Pew on Science

A new PEW study on America's state of Science standing in the national psyche is complete.

I find the study to be flawed and misreported in a number of ways. One section of the study asks respondents fairly pedestrian questions about science which Americans largely answer correctly and another section that asks so-called textbook questions. Unsurprisingly fewer respondents get the textbook questions correct. The commentary of the report implies that the textbook questions are "more complex science topics", a dubious characterization. One could argue that the textbook material is last century's idea of complex (nuclear age vs information technology questions).

In fact, the most profoundly disturbing aspect of this report is the utter lack of recognizing the importance of computing to science (a topic for another blog).

In Scientific American, the study is handed down without any critical thinking and that becomes an invitation to bash American public school science education.

Given that American science is still the envy of the rest of the world one has to wonder why Americans still accept and perpetuate the idea that American science education is in crisis.

As this blog has repeatedly pointed out, American business interests have used science and math bashing as a public relations ploy to pass legislation to exploit foreign workers at the expense of American workers.

The latest such insulting allegation came from a broadside from Vineet Nayar, a so-called respected CEO of yet another IT services outfit from India.

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn't hiring more people in his state. Vineet's short answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable." (In fairness to HCL, the company recently announced plans to open a delivery center in another state, North Carolina, and invest $3.2 million and hire more than 500 employees there over the next five years under a Job Development Investment Grant.)

Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.

As a result, Vineet said, most Americans are just too expensive to train--despite the Indian IT industry's reputation for having the most exhaustive boot camps in the world. To some extent, he said, students from other highly developed countries fall into the same rut.

In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships.

More broadly, Vineet echoed the concerns expressed by other CEOs, including SAS Institute's Jim Goodnight and Cisco's John Chambers, about the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce (a subject Goodnight and others will dive into at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, Sept. 13 to 15).

Beyond the need to bolster competencies in math, the hard sciences, and basic problem solving, U.S. schools at all levels must place a greater emphasis on global history, foreign languages, and other subjects that prepare students for jobs and life outside this country. How many grads of U.S. colleges are ready or even willing to work abroad? Vineet asked rhetorically. "We need to define the American dream to be more global in nature," he said.

The unholy alliance of corporate greed teamed with offshore job pirating firms has over-saturated the American democracy to the degree that American public education has been thrown under the bus along with the American worker.

With American science STILL, AS ALWAYS leading the world in innovation and progress, Americans continue to be denigrated, demeaned, and insulted by the corporate global job raiders.

The truth is that American students continue to shine in math and science at all educational levels and the proof is in the pudding. And American students continue to pursue the American dream of freedom, prosperity, and personal happiness with the same vigor of their forefathers. They have nothing to apologize for.

American workers have the right to earn decent wages in their own country from the fruit of their own ingenuity. It is not Americans who are out of line here, it is incivility of the those who lecture us instead of working to create self-sustaining opportunities in their own countries.

Education Doesn't Create Jobs

I've been reading a new voice in the national dialog about globalization. His name is Ralph Gomory and he has some very interesting theories about globalization and education's role in job productivity.

In an article in the Nation called The Establishment Rethinks Globalization by William Greider, Goromy's thoughts are explored.

"The situation today is that the companies have discovered that using modern technology they can do all that overseas and pay less for labor and then import product and services back into the United States. So what we're doing now is competing shovel to shovel. The people in many countries are being equipped with as good a shovel or backhoe as our people have. Very often we are helping them make the transition. We're making it person-to-person competition, which it never was before and which we cannot win. Because their people will be paid a third, a quarter of what our people are paid. And it's unreasonable to think you can educate our people so well that they can produce four times as much in the United States."

As this shift of productive assets progresses, the downward pressure on US wages will thus continue and intensify. Free-trade believers insist US workers can defend themselves by getting better educated, but Gomory suggests these believers simply don't understand the economics. "Better education can only help," he explains. "The question is where do you put your technology and knowledge and investment? These other countries understand that. They have understood the following divergence: What countries want and what companies want are different."

The implication is this: If nothing changes in how globalization currently works, Americans will be increasingly exposed to downward pressure on incomes and living standards. "Yes," says Gomory. "There are many ways to look at it, all of which reach the same conclusion."

I ask Gomory what he would say to those who believe this is a just outcome: Americans become less rich, others in the world become less poor. That might be "a reasonable personal choice," he agrees. "But that isn't what the people in this country are being told. No one has said to us: 'You're probably a little too rich and these other folks are a little too poor. Why don't we even it out?' Instead, what we usually hear is: 'It's going to be good for everyone. In the long run we're going to get richer with globalization.'"

Gomory and Baumol are elaborating a fundamental point sure to make many economists (and political leaders) sputter and choke. Contrary to dogma, the losses from trade are not confined to the "localized pain" felt by displaced workers who lose jobs and wages. In time, the accumulating loss of a country's productive base can injure the broader national interest--that is, everyone's economic well-being.

"Our objective," Baumol told a policy conference last summer, "is to show how outsourcing can indeed reduce the share of benefits of trade, not only for those who lose their jobs and suffer a direct reduction in wages but can wind up making the average American worse off than he or she would have been."

The conventional win-win assurances, they explain, are facile generalizations that ignore the complexity of the trading system--the myriad differences in country-to-country relationships and the vast realm of government actions and policy interventions designed to shape the outcomes. "Many of our 'dismal science' colleagues speak unguardedly as though they believe free trade cannot fail, no matter what," Baumol said.

Some nations, in other words, do indeed become "losers." Gomory fears the United States is now one of them--starting to go downhill. When he and Baumol wrote their book, they figured US trade relations with China and India produced "mutual gain" for both ends. The United States got cheaper goods, China and India got jobs and a start at industrialization. But the rapid improvements in those two nations during the past decade, Gomory thinks, are putting the United States in the bind where their gain becomes our loss.

Essentially, the terms of trade have changed as more and more value-added production has shifted from the United States to its poorer trading partners. America, he explains, becomes increasingly dependent, buying from abroad more and more of what its citizens consume and producing relatively less at home. US incomes stagnate as the high-wage jobs disappear and US exports become a smaller share of the world total.

The persistent offshoring of domestic production is leading to a perverse consequence: The United States finds itself paying more for imports. The production that originally moved offshore to get low-wage labor and cheaper goods is now claiming a larger and larger share of national income, as the growing trade deficits literally subtract from US domestic growth. "All the stuff you were already importing from them becomes more expensive," Gomory explains. "That's why you can start going downhill--because you pay more for what you were previously getting." Put another way, one hour of US work no longer buys as many hours of Chinese work as it once did. China can suppress its domestic wages to keep selling more of its stuff, but that does not alter the fundamental imbalance in productive strength.

The US predicament is vividly reflected in the nation's swollen trade deficits, now running at nearly 7 percent of GDP every year. The country consumes more than it produces. It borrows heavily from trading partners, led by China, to pay for its "excess" consumption. This allows America to dodge--temporarily--a reckoning with its weakened condition, that is, falling living standards. But that will eventually occur, when Americans are compelled to reduce their consumption and pay off the overdue bills. Postponement will deepen the ultimate injury because, meanwhile, the trading partners will gain greater industrial capabilities, while US productive strength weakens further.

Americans can choose to blame China or disloyal multinationals, but the problem is grounded in US politics. The solution can be found only in Washington. China and other developing nations are pursuing national self-interest and doing what the system allows. In a way, so are the US multinationals. "I want to stress it's a system problem," Gomory says. "The directors are doing the job they're sworn to do. It's a system that says the companies have to have a sole focus on maximizing profit."

Gomory's proposed solution would change two big things (and many lesser ones). First, the US government must intervene unilaterally to cap the nation's swollen trade deficit and force it to shrink until balanced trade is achieved with our trading partners. The mechanics for doing this are allowed under WTO rules, though the emergency action has never been invoked by a wealthy nation, much less the global system's putative leader. Capping US trade deficits would have wrenching consequences at home and abroad but could force other nations to consider reforms in how the trading system now functions. That could include international rights for workers, which Gomory favors.

Second, government must impose national policy direction on the behavior of US multinationals, directly influencing their investment decisions. Gomory thinks this can be done most effectively through the tax code. A reformed corporate income tax would penalize those firms that keep moving high-wage jobs and value-added production offshore while rewarding those that are investing in redeveloping the home country's economy.

US companies are not only free of national supervision but actively encouraged to offshore production by government policy and tax breaks. Other advanced economies have sophisticated national industrial policies, plus political and cultural pressures, that guide and discipline their multinationals, forcing them to adhere more closely to the national interest.

Neither of Gomory's fundamental policy reforms--balancing trade or imposing discipline on US multinationals--can work without the other. Both have to be done more or less at once. If the government taxed US multinational behavior without also capping imports, the firms would just head out the door. "That won't work," Gomory explains, "because you will say to the companies, 'This is how we're going to measure you.' And the corporations will say, 'Oh, no, you're not. I'm going overseas. I'm going to make my product over there and I'll send it back into the United States.' But if you insist on balanced trade, then the amount that's shipped in has to equal the amount that's shipped out by companies. If no companies do that, then nothing can be shipped in either. If you balance trade, you are going to develop internal companies that work the way you want." Public investment in new technologies and industries, I would add, may not achieve much either, if there is no guarantee that the companies will locate their new production in the United States.

Essentially, Gomory proposes to alter the profit incentives of US multinationals. If the government adds rules of behavior and enforces them through the tax code, companies will be compelled to seek profit in a different way--by adhering to the national interest and terms set by the US government. Other nations do this in various ways. Only the United States imagines the national interest doesn't require it.

In recent months Gomory and Leo Hindery of the Horizon Project have been calling on Congress with these big ideas and getting respectful audiences. The two met with some thirty Democratic senators and Congressional staffers from both parties. Senator Byron Dorgan, with co-sponsors like Sherrod Brown, Russell Feingold and even Hillary Clinton, has introduced several bills to confront the trade deficits.

Gomory's concept for multinational taxation is a tougher sell amid Washington lobbyists because it goes right to the bottom line of major US corporations. On the other hand, this proposal has stronger intuitive appeal for citizens, who reasonably ask why multinationals are allowed to undercut the national interest when they enjoy all the benefits of being "American" companies.

Hindery's group is advocating Congressional action to arrange a "national summit" on trade, where all these questions can be thrashed out. The political system has never really had an honest, open debate on globalization in the past thirty years. The dogmatic church of free trade--"free trade good, no trade bad"--wouldn't allow it. As more politicians grasp the meaning of Gomory's analysis, they should start demanding equal time for the heretics.

Gomory's vision of reformation actually goes beyond the trading system and America's economic deterioration. He wants to re-create an understanding of the corporation's obligations to society, the social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly extinct. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country, the employees and the people who use the product. "That attitude was the attitude I grew up on in IBM," Gomory explains. "That's the way we thought--good for the country, good for the people, good for the shareholders--and I hope we will get back to it.... We should measure corporations by their impact on all their constituencies.

The State of American Software Employees

President Bush has recently echoed Greenspan's sentiments that the free market must have exceptions with one of them being that software developers, architects and engineers in this country must be constrained from making a fair market wage.

Here's ComputerWorld's coverage of Round 2: H-1B Battle: American engineers vs. President Bush! by Dino Perrotti.

It hurts to get slapped across the face by the most powerful man in the world, but American engineers are not down and out yet. At the very opening moment of round 2, President Bush comes out swinging; knocking down any argument American engineers and other high-skilled professionals might have against H-1B immigration laws.

The president fired the first salvo in the 2007 H-1B Battle, telling selected employees of Dupont that he feels strongly that America needs to raise the cap on H-1Bs. Here is the exact excerpt:


...As an aside, when I talked about the immigration bill last night, I also want you to know I understand that we need to make sure that when a smart person from overseas wants to come and work in DuPont, it's in our interests to allow him or her to do so. We've got to expand what's called H1B visas. I know the Senator and the Congressman understand that. I'm looking forward with Congress to do just that. It makes no sense, by the way -- I know, I'm getting off topic here -- (laughter) -- but I feel strongly about what I'm telling you. It makes no sense to say to a young scientist from India, you can't come to America to help this company develop technologies that help us deal with our problems. So we've got to change that, as well, change that mind set in Washington, D.C. I know we can work together on that.

The article goes on to warn students and citizens of what is at stake.

So far the conversation has been controlled by studies paid for by special interest groups representing technology companies.

What affects the engineers of today, affects the engineers of tomorrow. Today, American students who yearn to learn mathematics and science are discouraged to do so. Why should anyone study so hard for a career that is in dire jeopardy?

Over the last several years, university engineering enrollment has plummeted as engineering opportunities have dissipated. Anyone who feels that their children should be encouraged to study math and science should voice their concern over this issue.

There are also serious national security concerns. It is widely known that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are attempting to use loopholes in our immigration laws to slip in those who wish to do harm to our country. Mohamed Atta was here on a student visa. It does not take a writer from "24" to imagine how much damage engineers sponsored by terrorist organizations can do to this country. Most applicants are rubber-stamped completely by USCIS, and tracking over 900,000 visas is nearly impossible for Homeland Security. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), the outgoing chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security has raised serious concerns over the program. It's worth noting that nuclear bombs are created by nuclear engineers, biological weapons are created by biology and chemical engineers, triggering mechanisms are designed by electrical engineers, hacking is performed by software engineers, and methods used to demolish buildings are developed by civil engineers. If all of this seems too overwhelming, take heed, there is something the average citizen can do.

Most Americans are getting tired of watching our beloved democracy become a plutocracy and they are doing something about it, voting.

VOTE!

Voting is the most powerful tool that Americans have to influence politicians. For the last decade or so, getting votes meant raising campaign contributions. With those funds, politicians advertised themselves in the media (television, print, and billboards), the same as a breakfast cereal would be. So the more money they got, the more commercials they would play and the more votes they would get and so on. Through campaign contributions and soft money, corporate America slowly took control of American politics to the detriment of U.S. citizens. Once our representatives realize that their constituents feel strongly about the H-1B issue, they will begin to discuss the program openly and honestly on the floor and in committees. All that engineers can ask for is a fair fight.

Disclaimer: H-1B's best and brightest

When used properly H-1B visas can be very good for America. Americans are pro-immigration as long as they do not face massive layoffs as a result. At the beginning of the H-1B program, the engineers who came here were extremely bright, pro-American, and wanted to become assimilated citizens. The H-1B program is considered a guest-worker program but every visa holder wanted to become a full citizen if possible. These were mostly engineers with Masters degrees and Ph.D.s, many of whom have spent years teaching at American universities. They were welcomed and appreciated.

Currently, there are over 900,000 H-1B visa holders in the United States, the majority of whom are fresh B.S.E.E. graduates with average technical skills, and some with extremely below average social skills. It is in our best interest to accept those with advanced degrees such as Masters and Ph.D.s, those who've graduated at the top of their undergraduate classes and those who've demonstrated an ability to assimilate into American society. If this was the case, the current cap of 85,000 per year may even be difficult to reach.

This fight is NOT between American engineers and H-1B engineers. Tech companies have abused American engineers by replacing them with H-1B engineers, but they have also abused the very same H-1B visa holders. H-1Bs are paid less, asked to work free overtime, cannot easily change jobs, and have the constant Damoclean Sword of deportation if they get fired. In addition, law firms and job shops such as Wipro take large portions of their salary for doing paperwork. Plus there are many other visa loops they and their families have to jump through just to stay in America. With proper H-1B reform, the quality of life for H-1B holders should dramatically improve.

Scorecard

In case you're keeping score, Round 1 was won by the engineers and the middle-class when an increase to the H-1B cap was averted in the last moments of the 2006 session of congress. It was a hollow victory, however, because it turned out that the cap was not enforced for the last 2 years anyway, which effectively increased the cap by an additional 75,000 visas. In layman's terms, they won the round but the judges ruled against them.

Round 2 was easily won by the tech companies. Regardless of what Lou Dobbs exposes, the President has the ultimate pen-power of signing the immigration reform bill into law. If engineers cannot convince the president to change his views, all may be lost. There is little evidence of the President ever changing his mind, but members of Congress who are concerned about the next election, may take a closer look at it. So it's still anybody's battle to win.

If any of you give the slightest care about this country you will write your House representative to reject any riders attached to the bill calling for an increase in the minimum wage. Today a Kennedy/McCain rider is attached to a Senate bill that will open the floodgates to a new tsunami of cheap imported labor.

It won't stop until you tell them we've all had enough.

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