America Must Work Harder for Homegrown Talent
The U.S. can no longer import its way out of its talent problems: To thrive in the knowledge economy, it must do more to discover and nurture its low-income, high-ability students.
More, please.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In 1943, Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Harvard University declaring that “the empires of the future are empires of the mind.” The America of the time hardly needed a British statesman, however great, to teach it this lesson: The U.S. postwar establishment duly consolidated and extended its position as the world’s leading knowledge economy, doing everything it could to attract the best minds from across the world. The result was a golden age of innovation-driven growth and global supremacy.
Yet today America is in danger of forgetting all about “empires of the mind.” As I wrote in the first part of this series, America faces a talent recession caused by a demographic squeeze and a concatenation of other internal and external factors. China is pulling ahead in many of the cleverest technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Competition from its peers and the emerging world means that Uncle Sam is no longer guaranteed the pick of the world’s brains. America’s education system is becoming stratified by income rather than talent. All this is happening as elite talent becomes even more important to commercial and military success.