in new ways. And if you don't have any strategy in advance at all, then you have to be warned: this is not a drill. As an American, I care about my country.How do we maximize our benefits and opportunities, and protect those who have difficulty in flattening the world?Some people's advice tends to be conservative, while others advocate laissez-faire.The solution I offer is compassionate flatism.Compassionate flatism is my definition, which means that in a flat world, it should be gradual.I started by assuming that, barring certain geopolitical conflicts, the world would become flatter, with dawn following dusk.In such a flat world, the jobs of governments and politicians will be more important than ever.Its mission is to embrace globalization and build a more just, compassionate, and equal society through a series of policies. We are neither strengthening the original welfare state nor abolishing it. Only the market will determine us. It needs to be reshaped to give every American the prospects, education, skills, and safety nets they need to compete with others in a flat world.This is what compassionate flatism means, and it should be structured around the following five dimensions: leadership, muscle building, good fats—buffering mechanisms, social activism, and nurturing.

The job of leading America's politicians, whether on a local, state, or national level, should be to educate the people and explain to them what kind of world they live in and what they should do if they want to live a good life something.But the problem we face today is that politicians have never heard of a flat world.As venture capitalist John.Dole once said to me: "When you talk to the leaders of China, they understand very quickly, because the leaders of China are all engineers. American politicians can't do it, they are all lawyers." bill.Gates also added: "The Chinese are willing to undertake hard labor and are willing to receive education. When you meet Chinese officials, you will find that they are all scientists and engineers. You can have digital discussions with them without listening to them Talk about 'how to give color to his political opponents', and you're dealing with a smart bureaucracy."

When Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India for the first time in April 2005, he did not fly to New Delhi like other foreign leaders.He flew straight from Beijing to Bangalore for a tech tour before heading to New Delhi.No US president or vice president has ever visited Bengaluru.I'm not saying that all American politicians are required to get engineering degrees, but if they have a basic understanding of the forces that are flattening the world and can use this to educate their own citizens and provoke a response, it will definitely help. It helps us a lot.However, things have backfired, and too many American politicians now appear to be doing the exact opposite.They are trying to make their own people stupid by instilling in them the belief that jobs are now secure and protected from competition from abroad, or that since the United States has always dominated the world economy, it will continue to do so go down.It will be difficult to get Americans to develop a national strategy for a flattening world if there is no recognition of the growing educational gap, if there is a lack of ambition, if people don't know that the crisis will be precariously calm. The best example is that in the 2005 budget passed by Congress, the investment of the National Science Foundation was cut by 100 million US dollars. We need politicians who can reveal the truth to people and inspire them to meet their challenges.And what needs to be explained to people most at present is just like Lu.Gerstner told the entire IBM workforce when he took over as chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) board in 1993.At the time, IBM faced an existential challenge by failing to adjust and continue investing in the business computing market it had developed. In the field of commercial computers, IBM has monopolized the privilege of helping customers solve technical problems, so it has gradually become arrogant. IBM stopped listening to customers, thinking it wasn't necessary.When IBM stopped listening to its customers, it stopped creating value, which is the key to its business.A friend who was working at IBM told me that in the first year of working in the company, when he was handling domestic business, his superiors boasted to him that IBM is a giant, and even if the qualifications of employees are average, the company can still make great achievements. Excellent performance.But as the world flattens and IBM grows more egotistical, its ranks filled with mediocre employees can hardly keep the company from prospering. However, when a company is in the "crown" position in its field, it is difficult to persuade it to introspect and convince it that the status quo will not last forever - there are two paths before it: put away the glory and continue to create new ones. history or become history.Gerstner decided to introspect.He said that IBM is ugly, and it is meaningless to formulate a strategy closely around design and sales. The correct approach should be to meet the needs of customers and think what customers think.Needless to say, this passage came as a bolt from the blue to all IBMers. "The transformation of an enterprise comes from its sense of crisis," Gerstner said in a December 2002 conversation with Harvard Business School students. "No institution is willing to make a fundamental transformation unless it realizes that it Encountered "big trouble, only innovation can survive. The situation in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century is very similar to that of IBM at that time. When Lou.One of the first things Gerstner did when he took over IBM was to replace people's idea of ​​an iron job with the concept of lifetime employment.My friend Alex.Attar, a French-born software engineer, was working at IBM at the time.He described the company's transformation in this way: "In the past, once you were hired by IBM, you could do it once and for all without worrying about your job. Now, you must always prove to the company that your ability is suitable for this position, otherwise you have to leave. The company provides What is given to you is just a framework, you have to adapt to it and perfect it yourself. It was the 1990s and I was the head of IBM's general sales in France, and I told my employees that in the past, lifetime employment was just a company The responsibility of the individual, the individual sits and waits. But as we come up with the concept of being employable, this becomes the responsibility of both the company and the individual. The company will provide you with opportunities to learn knowledge and improve yourself, and you must make full use of this opportunity... You have to master all kinds of skills, because there are many people competing with you." When Gerstner set out to push a new idea, he couldn't stop emphasizing individual competence.Alex."He recognized that an extraordinary company can only be built with an extraordinary group of people," Attar said. Like IBM, so is the US.The mediocre American must become the exceptional or generalist American.It is not the job of governments and corporations to assure people of an iron job - those days are gone.The old social contract has been abandoned with the advent of the flat world.What the government can and must assure people now is that it can give people the opportunity to become more capable and employable.We don't want the US to become the IBM of the 1980s: peaking, arrogant, cowardly, and mediocre.The US should emulate IBM's transformation. Politicians not only need to explain to people what a flat world is, but also encourage them to accept the challenges of a flat world.This puts higher demands on the leadership ability of politicians.Yes, we have to admit that people can be afraid, but leaders can cultivate their imaginations.Politicians can scare us and confuse us, but politicians can also inspire us and motivate us. Indeed, getting people enthusiastic about a flat world is no easy feat and takes some imagination. President Kennedy realized that the race with the Soviet Union was not a race in space, but a race in science, essentially an educational race. So while he mobilized the entire American people to engage in the Cold War, his actual policy was to invest heavily in the natural and engineering sciences to achieve the goal of landing a man on the moon, not to shoot missiles at Moscow. If President Bush can get a little inspiration from this historical legacy, it can only be to mobilize the enthusiasm of the whole nation in scientific research and realize the dream of "landing on the moon" in our era: to find new alternative energy sources, so that the United States will be able to achieve the goal in the next 10 years. Free from energy crisis within the year.If President Bush can make the development of alternative energy sources his "moonshot" plan, then as the price of oil falls, the source of financing for terrorism will gradually dry up; Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia will have to start the reform process- This is impossible when oil prices are at $50 per barrel; at the same time, the strength of the dollar is also increasing; as new energy sources reduce pollution emissions and slow down the process of global warming, President Bush can finally change his image in front of European countries.In this way, President Bush can inspire young people to commit themselves to the war on terror and future nation-building, and as a result of their devotion to these causes, young people grow up to be scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. "It's not just a win-win anymore," Michael said."Everyone involved is a winner," Mandelbaum said. I was amazed to find that over the years, the positive response to my newspaper column was mainly from young people, and they were interested in my urging the president to lead the country to a new era "moon landing". "The idea of ​​planning.Mobilizing the energy and technology of the whole country to produce new energy in the 21st century, this move can make President Bush's historical feats comparable to Nixon who visited China and Kennedy who proposed the moon landing plan.Unfortunately, the reality seems that it will be difficult to get President Bush to adopt this proposal. Building Muscle Since tenure in employment is an excess of fat that the flat world cannot support, our society should try to get governments and businesses to focus on how to increase everyone's lifetime employability. Employment for life means excess fat on the body of society, and the idea of ​​employability replaces that fat with muscle.We should try to promote this advanced social contract between the government and individuals, between enterprises and employees.In this contract, the government and enterprises do not guarantee a person's lifelong employment, but guarantee to provide you with opportunities and tools so that you may be employed.The spiritual connotation of a flat world is that every worker will gradually be responsible for their own jobs, risks and economic security, and the government and enterprises only help people develop this ability. What workers want are lifelong learning opportunities and benefits.Why these two?Because this is the most important capital that enables a worker to be good at adjusting flexibly in the competition.As Harvard University economist Robert.According to Lawrence, the unique advantage of the American economic system is the flexibility of its labor force and related laws.In a flat world, this advantage would become even more pronounced as jobs and the rate at which they are created and disappeared accelerate. Lawrence said that it is very important for a society to enable people to enjoy as many opportunities and benefits as possible for lifelong learning and to make the labor force more mobile.A society cannot have its members have to hang around in one company forever just because they fear losing their pensions and health care.When workers have easier access to health care, pensions, and lifelong learning opportunities, they become increasingly willing and able to enter new industries and new jobs, moving from dying businesses to thriving ones. Creating legal institutions to administer pensions, health care, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would help people increase this mobility.Today, almost 50 percent of Americans have no pension plan other than Social Security.Some people are lucky enough to have a retirement plan that doesn't follow their job.So what is most needed now is a universal pension program that combines the original 16 different taxes into one. The project was proposed by the Progressive Party Policy Institute.You start an account at the company you first work for, and the program encourages workers or employers to deposit cash payments, bonuses, bonuses or stock into the account.Regardless of the combination of assets in the account, this asset is tax-free.When changing jobs, workers don't have to withdraw cash, just bring the account to the new company. Today, some provisions on mobility exist, but they are so onerous that most workers do not benefit from them. This universal pension plan will make the flow of people simple and convenient, and will no longer constitute an obstacle to the flow of people. Of course, each employer can still provide his workers with the company's unique welfare plan as an incentive for employees.But once the worker quits, this extra benefit plan is automatically transferred to the universal pension plan. The pension plan will continue to start in the new work unit, and various benefits based on the plan will be smoothly connected. Weir, director of the Progressive Party Policy Institute.Marshall proposed that, in addition to this pension plan, legislation should be passed to make it easier for workers to obtain stock options in the company.Such legislation would give tax breaks to companies that issue stock options to workers and impose higher taxes on companies that do not.Making workers mobile depends in part on making more workers masters of financial assets than just their own labor. “In a flat world, we would like to see the public as owners of money, not only competing in the labor market but in the functioning of the capital market,” Marshall said. People earning wages, and policymaking has to aim for that - when people move into the 21st century, everyone should own assets, just like family ownership did in the 20th century." Why?Marshall says that because of the growing body of writing that states that "people who own private assets can better participate in the functioning of the democratic capitalist system, share in the benefits that the system brings to participants, and facilitate the rationalization of related policies," this It is another method to consolidate the democratic capitalist system after family ownership. It can make democratic capitalism more dynamic because workers who become owners are more productive.Also, in a flat world, each worker would face greater competition, and people would be more independent if they had more opportunities to accumulate wealth through labor and capital markets.We should reassure every worker that they can get stock options as easily as rich people.Conservatives have always focused on protecting the capital that already exists. Now, let us focus on how to strengthen the ranks of capital owners. In the case of health protection, I do not want to go into too much detail, because this topic requires the content of another book dedicated to it.However, it is necessary to introduce a portable health insurance plan designed to reduce the burden on employers.When I was writing this book, I talked to many entrepreneurs, and they all said that the rising cost of health insurance was the reason why companies moved their factories overseas.In those developing countries, either there is relatively little expenditure on employee health protection, or there is a national health protection system.I reiterate my call for the implementation of the progressive health care program proposed by the Progressive Policy Institute.The plan would establish in each state the kind of collective buying programs that Congress and federal employees currently use.This collective buying scheme is responsible for buying insurance subscription rights in bulk from large insurance companies.Every employer offers this subscription menu to new recruits.Workers can choose high, medium and low insurance plans, and everyone will be covered by the insurance system.The employer will pay some or all of the premium, with the employee making up the rest.But employers themselves do not have to negotiate insurance plans with insurance companies because they individually have no negotiating leverage. The scheme would make employees more mobile, allowing them to move from job to job with their own health coverage. Since the program has worked so well among members of Congress, why not extend it to the general public?For poor and low-income workers who cannot afford the costs, the government will provide some subsidies.But the dominant idea is to create a private insurance market that is supervised, regulated and funded by the government.In this market, the government sets the rules, no worker will be left out, and no employer can escape responsibility.This insurance plan is operated by private forces. What employers need to do is to allow employees to enter the system at any location and help them pay some or all of the costs. Employers themselves do not have to be responsible for operating the plan.During this process, employers can still provide employees with company-specific security plans, and employees have the right to choose between company plans and general social plans. (Details can be found at ppionline.org.) Although the plan is not perfect in many details, I think the basic idea behind the plan is sound: In a flat world, the pension and protection plans offered by companies like the Fortune 500 would no longer be sufficient. To keep workers safe, we need more collaborative solutions between government, labor and business that empower workers to be self-reliant, but not leave them to fend for themselves. Government also needs to play another important role in building lifetime employability: improving the educational attainment of the entire American workforce.In Chapter 7 I discuss the right type of education for the new middle-class jobs.Yet for people to learn how to learn, develop their right brain, become more resilient, and become integrators, they must start with the basics.A proper education can only be built on strong foundations—reading, collaboration, arithmetic, and basic science.We can't build a new middle class that will ensure our rising standards of living without more Americans on a solid footing.