America's decay

As strange as it can be the biggest threat America is facing now is NOT terrorism

Right, it was like what had happened in the auto industry 20 years ago, when you had French auto producers, Italian auto producers, Japanese auto producers and the big three here, and they all competed for national market share. But then that market went global -- as did the market for TVs and the market for telecommunication devices and the market for computers -- and then companies had to compete on a world
scale. The same thing is happening with cities and the talent they compete for.

And when all this hysteria about national security, homeland security started to happen, what really drove the United States to its position of greatness wasn't the fact that They had a big market or lots of raw materials or their American ingenuity. What really made America great for the better part of a century and a half has been their openness to people from all over the world. That's what built their textile industry, that's what built their railroad industry.
It was because they accepted people like Andrew Carnegie in the steel industry, David Sarnoff in the electronics industry, Adolphus Busch in the beer industry, and so on.

And according to analysts' statistics for the high-tech revolution, 30 percent of the companies in the Silicon Valley area were founded by an Indian or someone born in a Chinese-speaking country. Whether it's eBay or Yahoo or Google or Hotmail, what drove America's high-tech revolution and other industries was the ability to attract the world's best talent.


But what are the current problems the U.S. faces in terms of attracting that sort of talent? What's the difference between now and, say, five years ago?

There are two factors interacting here. The first, which would have happened anyway, is that other countries realized how important talent is and cities in those countries have become really effective in competing for talent.
So the playing field has been leveled. In the past, people would have said, "Absolutely, my first choice is to move to New York or Boston or San Francisco or Seattle or Chicago ..." Now cities like London, Dublin, Amsterdam and Stockholm have become extremely attractive to talented people, not because of any particular public policy but because of the way they've developed over the past decade.
And I'm not just talking about the relocation of Americans, I'm talking about the location decisions of people on a world scale.
So many foreigners have visa troubles now, even great scientists, artists and musicians.
And once they're living and working in the U.S., they can't go home to visit relatives for five years because if they're not a resident they have to get their visa renewed every time they enter or exit the country.
Which means it's a huge problem to leave the U.S. even for a short period of time because they're not sure they'll be able to get back in again.
Not surprisingly, there's a general sense in the world that the United States
isn't as welcoming.
And in particular, the recent U.S. restrictions have hit hard at foreign students who compose the critical backbone of their high-tech industries.
They couldn't have high-tech industries in the United States -- no matter how much they want to say they would -- without foreign-born engineers and computer scientists.
They just wouldn't have them. They couldn't run them because they don't produce enough talent of their own.
Fifty percent of the computer scientists in the United States are foreign-born, which is a huge number.
But it makes sense. If you have a billion kids in India and China and a billion kids are trying to learn engineering and math and computer science, there are going to be a lot of really talented and smart kids, even if they're distributed at the same ratios as U.S. kids.
And in the past that gave the U.S. a great advantage because they were able to attract the lion's share of the brightest, most technically sophisticated, entrepreneurial, motivated kids in the world.
No, it's not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent.
It's not like "It's going to be the EU" or "It's going to be China." That's silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the
talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that's a huge loss.
Roosevelt said, "I'm going to make sure that these working-class people get to be part of the industrial economy. I'm going to build an industrial society that allows people to organize and bargain collectively, raise their wages, has affordable housing, get long-term mortgages, provides occupational safety and health, Social
Security in their old age and welfare in their spells of poverty.
And I'm going to make sure that their kids can go to college."

All what they are doing now is to dismantle the New Deal. And this will have consequences...

Liberally taken from William Law "The Flight of the Creative Class"