Engineering & The Book Beat
Question #3
Friedman says business leaders have caught on, but our political elite don’t yet get it. While most leading US companies are responding rapidly, our government — folks in Washington — don’t understand technology and haven’t connected it to national economies. Do you think the Administration understands what’s happening?
Perhaps they do. But, they have chosen not to make it a top-tier priority. This scenario is reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative. It went only partially fulfilled due to the Vietnam War. Similarly, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars as well as emotional energy in Iraq. Countries that are progressing in leaps and bounds are largely those that have strong governmental support. Their governments have made technological advancement a mission. We need the administration to identify this as a mission and provide the leadership to see it through. The “Mission to Mars” is an attempt to do that, but again it isn’t far-reaching enough and it is undermined by the current foreign policy.
Business leaders do get it. They have to get it or else they are out of the job. Technology is moving faster and faster, but we have not yet connected to our nation’s economies. There are really 4 or 5 regions in the United States whose local economies are fostered by the technology sector. One of these is the DC metro area and the prime reason for this is because of the federal government. The government bureaucracy realizes the importance of technology and how it can make their jobs more efficient. However the disconnect between the government bureaucracy and the administration is apparent. One can just look at the bumbling in Katrina and Iraq to see this. Technology that our government has access to would have helped in both instances. There will not be a Sputnik moment until our nation realizes that we are losing space to China or that we are in another deep recession/depression because of the lack of opportunity for the average citizen.
Some Members of Congress understand what is happening, but they face so many competing pressures for their time and energy that the issue never quite rises to the top of the list. However, this situation is better than the level of understanding in the Bush Administration, where the only people who understand these phenomena sit far outside the sphere of influence in which policy is made. Career government employees with experience and knowledge in science policy—from agencies like the EPA, NIH, USGS, NOAA, Energy, FDA, to name a few—are leaving their jobs in droves because they are so frustrated with the policies implemented by political appointees from the White House. They report, in strikingly similar terms, that facts, evidence, and research mean less than political advantage and ideology in policy areas with any scientific content.
So, of course we should make science and engineering a priority in federal research and education funding. The Sputnik moment might never come again in the way it did in 1957; instead, it’s likely to be a steady, slow slide into mediocrity.
I think most American political leaders know about the “quiet crisis” as described in the book, but cannot change what they want in a timely fashion due to legislative difficulties or lack of funding. From my limited experience with public education’s administrative side, it seems to be a rather clunky beast. Enacting change in curricula to reflect more science and technology study is very difficult because it varies widely from state to state and administrators must plow through lots of red tape in order to get anything done. Funding is also an issue. To hook students on science and technology at the K12 level, teachers need higher levels of training and more hi-tech supplies than they currently have, both of which require much more funding.