At a party recently, I got to talking books with a client from Cook Critical Care. I recommended Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. He recommended Juan Enriquez’s As the Future Catches You. Follow-up guys that we are, we sent our recommendations to each other.
Last week, I read Enriquez. It’s about the economic and political impact of science and technology—genomics, nanotechnology, etc. Nations that invest in the brainpower necessary to advance this stuff soar. Those that don’t languish or die.
Pink sings from a similar hymnal. If work can be done by a machine or by following a set of rules, it will get done cheaper elsewhere. So to prosper, we must invest in the brainpower necessary to lead conceptually.
And how go our investments in things scientific? Consider medicine:
As I finished Enriquez, Congress had to override a presidential veto to avert drastic cuts in Medicare reimbursements to America’s physicians. And graduates of the Indiana University School of Medicine were carrying an average debt load of $120,000. And U.S. spending for medical research via the National Institutes of Health had declined for five straight years.
And people wonder why our economy lags, why our kids aren’t keeping pace in the global classroom, and why we risk losing our scientific, medical and technological edge?
It ain’t rocket science.
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As a state, we’re spending somewhere around $8,000 per pupil to educate kids. That means my husband’s classroom spends about $216,000 per year to educate 27 kindergarteners. How much of that money is actually used to engage and excite kids about learning, and how much is wasted? Ask any teacher, about redundant administrators, about the money spent to count silly things and file endless reports on the findings, about high-tech equipment that sits unused because the budget didn’t consider the cost of software to run it, about boxes of “educational materials” that teachers don’t want and don’t use, and on and on. We spend plenty of money on education–we just don’t spend it on the right things. I’d like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or T. Boone Pickens to take a look at school corporations and trim the fat, diverting wasted money to actual teaching. Then we’d see some real results.
I agree whole-heartedly, Liz. This recent TIME Magazine article about the lack of faith in Congress hits the nail on the head when it says:
“There’s a reason roughly half the people who write the laws have law degrees. But surely there’s value in having some teachers as legislators when No Child Left Behind is on the table, or some doctors and nurses on the committees dissecting health-care proposals.”
It’s time to throw out the bums. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1823944,00.html
Were it that simple.
While I’ll agree on certain expenditures in schooling being redundant, we also have been spending less on infrastructure, and letting new assets to be built in outlying areas while older areas suffer. The bedroom communities of Central Indiana have been the biggest spenders, following the growth of the ‘good places to raise children’ (read away from crime and even people of color).
Bill Gates’ Microsoft has had over 100 successful charges brought against it in the US, not to mention the world across– with many still pending. T Boone Pickens helped finance the onerous Swift Boat campaign. These are leaders? No. Educational institutions aren’t for-profit corporations, and these two individuals have dubious accomplishments at best. A fat wallet isn’t an indicator of success, rather success measured in one of many ways counts income.
Another question that bears asking is if we have to be strictly based on innovation and intellectual property as a nation in our economic endeavors? Whatever happened to good old hard work? Our ancestors were farmers, drained swamps, built cities brick by brick, worked in factories, dairies, government, and so on. The number of actual innovators were few. We just needed a few, and regular stakes in new markets.
Now we export the labor of manufacturing overseas and south/north of our borders in a terminal quest to please Wall Street, rather than look after the families next door, and their children’s future occupation.
Research is still another topic. Can it yield productive business models? Take Cook as an example; great research, company built, long term yields. How much are we as Hoosiers paying Indiana and Purdue University to finance the research projects that yield dollars that go outside Indiana, and to what benefit?
Each of Indiana’s universities have done well in this area, although the actual asset return to Indiana isn’t well documented. What of the old Indiana Corporation for Science and Technology that became Indiana Business and Modernization Technology Corporation? Del Schuh, its second leader, died recently. Where are the economic development dollars, other than tax dollars dropped like rock whenever someone wants to move into Indiana, or from even one county to another? It’s sleazy at best as we as taxpayers don’t get to choose which companies we want to invest in by this remission of tax obligation from new, moving, or expanding companies.
The answers aren’t easy and they’re not obvious. Innovation and entrepreneurship can lead to great companies that contribute to shareholders, workers, and the communities where they live over a long term. We have a habit of developing them, and then selling them outside of Indiana. We have excellent and horrible examples all around us. Instead, I believe it’s time to mentor children and young adults to think for themselves, and expose the realities of the economic infrastructure where we live so that they can not only navigate in it, but thrive and innovate within it.