The US May Have Already Lost Its Edge In Science And Technology

The US is fast losing its edge in science and needs urgent, extensive efforts to strengthen its scientific competitiveness, according to a recent New York Times report on warnings from a top congressional advisory panel. The panel recently reported that countries like China and India are emerging as real hi-tech centers that can challenge the US hegemony in the fields of science and technology

Unlike present-day America, these developing nations have plans, goals, and talent. There's a strong value of creativity, and local governments directly and indirectly help finance technological activity and companies. Capital is available for technology and there are hundreds of good foreign schools filled with bright eager students to develop these new technologies.

"Thanks to globalization," the panel's report said, "workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in China, India, Ireland, Finland or dozens of other nations whose economies are growing."

Panel members estimated the cost of new recommendations to maintain a critical dominant position in science and technology at $10 billion a year. Without such improvements, the US will be simply unequipped and unprepared to compete.

The panel offered startling indicators of why decisive action is needed now, including:

• Last year chemical companies shuttered 70 facilities in the US and have tagged 40 more for closure.
  
• For the cost of one chemist or one engineer in the United States, a company can hire about five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India.
  
• US 12th-graders rank below the international average for 21 countries in mathematics and science. No other country scored below the US in an advanced mathematics assessment administered to students in 15 other countries. Eleven countries outperformed the United States, and four scored similarly.
  
• In 1999 only 41 per cent of US eighth-graders had a math teacher who had majored in mathematics at the undergraduate or graduate level or studied the subject for teacher certification compared to the international average of 71 per cent.
  
• Last year more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China. In India, the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.

In 2001 US industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development "America must act now to preserve its strategic and economic security by capitalizing on its knowledge-based resources, particularly in science and technology, and maintaining the most fertile environment for new and revitalized industries that create well-paying jobs,". This must be accomplished soon or we must resign ourselves into becoming a weaker nation with a much lower living standard.

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