The prolific and beloved writer, Stephen King, said: “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” For some of us, fictional stories are pure entertainment, while for others, they are an imaginative journey into a future that could become a reality. Some of us believe this because amazing things have happened that were once fiction.
One of these fictional stories is the popular TV series, Snowpiercer. If you have not tuned in, it’s about a future where a failed climate-change experiment has destroyed all life except for those who have boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that perpetually travels around the globe. According to the storyline, the entire world is in a deep ice age by 2031, and for those on the train, a new class system emerges. You might believe this is the closest humanity and civilization will ever get to an ice age, but the earth’s climate history provides the truth in this lie.
Surprisingly, you only need three graphs (actually one expanded into three parts) to appreciate a portion of the earth’s climate history. The graphs are based on data collected and analyzed by many dedicated scientists over decades. The data come from deep ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland, worldwide deep ocean sediment cores, and even the interiors of prehistoric caves. More recent data, accumulated over the last 150 years, has utilized many different methods to estimate the earth’s average global temperature.
There is considerable consistency across all these different data sets. This consistency provides reasonable assurance that the estimates of the earth’s temperature over millions of years are likely correct. The data sets indicate that there were many ice ages in the past, and they occurred with some regularity. The data also suggest that over its geologically recent history, the earth has spent much more time at colder temperatures than it has in warm ones. Civilization, as we know it today, would not survive another ice age. Very low temperatures result in death, destruction, the extinction of species, and mass migrations. During such an event, the safest place to live is on and around the earth’s equator.
The earth’s climate history indicates what goes up in temperature will eventually come down. The principal uncertainty today is when will the warm temperatures we experience today come down. No one knows, nor can anyone predict when the descent into colder temperatures will begin. The many climate models being used to provide future climate forecasts cannot tell us when this will happen. We just know that it will very likely occur based on the earth’s climate history.
The three related graphs that describe the earth’s climate history over the last 800,000 years are described sequentially below.
The first graph above has essential information related to the earth’s temperature history. The temperature on the vertical axis is measured in degrees Celsius (C) relative to today’s average of 15 degrees C. The average temperature during this entire period was about 10 degrees C or 5 degrees C lower than today’s average. The lowest average temperature during this period was about 5 degrees C or 5 degrees above freezing.
The horizontal time axis in this graph is significantly compressed because it extends back 800,000 years. This compression makes some of the temperature peaks look very sharp: however, the width of these peaks contains information about how long warm periods last. As will become apparent, warmer periods are relatively short compared to colder periods.
The second graph above (labeled B) is an expansion in time of the rightmost part of the first graph. This section describes the earth’s temperature over the last 11,000 years or so. It indicates an overall decline in temperature from a peak about 9,000 years ago to the lower temperatures we experience today.
And the third graph above similarly expands the rightmost portion of the second graph. It describes the earth’s temperature over the last 145 years. The black lines indicate cyclical up and down temperature trends over relatively short periods of 30 to 40 years.
The key feature of the first graph is the relatively sharp peaks in temperature. Depending on how you count them, there are 10 to 13 such peaks. Four of them extend above 15 degrees C, and all of them are above today’s purported average global temperature. The most recent peak about 130,000 years ago is nearly 5 degrees C above today’s average temperature.
By cutting the tops off the four prominent peaks with a horizontal axis at today’s average temperature, one can get an estimate of how long warm periods have lasted. The duration ranges from about 3,000 to 22,000 years. In comparison, the peak we are on now has lasted for roughly 10,000 years. These warm periods are relatively short compared to the colder periods lasting between 70,000 to 90,000 years. The lowest temperature of the last ice age, about 5 degrees C, spanned around 9,000 years. This low temperature ended about 17,000 years ago by temperature increases that eventually, after reaching a peak, declined over 9,000 years to the cooler temperature today.
No one knows when the current warm period will end because no one understands the conditions that would tip the earth into descending temperatures. Based on the first graph, once the descent begins, it continues through a negative feedback loop over time that eventually bottoms out at very low temperatures. As the earth tips into colder temperatures, more snow and ice accumulate on the vast northern land areas, which causes more sunlight reflected into outer space. This reduction in energy retention cools the earth, but warm moist air from around the equator collides with the cold air from the north and south to produce more snow and ice. This cyclical process continues until it is so cold that there is very little moisture left in the air to make snow and ice.
The second graph also has a wealth of information. Visually there appears to be a long-term downward trend in temperature along with many short-term ups and downs over 11,000 years. Based on known physical processes, there are good reasons to believe that the downward trend in temperature has been impacting the earth’s climate over the last 9,000 years.
A way of explaining this is through a set of questions. Why does the earth always come out of regularly occurring ice ages? What causes the massive amounts of ice and snow to melt toward the end of an ice age? What source of energy melts the ice and snow? Why doesn’t the earth’s temperature continue to increase after much of the snow and ice have melted?
The answer to these questions involves naturally occurring changes in the sun’s illumination of the earth. On rare occasions, three things happen synchronously to cause the earth’s temperature to increase over thousands of years. This phenomenon occurs when the earth comes closest to the sun, the tilt of the earth’s axis is at a maximum angle, and the earth’s axis of rotation tilts toward the sun. Under these conditions, the northern latitudes receive maximum sunlight over thousands of years. This synchronization started to develop about 17,000 years ago and ended at a peak temperature about 9,000 years ago. After that time, the angle of the earth’s axis decreased to about half the maximum angle observed today. This decrease in angle reduces the amount of sunlight received at northern latitudes, expanding the northern region where cold air accumulates. This region also contains the polar vortex. The substantial loss in the sun’s energy at northern latitudes is the likely cause of the overall cooling trend over the last 9,000 years, which will continue.
The second graph also has many ups and downs, including those indicated at the graph’s far rightmost portion. These temperature swings are associated with “the little ice age,” which is a low temperature trend with ups and downs that lasted about 600 years. However, given the many rapid temperature excursions over 11,000 years, there appears to be nothing special about them except for the lower temperatures.
The rise in temperature after “the little ice age” is expanded in the third graph from the left. There are cyclical cooling and warming trends that lasted about 30-40 years. These trends have happened before, as shown in the second graph. Despite the overall upward trend over the last 145 years, the second graph indicates that the dominant climate trend over the last 9,000 years is cooling. Imagine living in each of the 30-40-year cycles (about half a lifespan) and believing that the trend will result in a freezing or warming catastrophe. No one lives long enough to experience a 9,000-year trend!
So, where does this leave the fate of the earth? No one seems to know. You would think that the models that climate scientists use to predict average global temperatures well into the future would have something definitive to say about a catastrophic effect such as an ice age. However, ice ages remain unexplained. There is no predictive theory of the earth’s climate that explains their occurrence and behavior.
By now, it should be clear that climate models in current use are inadequate and unreliable. There are deficiencies in our understanding of climate that must be addressed before making scientific judgments about the future of the earth’s climate. Based on saving civilization from the next ice age, I cannot think of a more critical scientific research problem facing humanity. Can you?
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, there will be a major news headline that goes something like this: China is rapidly approaching the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and will surpass it in five years. By the time we arrive at the five-year mark, no amount of short-term government stimulus can address this challenge because a change in our culture and an investment decline in economic growth opportunities over the last 50 years will have caused this to happen.
You might ask, when is it likely that China will surpass US GDP? It’s simple arithmetic. Before the pandemic, China’s annual GDP growth rate, about six percent, was more than two and a half times that of the US. Assuming these growth rates are restored by 2021, a simple calculation makes China First in about ten years or around 2030. That’s less than half a generation, which is not a long time.
As we approach the five-year mark, there will be impacts on US leadership worldwide simply because perception is truth in politics. Some countries will align themselves with the winner of the global economic power competition. This alignment can grow with time because the US will be perceived as growing weaker economically and wielding less global economic influence. The longstanding claim that an economy based on free-market capitalism is superior to all others will have fallen to a totalitarian state-run economy.
Ironically, US government policies have helped China achieve this goal by providing them with low-cost and low-risk growth opportunities through the transfer of proven business models, numerous technologies, and the exploitation of our university system and research capabilities. We have put ourselves in this situation through our government’s foreign policy, federal government spending priorities, allowing US companies to seek production cost reductions elsewhere, and a fundamental change in our national culture, e.g., https://johnparmentola.com/why-national-culture-matters-to-our-future/.
Over the last 50 years, we have managed to transition from a risk-taking culture that was once willing to take bold steps (think of landing humans on the moon in 1969) to a risk-averse one, mainly focused on process efficiency and incrementalism (think of incremental software and electronic hardware improvements). This change in our national culture is preventing us from creating our economic future.
You can see this aspect of our culture play out on the award-winning ABC television series Shark Tank. Here you have a group of business moguls with business models in their heads that listen to a five-minute business proposal. In the next five minutes, these moguls ask standard questions. Is the product unique and patented? Who are your competitors? What is your customer base, and how large is it, or could it be? How much in sales and profit have you already made, and over what period? Why do you need the money, and how would you spend it? These are all questions designed to assess risk and the time over which an investor can expect a return on investment. Depending upon the risk assessment, certain constraints can be put on the money to be invested to ensure that the investor can at least recover his or her original investment. This approach is not risk-taking but a rather elaborate exercise in risk avoidance.
The transition to China First will likely accelerate because our newly elected government will focus even more on government spending on short-term needs that have little or no effect on sustained growth. As in the past, they will neglect the longer-term investments required to create new economic growth opportunities. This path to our future is a simple example of risk-averse problem solving: If it works politically, don’t fix it.
The incoming Biden Administration has proposed $11 trillion in new spending over a decade. This increase is the largest proposed increase in federal spending since the Johnson Administration. About $4 trillion of this largesse involves expanding social programs, and another $3 trillion is an additional stimulus to help restore the economy to pre-pandemic levels. Both of these spending programs are intended to fulfill short-term needs and not future growth opportunities.
Another $1.5 trillion is intended to support education at all levels. This spending is just another example of politicians throwing money at a very serious problem that cannot be fixed without a fundamental change in how teachers are trained, the standards used to evaluate them, and the standards used to assess student performance. If anything, it will further politicize education in the classroom through government influence instead of teaching students the fundamentals they will need to make a life for themselves in a highly competitive world.
There is another $0.7 trillion in “Buy America” spending, which will very likely have political strings attached to fulfill special interests that contributed to re-election campaigns. Once again, this spending will satisfy short-term needs by providing free money to the risk-averse who expect a rate of return on their campaign contributions. The remaining $2 trillion of the $11 trillion will go to climate change and infrastructure.
This $2 trillion will replace portions of an already existing electric power system with another having inferior performance – “renewable” energy technology. This replacement strategy will increase the cost of living for consumers through higher-priced electricity and result in blackouts because of the intermittent nature of renewable technology electricity production. It will mainly cause financial damage to the middle class and poor; however, government subsistent programs will help those who cannot afford to pay their electricity bills.
Our risk-averse private sector will welcome government spending on all this infrastructure. Also, since China is the world leader in renewable technology production, we can expect that US government spending will benefit China as it did during the Obama Administration through its renewable programs.
So, what do ordinary Americans get out of this? Just more of what has occurred over the last 50 years. We will have more human dependency on government, a lower quality and more costly education system, more free money for a risk-averse private sector, the replacement of an existing electric power system with an inferior one at a higher cost, and more benefits to China. Making matters even worse, the interest on the debt from additional government borrowing to pay for all this will favor the wealthy and foreign holders of the debt, such as China. In the end, the American taxpayer will be responsible for paying off the growing national debt that has exceeded the GDP.
All of this will reduce the time it will take for China to become first in the world while US government spending produces short-lived results.
How do we prevent China First?
A strategic aspect of financial risk-taking is its importance for fulfilling an essential human need, economic growth. Spent wisely, investments in the future can translate into an increasing number of quality jobs, new products and services, and new industries that produce them. The right type of risk-taking can matter in peoples’ lives and livelihoods. However, such a strategy cannot guarantee additional economic growth on a prescribed schedule because of random and unanticipated events that affect outcomes. It’s just the way the world works. Despite this inherent uncertainty, a proven investment strategy has repeatedly produced economic growth and prosperity over the last 200 years. Unfortunately, our federal government no longer embraces this strategy, and, in fact, our government has been moving further away from it for the last 50 years.
This proven strategy involves federal government investment in research and development (R&D), which is required for a nation to grow economically because the private sector is unwilling to fund the risks of pushing out the frontiers of science, engineering, and mathematics. The private sector is inherently risk-averse. As Leonardo da Vinci said: “He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.” The private sector fears losing what it values most: money!
If we are to secure a better economic future for our citizens, the federal government must create economic opportunities. A pro-growth strategy also involves quality education for all its citizens. The current system is badly broken and must be replaced with a much more egalitarian system of much higher quality. There are ways of accomplishing this by applying and developing technology, e.g., https://johnparmentola.com/revolutionizing-our-k-12-education-system/.
The US followed such a strategy after WWII, e.g., https://johnparmentola.com/the-great-mystery-of-economic-growth/. Federal investment in R&D increased by about 200 percent relative to GDP from around 1950 up to 1965 or 15 years. This spending was an investment in the American people through quality education and new scientific, engineering, and mathematical discoveries that expanded human imagination into what was possible, feasible, and practical. Every major invention, technology, and innovation the world exploits and enjoys today came from these investments and the investments of other nations. Without them, the US economy and the world economy would be far less productive compared to today. This strategy made the US the global economic and military power after WWII.
Despite the extraordinary success of our post-WWII investment strategy, since 1965, federal R&D investment as a percentage of GDP has fallen by an astonishing amount, 65 percent. Investments of this kind create new opportunities for future growth—their reduction results in opportunity loss that has serious consequences for a national economy.
The problem is politicians do not see a re-election opportunity from a government-funded R&D strategy that creates economic growth opportunities outside their election cycle. They care more about holding their jobs by rewarding those who fund their campaigns than they do the broader public good.
To fix this situation, our government must establish a measure of economic opportunity creation that is required by law, call it the future economic opportunity index (FEOI). FEOI is the amount of federal R&D spending that creates economic opportunities divided by GDP, which has historically increased from such spending.
Surprisingly, FEOI is at the level it was back in 1950, or about 0.6 percent. This fact has gone unnoticed. If we are to overcome China First, we must increase the FEOI by 200 percent over 15 years, as we did after WWII. This goal can be achieved by increasing the FEOI by 8 percent per year for 15 years, which is a few billion dollars per year that will grow as the US GDP increases. In the big scheme of things, this is small potatoes and our best bet to ensure that China will not surpass our GDP in 10 years.
Our future all boils down to how much conviction and courage our political leaders have to accomplish this for our children and grandchildren, so our precious youth can continue to make America an exceptional nation in the world. The fundamental question is: Do we care enough about this nation’s future to do something about it?
“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.”
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
At the time, this quote by President Kennedy captured our national culture. Back then, we believed, as a nation, we could accomplish anything, even the removal of the two-hundred-year-old-stain of injustice against Black Americans, and putting an end to the Vietnam War that we had no will to win. Also representative of this culture were two extraordinary events, one month apart, that were immortalized in the summer of 1969. One was carefully planned over eight years, starting with President Kennedy’s awe-inspiring speech before the US Congress, while the other was mostly improvised as the event unfolded. The outcomes of both were highly uncertain. However, they shared a common thread; the human spirit to achieve something extraordinary, with one, Apollo 11, bordering on science fiction to touch our moon, and the other, totally unanticipated, involving the greatest music festival of any generation in history, The Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
The most powerful rocket ever developed, producing 160 million horsepower that shook the ground 3 miles awayA half of million peaceful music lovers on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, NY
All these events happened because ambitious and creative people were empowered to explore the unknown, accept risk as well as failure, challenge conventional wisdom, and believed in taking bold steps. Individualism and freedom of expression were fundamental to our culture and enabled our nation to become the world economic and military power.
In contrast, today, we find ourselves preoccupied with the political correctness movement, which has as its goal the creation of a socially uniform herd that passes judgment on what it considers to be acceptable behavior for people of an entire nation. Within this movement, individualism and individual expression are not to be tolerated unless they conform to the standards proscribed by the herd. This movement should be of serious concern to all of us because, in the long run, it will be counterproductive to discovering what is true about ourselves and our world. It represents a risk-averse culture at its extreme.
Challenging authority or groupthink was fundamental to the founding of our nation. We are very fortunate to have a First Amendment, which protects an individual’s right to openly disagree with anyone or group no matter how large or powerful. It also protects the freedom of assembly and association. These individual rights are sacred and represent the basic building blocks of a free society. They empower people to explore what we do not know and challenge what we accept as conventional wisdom.
Without these rights, the processes of discovery in fields of science, engineering, mathematics, and invention would be severely compromised, and along with them, opportunities to create our future. It is through open disagreement and scrutiny, no matter how unpopular, that knowledge becomes reliable and of value to humankind. Our unique American environment has enabled human imagination and creativity to flourish through the freedoms provided by these individual rights, which enabled significant scientific, technological, and economic growth that our nation experienced in the 20th century and now, hopefully, will continue to partake in the 21st century.
Ratio of National Debt to Gross Domestic Product 1940-2019
It is not difficult to appreciate the vital role that unique things have played in the growth of our economy. It is human nature to seek out uniqueness along with the joy obtained from discovering it. We derive happiness from seeing, listening, tasting, touching, and owning unique things. As a nation creates more and more unique products and services for consumption, new industries and jobs are created as world demand for them grows. When these unique things are produced in quantity within a nation, tax revenues increase, which, if large enough, enable that nation to afford a government for its people. This strategy, in large part, is how our country reduced its national debt as a percentage of GDP. It went from 120 percent just after WWII to about 30 percent by 1980.
Before and just after WWII, our national culture was a very different one from what it is today. It was a culture that defeated Nazi oppression and saved American lives by putting an end to a terrible war with Japan through the extraordinary development of the first atomic bomb in just three years. It was a culture that was led in succession by four visionary Presidents: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. They understood that government investments were needed to rebuild our nation after the war and to prepare our nation for the rise of competition in the world, in particular, the threat of communism. This culture believed it could accomplish anything, including sending humans to the moon and returning them safely back to earth. Our nation accomplished this in just eight years, a feat never matched by any other country.
Nearly every technology we hold dear today is traceable to scientific discoveries and science-inspired inventions sponsored by governments and wealthy patrons, not just our own, over the last four centuries. Many of these unique inventions occurred during the first half of the 20th century and also during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This latter period was the golden age of science and technology, which produced an explosion of scientific discoveries and unique inventions that the world admired, copied, and continues to improve upon even to this day. The world benefited tremendously from the creation of the digital, communication, and biotechnology revolutions. This period also gave the world programmable high-speed computers, mobile wireless communications, the first demonstration of a robot-driven by artificial intelligence, the laser, the atomic clock that makes GPS possible, MRI, the chemical structure of DNA, the birth of genetic engineering, the internet, supercomputers, nuclear reactors, and many more discoveries and the many unique inventions inspired by them. These developments were the foundation for our economic future, which not only paid off for our nation but also the entire world. Just imagine what our economic growth would be today without investments in discovering what we did not know.
Back then, our federal government did what the private sector could not do or would not do. In contrast, today, our government looks to the private sector for leadership in creating our nation’s future. Government bureaucracies and politicians on Capitol Hill use private sector interests as a benchmark for the spending of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Our government even spends taxpayer dollars on what the private sector would do anyway, rather than fund the discovery of new knowledge at the frontiers of science, engineering, and mathematics that industry cannot do or will not do. Contrary to what some would like you to believe, the private sector is primarily about risk avoidance. As Leonardo da Vinci said: “He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.” The private sector fears losing what it values most: money!
Today, the private sector puts a very high premium on the efficient use of money to capture a rate of return on investment. To the private sector, the only truly good ideas are those that make money. Based upon this metric, you would come to the absurd conclusion that all progress in acquiring new knowledge about the natural world from the Italian Renaissance to today was a total waste of time and money.
You can see this aspect of our culture play out on the award-winning ABC television series Shark Tank. Here you have a group of business moguls with business models in their heads that listen to a five-minute business proposal. In the next five minutes, these moguls ask standard questions. Is the product unique and patented? Who are your competitors? What is your customer base, and how large is it, or could it be? How much in sales and profit have you already made and over what period? Why do you need the money, and how would you spend it? These are all questions designed to assess risk and the time over which an investor can expect a return on investment. Depending upon the risk assessment, certain constraints can be put on the money to be invested in ensuring that the investor can at least recover his or her original investment. This approach is not risk-taking, but a rather elaborate exercise in risk avoidance.
Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful, of the TV series Shark Tank
The leader of this group, “Mr. Wonderful”, played by the self-assertive Kevin O’Leary, prides himself on his astute business acumen. When entrepreneurs come to him with a concept that requires any amount of scientific and engineering research, he asks them when they arrived on this planet. He labels them “nutbar 2.0.” Based upon Mr. Wonderful’s minimal risk strategy, rather than enjoying the prosperity we have today, from investments made in the discovery of new knowledge by governments and wealthy patrons over many centuries, our standard of living would be more like that of the 18th century. The results of major technology revolutions, which we enjoy today, would not exist.
Wernher von Braun, one of the key NASA strategic thinkers for the US space program
What lies beneath this form of reality entertainment is a persistent tension between two relatively distinct cultures that have shaped the modern world. One has primarily focused on the pursuit of new knowledge about the natural world, which is an upstream activity in the sense that it has the potential to contribute over time to downstream economic growth. It is an inherently inefficient activity because understanding how nature works involves considerable guesswork. As the famous 20th century German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun once put it: “Research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” The other culture is one much more focused on the short-term, through the more predictable and efficient downstream exploitation of knowledge for monetary gain or realizing military capabilities to win a war.
However, there have been more risk-oriented private sector investment strategies in our history. Companies of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, especially some high-tech companies of that era, foresaw the need to expand the frontiers of science and engineering as a fundamental part of their business strategy to compete in the world. Companies of this era took advantage of the foundations of science and engineering primarily developed by the governments of the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. These powerful knowledge-based assets through education provided these companies with a workforce that was inspired by the frontiers of science and engineering.
Back then, knowledgeable individuals founded companies like Bell Telephone Laboratories, Texas Instruments, Xerox, Hewlett Packard, and Intel, and their leadership had a significant influence on the evolution of technology and specific areas of science and engineering research. These companies competed in high-quality research with the best institutions in the world. They encouraged risk-taking and exploration, which shaped their future and that of the world.
Consider, for example, Bell Telephone Laboratories, which was a science, engineering, and technology powerhouse. At one time, Bell was a company that considered science essential to maintaining its competitive edge in the world. At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier organization of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory that formed the basis of modern communications, the computer operating system Unix and computer programming languages C and C++. In total, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work conducted by extraordinary people at Bell Laboratories. One of these Nobel Prizes involved the most fundamental aspects of matter at an atomic scale, which demonstrated that electrons behave as waves similar to light waves. Another involved the detection of “the echo” from the Big Bang, the event that created our universe 14 billion years ago. This discovery has had profound effects on the way we explore and now understand our universe.
Many of these organizations are either nonexistent in their original form, like Bell, or have undergone considerable cultural change through the focus on quarterly returns measured in earnings per share. As a result, many research jobs within the private sector have been permanently lost over time. Because of this decline in job opportunities, our precious youth turn away from careers in science and engineering. This trend produces negative feedback into our science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational system, which ultimately limits the creation of opportunities for future economic growth
For those who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there has been a stark cultural transformation of our nation. We have gone from a country that took bold steps, led by visionary leaders, to a nation mostly concerned with the fear of failure. Rather than taking risks to figure out what we don’t know, we would rather revisit, repackage and incrementally improve on what we already know. We even talk about going to the moon again as a way of reviving our national spirit of risk-taking. This path to the future is not the way the modern world was created, nor the way the US became the world economic and military power after WWII.
As in the past, bold steps and risk-taking will lead to the development of unique products, which through increased aggregate demand, can pay back that investment many times over. Strategic government investments, like those after WWII, have been a key recurring pattern that enabled the creation of the modern world and also enabled the US to rise as the world military and economic power after WWII. Failure to address the risks associated with the current path we are on now will only make overcoming the mounting headwinds that much more difficult later.
We must not allow the short-term risk-averse priorities in the federal budget to prevent us from investing in our people, equipment, and facilities to create new opportunities through discovery for our future prosperity. We must begin to fix this very serious problem. In the final analysis, the key to addressing this issue is the need for strong dynamic leadership with a vision that can revive the risk-taking spirit of a nation that led the entire world into extraordinary economic growth and prosperity.
As long as we continue to wonder and invest in the human mind to unlock the truth behind the mysteries that surround us without preconceived notions as to what that truth is, there is great potential to improve the human condition. What we need is renewed faith in ourselves and our nation to achieve truly extraordinary things, and to create again a fearless culture of exploration into the unknown that future generations will admire and be inspired by, to continue this great adventure and experiment we call America.
Buzz Aldrin on the moon as photographed by Neil Armstrong, the first human to step on the moon
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
William Arthur Ward
The cause of the problem
We all want our children to live fulfilling lives. We want them to realize their dreams of a better future for themselves, their families, and our nation. However, to accomplish these goals, we must provide them with opportunities that can enable them to create their future. The key factor that will limit their ability to create their future is the severe decline in the quality of our K-12 education system, especially the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. This decline has affected the preparedness of our young people to adapt to a continuously changing and highly competitive world. By allowing this to happen over time, we have put their future and our nation’s future at significant risk.
The decline in our K-12 education system began in the early 1980s. The fundamental cause dates back to university policies that transformed the teaching of STEM courses to aspiring STEM teachers that had little connection to the traditional departments that teach these subjects. This transformation created separate courses such as physics for poets, chemistry for poets, biology for poets, etc., which did not include mathematics in the teaching of these subjects. If a teacher has not struggled with the conceptual problems in learning these subjects, it is virtually impossible to teach them to students effectively. How this training could be effective in inspiring and educating our youth in these fields is incomprehensible.
Our young people are not stupid. They sense when a teacher does not understand a subject and are uninspired by teachers who do not have a passion for the subjects they teach. Today, the majority of K-12 STEM teachers believe their responsibility is to provide students with information. This approach is not teaching. Today, many K-12 STEM teachers fulfill their lesson requirements by primarily reading from scripts. The proficiency of these teachers is so low that it would not take much to replace them with technology, which is a subject that I will return to later.
This transformation in the training of teachers increased university enrollments and, along with it, revenue, which satisfied administrators; however, it also dramatically increased the number of poorly trained STEM teachers. Over the decades, this form of training flooded our K-12 school system with incompetent teachers. Labor unions and school administrators now protect these teachers. Both university presidents and teacher unions have literally wasted our youth in the name of revenue and job security. There may have been good financial reasons to adopt these policies at the time, such as the need for increased revenues during an economic downturn. However, our nation is paying a considerable price in terms of a future workforce ill-equipped to compete in a highly competitive high-tech world.
Our nation led the digital, communication, and biotechnology revolutions. Yet, we lack enough qualified US citizens to compete for jobs in these industries. Ironically, we now have to import expertise to fill these jobs, which our government has enabled through special immigration programs. Such a strategy takes pressure off our K-12 education system to improve STEM education standards.
This circumstance affects our people over the long-term, especially in a world that puts increasing emphasis on STEM skills in numerous occupations. Unless this trend is abated, our education system will create a permanent underclass in our nation that will become increasingly dependent upon public assistance for their survival.
There is now a call by certain politicians to increase public school teacher salaries as if this is a solution to the poor quality of our K-12 education system. Such salary increases could indeed attract those who typically go into STEM-related industries; however, to be effective, the proficiency standards of STEM teachers would have to change significantly. This expedient salary approach to fixing this serious problem is a sinister way that politicians use taxpayer dollars to secure more votes by pandering to the public. These are the same politicians who protect incompetent teachers through their support of teacher unions instead of focusing their attention on protecting the future of our youth and our nation.
Basic facts and consequences
By far, the most important educational challenge we face as a nation is to realize a K-12 educational system that prepares our youth for the future. Our young people will have to be at least as creative and productive as those that will be retiring over the next several decades. Through the skills they develop, the new knowledge they acquire, and the talents they bring to our national enterprise, their future will be our nation’s future.
As obvious as this sounds, we are a nation that spends less time thinking, planning, and investing in our future, especially human potential that inevitably drives everything in our national enterprise. As the challenge of adequately preparing our youth becomes dire, people will focus more on quick fixes. Rather than pursue productive social pathways for themselves, our youth will find government subsistence a more attractive option. Such a path will inevitably result in a public that is no longer in control of their destiny but controlled instead by a massive government bureaucracy.
The list of educational reform proposals and policies for our K-12 system is quite long. Still, none address the fundamental problem of educating our youth in a rapidly evolving world that is increasingly dependent on mastering STEM subjects. It’s not a matter of everyone becoming a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. Science and technology are transforming everything we do through their incorporation into the numerous processes and services we use daily. Failing to keep up with the latest technology improvements could mean the end of a business or job. It could also mean failure to defend our nation against future threats. To meet the challenges of an uncertain future, we need a workforce that embraces science and technology instead of one that fears or avoids it.
Unfortunately, our culture has changed as a result of a series of decisions made over 50 years. As discussed earlier, some of this has to do with the systematic decline in federal government R&D spending as a percentage of GDP by 65 percent since 1965. Concurrently, research jobs in the private sector have largely disappeared. These trends have sent a message throughout our educational system that careers in advancing science and technology through research are not as important as they once were. Making matters worse, qualified STEM teachers are in short supply primarily because they are inadequately trained, and those who are knowledgeable in STEM fields can find better-paying jobs. Exacerbating this situation is a lack of strong dynamic leadership with a vision that can lead our educational system to adopt new standards and methods of teaching to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Until government policies and educational leadership change, there will be little, if any, progress in improving our K-12 education system.
There are about sixty million young people in K-12 education, with about 10 percent in private schools. The case is often made that private schools are less costly per student ompared to public schools. This claim is valid for religious-based private schools. For non-sectarian schools, the cost per student is more than twice that of other private and public schools. Even if private schools were superior educational institutions, not everyone wants to send their child to a religious school, and the vast number of American families cannot afford to send their children to non-sectarian private schools. Therefore, private schools are largely irrelevant to educating the vast majority of our precious youth.
Many complain that the federal government spends too much money on education. This claim was never true. Local governments have primarily supported education throughout US history. There have been short-term blips where the federal government increased education spending after WWII through the GI Bill and during the1960s with President Kennedy’s initiative to expand the accessibility of education to people from all walks of life. However, the federal government has generally been a minor player, while local and state governments have predominantly funded education.
Local governments have created disparities in the quality of education through local real estate taxes. If there is a reason for gross inequities in our educational system, this is it. Families that live in wealthier neighborhoods receive a better-quality education than those living in impoverished areas. It’s hard to imagine how a strategy like this is of benefit to the entire nation. Education is an investment in our youth, which benefits the whole nation and not just a local community. Just imagine improving the retention level of knowledge and skills of about sixty million young people across the nation by about 20-30 percent. That could have an enormous impact on our future through the sheer number of people and the magnitude of the improvement. Asking the federal government to solve this problem would be a big mistake because the House of Representatives is district-based, and the Senate is state-based. Also, having a highly educated public is more of a threat to politicians than a benefit. As I will discuss later, a more equitable approach to education for our youth can be achieved through technology.
There is the claim that the US spends more on education per student per year than any other nation. This claim depends on how this spending is compared across countries. For example, using a nation’s GDP as the comparative measure of education spending eliminates unstable foreign currency conversion rates to US dollars. It also represents the monetary value of all US goods and services produced, which is a measure of what we can afford to invest in education.
Comparing what we spend on all education as a percentage of our GDP, about 6.4 percent, to that of the 35 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), implies that we are tied for 5th place with Iceland while the United Kingdom is close behind us in 6th place. New Zealand, The Republic of Korea, Norway, and Israel spend more of their GDP on education. We are below the OECD average for K-12 but place first by substantial margins in post-secondary school education.
In terms of outcomes, if you look at US high school dropout rates from the 1960s to the present, there have been significant reductions across all racial and ethnic groups by about one third relative to their historical levels. Just looking at this alone, one might conclude that there has been significant progress.
However, according to our Nation’s Report Card, the proficiencies of K-12 students in subjects like civics, economics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, technology and engineering literacy, US history and writing are all in steady decline. There is no subject at any grade level, where the percent proficiency of students is 50% or more. Astonishingly, the proficiency percentages range from about 40% down to about 10%, depending on the subject and grade level. And instead of improving from lower to upper grades, the percentages systematically decline in all subjects. You can, of course, question the accuracy of these numbers, how they were measured, differences between schools, and deny that there is even a problem, but the overall trends from year to year should be of considerable concern. Some would call this a crisis in K-12 education.
We can gain further insight into this by examining the percentage of high school seniors who met college readiness benchmarks. In 2011, 52% did not meet reading levels. Only 45% were proficient in math and 30% in science. These numbers indicate a significant disconnect in readiness standards between our nation’s high schools and colleges and universities. You can see this in SAT scores over time as indicated in the figure to the left for all students with the exception of Asians. The State of California has decided to solve this problem by eliminating the exams all together. It’s hard to imagine how this helps anyone except those who are doing a very poor job in improving K-12 education. This situation has forced our colleges and universities into providing remedial education in high school subjects. It is not solely a consequence of high school standards, but also the teaching methods and the proficiency of the teachers that teach these subjects. This is irrefutable.
As further evidence, the percentage of students taught by teachers with no major and no certification in core subjects is quite shocking. They range from 30% in math, 61% and 66% in biology and physics, respectively, 79% in earth and space science. Rather large percentages of our youth are being educated by the uneducated. Given these circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine that such teachers fail to inspire confidence or enthusiasm in students that are learning these subjects. It should also be no surprise that less than 15 percent of the top-performing high school seniors major in STEM fields. At this rate, our nation will not meet the future demand for jobs in these fields. Ironically, this situation has required the U.S.to import talent to meet the shortfalls in qualified people for the high-tech sector.
In traveling around the world with about one and a half million miles to my total, once in a while you can get lucky. On a flight from Washington DC to San Diego, I managed to sit next to a former Secretary of Labor. After introducing myself, I mentioned the decline in US citizens going into STEM fields and whether the Labor Department was concerned. To my surprise, I was told there would be plenty of qualified people available through students coming to our nation from outside the US. As is typical, government agencies have narrowly defined policies that serve the purpose of promoting their existence rather than having a coordinated plan across the government that effectively addresses the systemic issues of a significant national problem.
This immigration policy accommodates a K-12 educational system that has failed. It is also creating a permanent underclass of unskilled workers in our nation. Furthermore, this trend will also create a national security risk because U.S. citizens in STEM fields are needed in critical defense areas that require high-level security clearances.
The future of our precious youth has, in effect, become expendable by incompetent teachers, teacher unions, and politicians. When you bring this up with the believers in the system, they simply blame the parents. As a result, we are now in the business of wasting human potential.
An inevitable solution to K-12 education
Solving this problem involves replacing the current system over time with a new paradigm of K-12 education. As typical, any person or organization attempting to change the current system will be confronted by fierce opposition. Any change to the classroom model of teaching, which dates back more than two thousand years to Ancient Greece, is unacceptable. However, absent a radical change in the current system, our future as a nation will very likely provide fewer opportunities for our youth to achieve a fulfilling life in our society.
To start along a path of change, imagine an ideal school for maximizing student performance. Through a carefully crafted selection process, this school would select from a diverse population of students those with comparable learning capabilities. Having students with comparable learning skills enables the training and learning process to be more efficient in maximizing student performance. In contrast, a standard classroom compels a teacher to teach to the middle of the student capability distribution. This conventional approach causes inefficiencies in maximizing student performance on either side of the middle of their learning capability. You lose the students that need more help and those that are more capable of learning become bored.
For such a school, teachers would be required to be proficient in the subjects they teach and have a demonstrated passion for teaching. The school would also have diversity in sports, music, the arts as well as community activities. Students at the appropriate age would be encouraged to participate in school governance to gain an appreciation of leadership. There would also be tests and competitions to measure and promote excellence. Naturally, there would be winners and losers. Through these standards and types of activities, such a school would develop students with strong character and intellectual, emotional, and social intelligence.
There are costly private schools that emulate such a model. Some would object that diversity is limited in such a model because it selects students of comparable learning capability. The problem is that there are inherent limitations of developing individual performance in a standard classroom versus being selective by teaching students of comparable learning capability to maximize their performance. Fortunately, technology can overcome these limitations through the development of human-specific learning and training.
Through the integration of several existing technologies, human-specific training and learning could be made accessible to anyone. This approach would enable each individual to maximize his or her performance at a rate specific to them. With steady advances in AI, machine learning, computer processing, and virtual reality environments, human-specific training and learning will improve. This approach to education would level the playing field by providing equal opportunity for all to obtain a decent education.
For several decades now, we have known that children have a natural affinity for computers and related information-based technologies. We also know that they enjoy single and multiplayer games. These provide risk and reward environments that challenge their skills, both physically and mentally. They are primarily rule-based and role-playing competitions with specific goals that, if achieved, can provide emotional rewards. Realistic graphics supported by a storyline with dynamic visualization can create emotionally exciting immersive environments that engage young people.
We know from Hollywood storytelling that movies that generate emotion are the most memorable. We can recall a movie and even scenes from just recognizing the musical score. We also know that intelligence and emotion are intertwined in the human brain through both behavioral and neurological studies. This fact opens up an opportunity to exploit Hollywood storytelling, realistic graphics, and gaming technology to create learning environments that increase retention through dynamic visualization of stories based on knowledge and communication using spoken language.
This approach requires the introduction of some new elements into traditional pedagogy. These elements involve the integration of Hollywood storytelling, realistic graphics, gaming technology, and critical subject matter concepts that would provide a stimulating and interactive learning and training environment. The system would have a software-driven director and intelligent tutor that assesses individual learning and training proficiency and, if necessary, adjusts the path to proficiency to match the specific individual. Natural language processing and dialog management between the student and the system would be used to enable real-time feedback. Cultural and age-specific differences could also be made a part of the learning and training experience. For STEM subjects, this would have to be supplemented by hands-on training by students conducting actual experiments along with data analysis, so they have a complete experience.
For example, about nineteen years ago, I was tasked by the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, to create a unique STEM competition for our nation that was specific to middle schools. The goal was to make this competition inclusive by engaging students from all backgrounds by focusing on subjects that middle school students thought were cool. In formulating this competition, surveys of seventh- and eighth-grade students and teachers were conducted at several representative schools across the nation to determine age-related student interests. Our work indicated that sports and recreation, environment, health and safety, and arts and entertainment were the dominant areas of interest for seventh and eighth graders. Of course, one might ask: “What do these interests have to do with STEM fields?” The answer is “everything” because STEM fields have played a significant role in creating and advancing these human activities.
This new competition, eCybermission, focused on these principal themes and has been tremendously successful over the last 18 years. Students from all social strata have participated in numerous small teams in all 50 States, US territories and possessions with projects in these four areas. One of these teams even received a national award from the President of the United States. From this competition we learned that age-specific interests could increase relevancy and encourage student interest in STEM subjects.
These features can all be a part of learning and training environments for academic subjects that come alive through virtual reality. Rather than reading about history or listening to it described in a classroom, it can be experienced through storytelling and visualization. Significant events in history, those who made history, battles won and lost, scientific, engineering and mathematics discoveries, and other subjects could all be visualized through a virtual reality environment with an emphasis on when it happened, how it happened, and the lessons learned. Instead of listening to abstract discussions of mathematics and physics in a classroom, these subjects can be presented through an adventure story with challenges that can be solved by employing subject matter rules and principles just like games young people enjoy playing today.
By exploiting artificial intelligence that learns, the training and learning environment can be made adaptive to the characteristics of the student. The system could dynamically adjust by providing alternative learning paths using a set of skill metrics to identify deficiencies during learning and training sessions. Using experts who understand the conceptual and process problems students typically have in these subjects, the learning and training environment can be designed to focus on overcoming these challenges with immediate reinforcement through inspiring messages that acknowledge progress. In this way, the persistence that young people exhibit in playing games can be utilized to win at learning and training.
This approach can be taken one step further through interactive assessments using natural language processing and dialog management, so the student can ask personal performance questions of the system, which can then provide recommendations on ways to improve on the educational experience. In essence, the system would have a built-in intelligent coach. The retention and mastery of a wide range of academic subjects will increase by making the experience of learning and training immersive, emotional, and human-specific. What is more, progress in learning and mastering a subject becomes a more focused and dynamic experience between the immersive environment and the student.
The only limitation to succeeding with this approach will be human imagination in realizing the types and nature of these environments. And the enormous customer base will drive down costs over time to make them affordable. What is more, technology will only improve with time, making the experience more entertaining, realistic, and enjoyable for learning and training.
To develop this system will require leadership that brings together those gifted and talented individuals representing the various disciplines needed to create these environments. Developing this is far from a simple task because of the diverse professional cultures involved and the balancing of inputs to accomplish the goal of creating an effective learning and training environment. However, there are no fundamental obstacles to achieving this.
Like most new ideas, the major obstacle will be the entrenched interests of the status quo. To achieve this will necessarily involve risk-taking and a willingness to oppose a failed educational system, which so many out of complacency depend on for their children. If we do not change our K-12 education system, we will continue to reduce social pathways to the future for our precious youth. Changing this is only a matter of recognizing the urgency, and that urgency is their future and the future of our nation.
We are all looking for an answer to the social disparities in our society. We tend to reduce the issue of racial inequality down to a single number, the percentage of people of some color. It’s simple, so we readily accept it. We then take out our hate of social injustice on police who are of all colors. They are at the end of a terrifying problem: violent crime. Those in law enforcement have to clean up the mess that has been caused by the policies of feckless politicians who have no shame in blaming them for protecting us all from serious crimes.
The truth is that through their ineffective policies, politicians have created a permanent underclass in our society. There are the poor that live in communities riddled with violent crime. There are about 16 million White Americans, 9 million Black Americans, 2 million Asian Americans, and 11 million Hispanic Americans that are poor. Is this inequality a result of racism? This notion makes no sense. To solve this serious societal problem, you cannot focus on one color because the problem is colorless, involving about 40 million human beings. They should all matter to us as caring and compassionate people. Not to do so is a social injustice to our nation’s poor.
If you believe that the greater percentage of African Americans in prison versus White Americans proves we are a racist nation, you still have to explain why there are other races and ethnic groups in prison. There are also more White Americans and Hispanic Americans than African Americans that are poor. By failing to explain these disparities, we have an incomplete and potentially dangerous misconception of what divides us as a nation. The consequences of this lack of understanding have had horrible effects on the destruction of lives and livelihoods, as we can see today. If you devalue the lives of the poor, then that is the way their lives will be treated.
It is a well-established fact that violence and crime are much more prevalent in poor communities. So, could it be that the conditions of poverty and the culture that goes along with it affect the occurrences of arrests and incarcerations? It is known that poverty and its culture are pathogenic. That culture is passed on from generation to generation independent of race. I saw it and experienced it growing up on the streets of the Bronx. This very serious life and death issue should bind us together as a society to do something about it. Instead, because of political opportunity to win votes and improving viewer ratings, this social divide persists and along with it increasing emotional strife.
Some may think this is just an attempt to explain away the deeply held belief that we are a racially divided nation, but you would be turning your back on a much bigger societal problem. Unfortunately, this labeling of racial prejudice has all been reduced to a prevailing narrative that hides what politicians and some in the media do not want to discuss. They do not talk about it because the real issue affects us all and future generations. By discussing it, politicians would lose votes, and the media would lose viewers. These people will exploit any story they can make up to serve their narcissism and lust for control of the way we must think. It all boils down to vested interests and protecting business models that rely on the flow of money. They make a living by getting us to hate each other.
There are common factors that cause social disparities in our nation. I can shed some light on this issue through the experiences of my family, who were immigrants to this country. It’s one of many only in America stories.
My father came to America from a small town outside of Naples, Italy. He was from an impoverished family. They were so poor that my father had his first pair of shoes when he was seven years old. Those shoes were given to him by nuns from a local church. He had a 3rd-grade education and could not read or write; however, as a young man, he learned how to grow flowers, plants, and make floral arrangements from his uncle. This skill would enable him to escape poverty when he came to America. However, that journey to America would involve many risks.
My father was full of ambition. When 21 years of age, he had a strong desire to establish a flower business in his town, but his uncle prevented him from the power he had in the local flower market at the time. So, at the age of 21, he decided to join the Italian Navy. That decision would completely change his life.
During 1928-1930, serving as a sailor on the Italian battleship Libya, my father circumnavigated the world several times. He spent most of his time in Asia, in particular Japan and China. However, he did visit America and many other countries in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. This experience gave him a sense of what the world had to offer. During my childhood, he would tell me many stories in his self-stylized broken English, which you could only understand if you spent time with him. He used words and phrases that, by conventional standards, were incomprehensible. Most people who listened to him thought he was illiterate and stupid. But behind this illiterate façade was someone with ambition and enormous imagination.
Shortly after his time with the Navy, he decided to join the Italian merchant marine because there were no opportunities for him to start a business in his town. He knew from experience that America was the land of opportunity, while Italy in 1930 was the land of fascism and oppression. The availability of opportunity was the key element to my father’s success in America, but it was not all that easy to find.
So, in 1930, he jumped ship and entered the U.S. through Canada as an illegal alien. He resided in the Bronx with a family he knew from his town and assumed their last name. The timing of this transition was far from optimal because of the Great Depression. He struggled, as did many others, during this period with little hope of making a living. I remember as a child finding polished horseshoes in our small apartment in the Bronx that he refurbished and sold as good luck charms.
My father was a very handsome man. He looked like Errol Flynn, the Hollywood actor famous for his role as Robin Hood. Using his good looks, he met a wealthy woman who loaned him some money to start a business. He started a dry goods business in an area of the Bronx called Arthur Avenue, where there was a vibrant Italian community. His small store was very successful, and like all such businesses, he had to pay the local Mafia protection money. If he didn’t, they would shut him down.
His progress came to an end when the U.S. entered WWII. I once found an arrest warrant for him in a shoebox. At the time of WWII, if you were an illegal alien in the U.S., you could be arrested for espionage. My father met with F.B.I. Agents in downtown Manhattan and he explained how he entered the U.S. They believed his story; however, he could only stay in the U.S. if he joined the armed services to support the war effort. My father had two weeks to comply, so he sold his business at a loss to serve in the U.S. Army. This commitment to defend America is how he became a U.S. citizen.
While serving in the U.S. Army, he was injured and given an honorable medical discharge. He never claimed a disability benefit because he felt that others with more severe injuries were much more deserving. Shortly after his discharge, he met my mother through the family he lived with when he came to America. Like my father, my mother was an immigrant to this country from Sicily. She came in 1905 at the age of one and a half years in her mother’s arms through Ellis Island. As a woman in a Sicilian family, she worked most of her life, giving what she earned to her family. She was a seamstress who worked in sub-standard sweatshops for menial wages and made clothing for the rest of her family. She managed to get a 6th-grade education that enabled her to read, write, and do arithmetic. This minimal education became a valuable factor in their lives. When she married my father, she did not even have a nickel to her name. All that she had earned went to her family.
The fact that my mother could read became essential to my father’s search for a job. She found a job listed in a News York newspaper at Judith Garden Flowers in downtown Manhattan. They were looking for a florist to design and produce flower arrangements. So, my father decided to go back to the skills he learned as a young man in Italy. This opportunity changed his life and my mother’s in ways that they could not imagine. He became a well-known Madison Avenue florist. So much so, that he became the personal florist to the Duke of Windsor, decorated the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor to Nicky Hilton, was a florist to many Hollywood Stars, and eventually decorated the White House for President Johnson’s inauguration. He even met President Johnson. Only in America could something like this happen.
Having lived through WWI, the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression, and WWII, I learned many things from my father. He often told me that if you have no money in America, people will spit on you. This statement captures the plight of the poor. I believe that the memory of being poor was always on his mind. I also think that this horrible memory compelled him to think of new ways to make a buck. My father also told me that without ambition, you could not succeed in life. As he said to me many times, I had a choice of either using my brain or my back. It was up to me. By watching my father make floral arrangements, and being involved in his numerous ideas, I learned the importance of having ideas. As an example, he once told me that he wanted to grow pink pineapples. When I asked him why he said everyone would want to one. He worked on this idea until he was 85 years old. Today it has been accomplished through genetic engineering. This passion for ideas stayed with me throughout my life.
While I was a good student in school and received a decent public school education that was available at that time, I grew up in the northeast Bronx, mainly during the 50s and 60s, when New York street gangs were prevalent. These gangs were a part of folklore passed on by those, like myself, who hung around street corners. Songs, like The Wanderer sung by Dion DiMucci, captured life on those streets through the words:
“Oh well, I roam from town to town I go through life without a care And I’m as happy as a clown I with my two fists of iron and I’m going nowhere“.
Unfortunately, I eventually became a part of this culture. I started with hope and aspirations like most kids, but over time this optimism decayed through self-doubt and the security offered up by a Bronx street gang. This decay eventually immersed me in violence and the dark side of growing up on the streets. My participation in a very serious crime put me in jail. This experience nearly destroyed my life. However, the tragedy of it ignited my spirit and courage to eventually transform my life to one of value to myself and others.
As fate would have it, I managed through redemption and hard work to escape from the streets of the Bronx. I attribute this to the unconditional love of my parents and an unrelenting personal desire to seek meaning in life. I eventually discovered a passion with the help of some teachers. Looking back, the pathway out of what anyone would call a total waste of life was fortuitous. Nevertheless, that path took me on a transformational journey to a doctoral degree in physics from MIT, which provided life-changing opportunities I could never have imagined growing up on the streets. If you were to tell me when I was 17 years old that I would accomplish this, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. Nevertheless, I managed to mentally move from street culture to a highly intellectual one, never feeling completely comfortable with the transition even to this day.
The main lesson from this short essay is that what divides us is the horrible gap between the “haves” and “have nots” and the terrible disparagement that goes along with being poor. It’s a systemic problem that has to do with our values. Without opportunities to create a better pathway through life and a decent education for their children, the poor live in a constant state of despair. Despair and boredom can lead to anger, and anger can lead to violence. We have seen this happen in many third world countries. If our weak and ineffectual politicians would have some courage, instead of pandering for votes, and our storytelling media would focus on facts that could matter in the lives of people, our nation could then concentrate on the challenge of overcoming impoverishment in this country. For example, try providing the youth of the poor with quality education, quality recreational activities that build character and civilized social camaraderie, and a belief in themselves and their God-given abilities. Try that for a start instead of trying to make us hate each other.
I am often reminded of the caring thoughts of John W. Gardner, who dedicated his life to public service, that capture the problem we have,
“We don’t even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead. That is why we must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change. That is why we must give them the critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.”
Politicians could never anticipate a situation like the devastating one caused by an invisible virus. They just do not have that much imagination. Nature, however, is full of surprises simply because of natural random processes that can create unique life forms, which can radically change the future of the entire world. In a sense, it is nature’s way of creative destruction. Changes like this can create unique circumstances for the politically minded to achieve goals that they could not accomplish under normal circumstances.
Looking for an opportunity, politicians are forever vigilant because seizing political power fulfills the needs of their narcissism and self-importance. The extreme left of the Democratic party may have been provided with an extraordinary opportunity to change American society forever with minimal effort. A virus, a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, has crippled our society in a way that is causing people to become desperate. Desperation can be measured by the persistent absence of toilet paper, paper towels, and food items that are not perishable. It’s almost like people are anticipating the apocalypse. Given such circumstances and the emotional vulnerabilities that follow, there may be much less for left-leaning Democrats to do to achieve their expansion of taxpayer-funded social programs. If there were ever a free political lunch, this gift from nature to the opportunists is more than they could have expected or anticipated in their lifetimes.
In their typical fashion, the liberal media is using what they call scientific truth (as if they understood what science means) to affect the minds of the public with doom and gloom scenarios and anecdotal evidence of the effects of the disease. The good news stories are rare, but this is business as usual. The public is being given an ultimatum: either stay home until the virus no longer kills anyone or challenge authority by going back to work with the possibility of infection and even worse death to themselves and others. No one objectively understands the correct balance that will save lives and livelihoods. Staying home creates the ideal circumstances for the general public to dig a deeper financial hole for themselves, which incentivizes the need for government subsistence programs. However, the outcome of this strategy is unlikely to restore the nation to normalcy, given the rapidly growing financial obstacles that continue to mount daily. Many jobs and businesses are likely to be permanently lost. At one extreme, Governor Gretchen Wittmer has an executive order that is supposed to keep the residents of Michigan at home until labor-day, with no specific plan to address the potential economic damage to the State and its people.
In November, there is the possibility that the economic situation may be so dire that once again, the American people will want the government to fix this type of problem as they decided in 2008. Expanding central government control of the short-term needs of people is the specialty of the Democrats. Meanwhile, President Trump and Congress have responded to the current circumstances by an unprecedented aid package that is consistent with the political goals of the progressive left. This aid package is enormous, more than 3 trillion dollars or 75% of the total annual federal budget, and of the type that Bernie Sanders and his followers have been anxious to implement for our nation. These policies are part of the liberal progressive narrative and playbook.
While the extreme left has been vocal about expanding government social programs, Nancy Pelosi has resisted their calls for a socialistic agenda for the Democratic party up until recently. That is changing because the circumstances make larger government subsistence packages more acceptable to the general public. She now thinks guaranteed monthly income is worthy of consideration, and she, her staff, and a small group of loyal Democrats have at warped speed jammed another enormous spending bill through the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill, dubiously called the Heroes Act, is filled with typical left-wing policies that, typically, would not be accepted by the public. They somehow expect people to believe that a small group of politicians who understand very little about how the world works could sensibly formulate the spending of $3 trillion in record time. It violates common sense. With help from a virus, this bill will likely seed the growth of socialism in America if passed by Congress and the President.
Currently, Joe Biden is also moving further to the left with proposals such as an expansion of Medicare and the elimination of student debt to help meet the goals of the far left of his party. They expect to provide voters with emotional comfort despite the deteriorating economic circumstances. Concurrently, the big blue States, especially New York, New Jersey, California, and Illinois, are contributing to this through their prolonged lockdowns. In this way, these States are likely to become more desperate, and their economic conditions more irreversible as inaction in opening up their economies takes its devastating financial toll. This evolving Democratic strategy may have a reasonable chance of succeeding in November.
Of course, the Democratic socialists will claim that this is all about saving people. However, the cause of all of this has nothing to do with socialism. It will just be another lie that is intended to hide a political agenda to change American society forever. In support of this goal, Biden and his loyal followers will likely move further to the left to capture Bernie supporters. This political opportunity is about crafting a strategy to seize political power and to change our nation radically. If this strategy succeeds, we can expect from many examples in history that we will go from a country with the potential to lead the world into a mediocre one. We will join the club of average nations. It will not be because the politics of socialism succeeded but rather because of an invisible virus set up the conditions for political opportunists to seize power so that America will never be great again.
These posts focus on the actual cause of economic growth, how government policy over the last half-century has reduced investment in it and discusses the serious consequences of this policy to the future of economic growth and prosperity for all.
In a society driven by capitalism, the notion of creating wealth from worthless things seems absurd. Is this even possible? The answer is yes. The truth in this statement is a consequence of the cause of economic growth, which has remained a mystery since the publication of Adam Smith’s landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
Something is missing in economic science
The mistake too many economists make is they associate anything that affects economic growth with the cause of growth. They build mathematical models using such causes so that they can make predictions of economic growth. To do this, they need causes that can be quantified in some way. However, suppose the actual cause cannot be quantified. What if the real cause has no commercial value, i.e., it’s worthless. The purpose of this essay is to convince you of this basic fact.
If we want to replicate the result of strong and sustained economic growth, powerful enough to change the world, we need to identify the actual cause. This discovery can create a beneficial cause and effect relationship that could enable prosperity to continue for future generations. To determine the exact cause, we need to question certain assumptions.
There are popular books, such as The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth by Robert Gordon, that presents a very bleak picture of future U.S. economic growth. Gordon’s observation is that since the 1970s, America has been practicing a form of incrementalism. He alleges that there are no unique inventions today, which have a consumption scale comparable to the historical examples of electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and modern communications. Gordon suggests that we are likely on a path to further economic decline and possibly stagnation. However, his work indicates that the development and application of technology created extraordinary economic growth and wealth over the last 200 years. So, is technology the cause of economic growth, or is there something before it that caused its creation?
Another popular book, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, argues that the traditional competitive advantage of knowledge and innovation is shrinking because of modern communications. Once someone has demonstrated something based on established knowledge, another person on the other side of the globe can rapidly imitate or reproduce it. Taken to its logical conclusion, this can eventually lead to a paradox where there will be no incentive to create anything because of the risk to the recovery of the original investment. Here, Friedman focuses on the process of innovation, which transforms inventions into technologies for various applications.; however, are inventions and the process of innovation the actual cause of economic growth, or is there something before them that caused their creation?
These books identify significant trends that may portend a future of limited economic growth; however, they fall far short of identifying the actual cause of economic growth.
Romer’s work provides a hint as to the cause of economic growth. He identifies the key driver of economic growth to be what the financial world refers to as intangible assets. More specifically, Romer identifies knowledge in the form of a critical commodity, intellectual property (IP), such as patents, mathematical algorithms represented in business processes, and knowledge derived from research and development. These IP assets enable businesses to run and grow through the education and training of people who exploit them, much like factory workers utilize production machinery. There are good reasons to believe in this idea because of the assessed worth of companies depends on intangible assets as indicated by the Standard and Poor’s Stock Index of 500 companies below. Intangible assets directly contribute to the sale price of businesses in the competitive marketplace.
The market value of companies today is largely determined by intangible assets.
Surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (USBEA), which keeps our nation’s financial books, since 2013 includes government and private sector intangible assets of various types in U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates. The assigned asset value is equal to the cost to produce them, which is basic bookkeeping. The USBEA has even revised U.S. GDP estimates back to 1929. However, this assignment of value, if taken too seriously, could cause one to conclude that the total monetary value of Newton’s Laws of Motion, his Law of Universal Gravitation and his creation of
Newton’s Principia contains intangible assets in the form of knowledge as to how the natural world works, which, through human imagination, has created great wealth in the world.
Calculus is equal to his salary at Trinity College. This, of course, would be absurd, however, this begs the question: What is the commercial value of Newton’s discoveries? Unlike IP, intangible assets of this type have no commercial value because they cannot be owned, replicated in quantity to be sold or modified to suit specific applications. However, their economic effects have been profoundly and substantially important to world economic growth over the last 200 years.
Typical descriptions of the cause of the rapid growth in the standard of living that started toward the end of the 18th century appear to be missing something. Did technology cause this growth as we typically learn in history class? Or were there human activities prior and after the start of the British Industrial Revolution that had no commercial value, which caused and sustained this extraordinary period of economic growth? Did something similar happen that transformed the U.S. into the major world economic and military power after WWII? What caused the chemical revolution, the development of heat engines, the electrification of the world, and the digital, communication, and biotechnology revolutions?
The missing piece of the puzzle
In my career leading technology organizations, I have experienced how strong economic performance depends on knowledge derived from research and development. I also understand how the true trailblazers that acquired great wealth depended on technology revolutions caused by the discovery of unique materials and new scientific, engineering, and mathematical knowledge. Like Newton’s Laws and his Calculus, these discoveries also have no commercial value, i.e., they are worthless things. However, it’s these assets that expand human imagination through education that inspire unique inventions. Inventions are then adapted over time through new materials and innovation to numerous technological applications. It’s the downstream business activities of the private sector that strive for efficiency in the production of products and services to make a profit while limiting their technical, financial, and market risks.
To establish discovery as the actual cause of economic growth, we need to go back in history to identify those things that inspired technology revolutions. Through the threading a set of unrelated events involving people in history who discovered unique materials and knowledge, we can establish recurring patterns. Then by connecting each thread to those things we hold dear today, we will have found the cause of technology revolutions. Such threads take the form of unpredictable recurring patterns in history. They account for wealth creation through technology revolutions during the British Industrial Revolution and how the U.S. became a world economic and military power after World War II. We owe the discovery of these intangible assets to investments in human curiosity by governments and wealthy patrons throughout human history.
As an example, consider the mysterious force of the ancient world, fire. The scientific explanation of this strange phenomenon as a chemical reaction occurred during the 18th century. This explanation gave birth to modern chemistry that provided the rules for chemical reactions, explained the relationship between the fundamental chemical elements and compounds, and eventually led to the discovery of the 98 natural elements of the Periodic Table. These rules had no commercial value.
As modern chemistry and chemical engineering evolved, many unique materials were discovered, created, and produced in mass quantities for worldwide consumption. Today there is an astounding number, more than 10 million known chemical compounds, or an increase of 20 million percent since 1800. New knowledge, an intangible asset, enabled the creation of the worldwide chemical industry worth over $4 trillion in revenue generated each year. A small investment in human curiosity by the French Government to understand the nature of fire led to an explosion of wealth through a technological revolution. The heat engine, electrification, communication, digital, and biotechnology revolutions were followed similar patterns in human history involving worthless things.
After World War II, U.S. government investment in research and development as a percentage of GDP increased by 200% up until about 1965. This investment expanded the frontiers of science, engineering, and mathematics, and expanded access to quality education for many while taking advantage of the accumulation of knowledge from earlier investments by other governments and wealthy patrons in history. We are still improving upon the results of that investment to this day. To put it in Wall Street terms: Investments
Research and Development funding as a percentage of GDP indicating the decline in Federal contribution of 65% from its peak.
by governments and wealthy patrons over centuries in the discovery of new knowledge about the natural world — i.e., worthless things — has been a tremendously successful strategy for world economic growth.
Despite this success, since around 1965, Federal investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP has declined by 65%. This decline has been a huge opportunity-loss for the American people to create their future, which has impacted economic growth.
One measure of trends in economic growth is the annual GDP growth rate. This rate, depicted below, has significantly declined over the last forty years. A simple inspection
United States GDP Annual Growth Rate from 1950 to the present.
of this graph reveals that from 1950 to 1980, the GDP growth rate exceeded 5% about twenty-times while after 1980 there were only two excursions above 5%. Just imagine that Federal R&D spending before 1980 and after WWII did not happen, and prior investments by other governments, especially those of Europe, also did not occur. The technologies revolutions we are living off today would not exist because they are all traceable to the discovery of new materials and new knowledge that was primarily funded by governments and wealthy patrons throughout history. To further economic growth, we must invest in the discovery of more worthless things. That is what history teaches us. However, economists are unlikely to accept this because this cause is not quantifiable.
Nevertheless, if policymakers and economists are looking for a fundamental cause for limited economic growth or, worse yet, stagnation, then they need to look into the origins of this decline and the potential consequences of it for the future of our nation.
I presented this talk at the MIT Physics Colloquium on September 5th, 2019, which concerns a critical human need, economic growth. It is, in large part, a brief description of some of human history, but not one we learn in history class. In this talk, I identify the cause of economic growth and how this cause created technology revolutions.
Such revolutions fueled extraordinary wealth creation and increased the standard of living by more than 3000 percent over the last 200 years. This same cause also enabled the U.S. to become a world economic and military power after World War II.
Unfortunately, over the last half-century, the role this cause has played in creating opportunities for economic growth has been reduced by 65% as a result of social and political forces, which have directly affected U.S. government funding policies.
This situation raises serious concerns about our ability to create our economic future. If you care about your children’s future, the future of their children, and the future of this great nation, then this talk will provide you with knowledge and a plan as to how we can ensure that prosperity for all can continue for future generations.
