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CaseCompetitiveness Advantage1NC – CompetitivenessSquo Solves –1. No STEM worker shortage – 6.8 million STEM degree holders without STEM jobs, slow wage growthCamarota and Zeigler 14 - Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS),doctorate degree from the University of Virginia in public policy analysis, Karen Zeigler, Demographer for the Center for Immigration Studies, Master’s in Justice, Law, and Crime Policy from George Mason University (Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?" , Center for Immigration Studies, 5-19-2014, Available Online from https://cis.org/There-STEM-Worker-Shortage, Accessed on 7-17-2017 by JS) While employers argue that there are not enough workers with technical skills, most prior research has found little evidence that such workers are in short supply. This report uses the latest Census Bureau data available to examine the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Consistent with other research, the findings show that the country has more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data indicate there is no shortage of STEM workers in the United States. Using the most common definition of STEM jobs, total STEM employment in 2012 was 5.3 million workers (immigrant and native), but there are 12.1 million STEM degree holders (immigrant and native). Only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree holding a job actually work in a STEM occupation. There are more than five million native-born Americans with STEM undergraduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations: 1.5 million with engineering degrees, half a million with technology degrees, 400,000 with math degrees, and 2.6 million with science degrees. An additional 1.2 million natives with STEM degrees are not working — unemployed or out of the labor force in 2012. Despite the economic downturn, Census Bureau data show that, between 2007 and 2012, about 700,000 new immigrants who have STEM degrees were allowed to settle in the country, yet at the same time, total STEM employment grew by only about 500,000. Of these new immigrants with STEM degrees, only a little more than a third took a STEM job and about the same share took a non-STEM job. The rest were not working in 2012. Overall, less than half of immigrants with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs. In particular, just 23 percent of all immigrants with engineering degrees work as engineers. In total, 1.6 million immigrants with STEM degrees worked outside of a STEM field and 563,000 were not working. The supply of STEM workers is not just limited to those with STEM degrees. Nearly one-third of the nation's STEM workers do not have an undergraduate STEM degree. Wage trends are one of the best measures of labor demand. If STEM workers are in short supply, wages should be increasing rapidly. But wage data from multiple sources show little growth over the last 12 years. Real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7 percent a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less — 0.4 percent a year. Wage growth is very modest for most subcategories of engineers and technology workers. 2. No STEM gap—females account for 50% of people in STEM alreadyCummins 15—Denise, research psychologist, author and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, 4-17-2015, "Why the STEM gender gap is overblown," PBS News Hour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/, accessed 7/28, JMB Men do not outnumber women in all STEM fields Gender equity in STEM means that females account for 50 percent of the individuals involved in STEM fields. When we look at the percentage of STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded to female students for the last two decades, based on NSF statistics, we find that there is no gender difference in the biosciences, the social sciences, or mathematics, and not much of a difference in the physical sciences. The only STEM fields in which men genuinely outnumber women are computer science and engineering. I created the following graphs, based on NSF data, to show women’s completion of bachelor’s degrees and PhDs in specific fields between 1991 and 2010. At the Ph.D. level, women have clearly achieved equity in the biosciences and social sciences, are nearly there (40 percent) in mathematics and the physical sciences, and are “over-represented” in psychology (78 percent). Again, the only fields in which men greatly outnumber women are computer science and engineering. When we look at the actual workforce, we see the same pattern. Women are as likely as men to be biological scientists, medical scientists and chemists. They are much less likely than men to be computer scientists, but have achieved equity in three out of five areas, with computer science and geoscience being exceptions. 2. Women and men are equally capable of doing STEM work One explanation for sex difference in STEM fields is that women just don’t have what it takes to succeed in the “hard” sciences, computer science, or engineering. Some have even argued that women are not smart enough for these fields. The fact is that men and women score equivalently on tests of raw IQ, with some studies showing women scoring slightly higher. When it comes to mathematics—a core requirement for science and engineering—women score on average only 32 points lower than men on the SAT— a mere 3 percent difference. While men outnumber women in the “genius” SAT math score range (700-800), the ratio is not that large (1.6 to 1). Men show only an insignificant five-point advantage over women on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Examination, and they score one point lower than women on the analytic section. It is also not the case that more undergraduate men than women are selected by top engineering programs. Of the top STEM programs in the country, most have male-to-female undergraduate student ratios close to 1:1. 3. Sex-linked interest preferences are not mere artifacts of socialization One interpretation of the sex difference in STEM careers (and the workforce in general) is that females are pressured into areas that are more “gender appropriate,” not that they are choosing to study what is intrinsically more interesting to them. For example, former American Association of University Women senior researcher Andresse St. Rose, one of the authors of ”Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” puts it this way: Another common but somewhat misguided explanation for female underrepresentation in STEM is that while girls and young women may be just as able as young men, they are not as interested in science and engineering. From early adolescence, girls report less interest in math and science careers than boys do (Turner et al. 2008), and among children identified as mathematically precocious, girls were less likely than boys to pursue STEM careers as adults (Lubinski and Benbow 2006). Girls’ lower reported interest in STEM may be partially explained by social attitudes and beliefs about whether it is appropriate for girls to pursue these subjects and careers. The problem with this “blank slate” interpretation of gender differences is that it doesn’t jibe with results of developmental studies. Newborn girls prefer to look at faces while newborn boys prefer to look at mechanical stimuli (such as mobiles). When it comes to toys, a consistent finding is that boys (and juvenile male monkeys) strongly prefer to play with mechanical toys over plush toys or dolls, while girls (and female juvenile monkeys) show equivalent interest in the two. (See this for summary of this research.) These sex-linked preferences emerge in human development long before any significant socialization can have taken place. And they exist in juvenile non-human primates that are not exposed to human gender-specific socialization efforts. It is not difficult to see how such early emerging preferences can end up shaping career choices later on: Women tend to gravitate toward fields that focus on living things and agents, men to fields that focus on objects. 4. Different preferences don’t mean women’s are less important The hidden assumption underlying the push to eliminate gender gaps in traditionally male-dominated fields is that such fields are intrinsically more important and more valuable to society than fields that traditionally appeal to women. The hidden assumption underlying the push to eliminate gender gaps in traditionally male-dominated fields is that such fields are intrinsically more important and more valuable to society than fields that traditionally appeal to women. So we must turn women into men so that women can achieve economic parity with men. As Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg put it in her book “Lean In,” we need to set a goal of getting more women “in the door” of male-dominated, prestigious, and high-paying fields, even if doing so requires that women act more like men. But what happens when women follow this advice and follow the “lure” of prestige and wealth offered by male-dominated professions? Kate Bahn, an economics Ph.D. candidate at the New School, put it this way in her blog The Lady Economist: 3. US Innovation high in the Status quo - smarter management of complex systems, sophisticated data analytics, and automationVictor and Yanosek 17 (David Victor Co-Chair - Foreign Policy, Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings institution, Kassia Associate Partner, Global Energy and Materials practice - McKinsey & Company, “The next energy revolution: The promise and peril of high-tech innovation”, Brookings Institute, 6/13/2017, Online: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2017/06/13/the-next-energy-revolution-the-promise-and-peril-of-high-tech-innovation/, 7/11, DTS) The technology revolution has transformed one industry after another, from retail to manufacturing to transportation. Its most far-reaching effects, however, may be playing out in the unlikeliest of places: the traditional industries of oil, gas, and electricity. Over the past decade, innovation has upended the energy industry. First came the shale revolution. Starting around 2005, companies began to unlock massive new supplies of natural gas, and then oil, from shale basins, thanks to two new technologies: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). Engineers worked out how to drill shafts vertically and then turn their drills sideways to travel along a shale seam; they then blasted the shale with high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals to pry open the rock and allow the hydrocarbons to flow. These technologies have helped drive oil prices down from an all-time high of $145 per barrel in July 2008 to less than a third of that today, and supply has become much more responsive to market conditions, undercutting the ability of OPEC, a group of the world’s major oil-exporting nations, to influence global oil prices. That was just the beginning. Today, smarter management of complex systems, data analytics, and automation are remaking the industry once again, boosting the productivity and flexibility of energy companies. These changes have begun to transform not only the industries that produce commodities such as oil and gas but also the ways in which companies generate and deliver electric power. A new electricity industry is emerging—one that is more decentralized and consumer-friendly, and able to integrate many different sources of power into highly reliable power grids. In the coming years, these trends are likely to keep energy cheap and plentiful, responsive to market conditions, and more efficient than ever. But this transition will not be straightforward. It could destabilize countries whose economies depend on revenue from traditional energy sources, such as Russia, the big producers of the Persian Gulf, and Venezuela. It could hurt lower-skilled workers, whose jobs are vulnerable to automation. And cheap fossil fuels will make it harder to achieve the deep cuts in emissions needed to halt global warming. GET SMART There are three trends driving the new energy revolution: smarter management of complex systems, more sophisticated data analytics, and automation. The first trend has allowed companies to become much more efficient while drilling for oil and gas in ever more complex geological environments. Beginning around 15 years ago, for example, advances in imaging technology made it easier for companies to find oil deposits in deep waters, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Brazil. But as oil and gas companies rushed to recover these resources, the technological demands of operating in deep waters and through thick layers of sediment and bedrock drove up costs. By 2014, new deep-water projects were so costly that many broke even only when the price of oil was at almost $100 per barrel. As the price of oil tumbled from above $100 per barrel in early 2014 to below $50 per barrel in January 2015, many of these projects stalled. By early 2016, companies had put on hold an estimated four million barrels per day of new oil output, 40 percent of it from deep-water sources. As drilling stalled, oil and gas operators, desperate to cut costs, began to rethink the complex systems they used. Some savings were easy to find: reduced activity meant that critical equipment and services, once scarce, now sat idle. The daily cost of renting an oil rig, for example, fell by half. But the industry is also cutting costs and improving performance through fundamental productivity improvements. Simpler, standardized designs make drilling and production platforms easier to replicate, less expensive, and less likely to suffer costly delays and overruns in construction. And companies are transferring the lessons they’ve learned across the industry. Shell, for example, recently announced that it is applying techniques from onshore shale operations, such as drilling horizontal wells and injecting water into them, to increase production in mature deep-water fields. Today, thanks to these innovations, the average breakeven prices of new deep-water projects have fallen, to just $40–$50 per barrel in the Gulf of Mexico—an important global bellwether because it is one of the most responsive regions in the world to changes in market conditions. Even though oil prices remain low (and many in the industry expect them to stay low), investment is once again growing. Ten deep-water projects were approved for investment in 2016 and the first half of 2017 alone. Smarter management of complex systems is also reshaping the electric power industry. For decades, centralized, base-load energy generators—mainly coal, nuclear, and large hydro- electric plants—dominated the industry. But in the last two decades, governments have subsidized wind and solar energy and pushed them into the electricity system, in the hopes of diversifying their countries’ energy sources, creating new jobs, and reducing emissions. Until recently, these new sources were too small to have much of an effect on the overall system. Today, however, as the cost of renewables is plummeting and their share of the power supply is rising, they have begun to transform electricity markets. In Germany, wind and solar power account for almost 30 percent of the power mix; in Hawaii, they account for about a quarter. Traditional utilities have struggled to adapt. In March, grid operators in California shut down 80 gigawatt-hours of the state’s renewable power because the grid couldn’t handle the afternoon solar surge; without more capacity to store power, even larger curtailments will occur. In Texas, among many other places, prices occasionally turn negative when the wind is blowing hard but people don’t need too much electricity—in other words, companies are paying customers to use the electricity they generate. Utilities that have failed to see these changes coming have floundered. The market valuations of the top four German utilities are about one-third the level they were a decade ago—in large part because they were stuck with the costs of the old electric power system even as the government provided lavish support for renewables. Renewables are just one part of this transformation. In the coming years, utility companies may face an existential challenge from smaller and more decentralized energy systems known as “microgrids.” Microgrids first emerged decades ago, driven by customers, such as the U.S. military, that prized reliability above all else and that did not mind paying more for it: military bases have to keep functioning even if the bulk power grid fails. Early adopters also included remote communities, such as in Alaska, that are far from the conventional grid. But now, microgrids are spreading to other places, such as university campuses and hospitals, where they generate reliable power and are often designed to save money by using waste energy to heat and cool buildings. New technologies, such as fuel cells and battery storage systems (to store extra power produced by renewables), along with more sophisticated software, have led to even smaller systems called “nanogrids,” which Walmart and other megastores have begun to adopt. And picogrids may be next. As more and more people rely less on the traditional grid for power (while still interconnecting with it to help ensure reliability), policymakers and companies will need to create new regulatory systems and business models. Some states, such as New York, have embraced these changes, aggressively promoting decentralization by rewarding companies that invest in decentralized systems. But no one has yet worked out a detailed plan for how to integrate new grids with traditional power systems. HI, ROBOT The second major source of innovation is better data analytics. Oil companies, for example, have begun to use complex algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data, making it easier for them to find oil and gas and to manage production. In April 2017, for example, bp announced that, using these methods, it had identified another 200 million barrels of oil in an existing field in the Gulf of Mexico. According to bp, data crunching that used to take a year now takes just a few weeks. And cloud processing makes it possible to generate millions of scenarios for developing an oil field. When firms can evaluate more options, production from fields can rise by five percent, with a 30 percent cut in the investment required to drill holes and begin producing oil. The industry has also begun to use data analytics for “predictive maintenance,” reducing unplanned downtime by analyzing historical data to predict equipment failures before they happen. This practice, pioneered by industries such as the aircraft engine business, is helping cut costs on oil and gas rigs, where compressors and other rotating equipment can cause costly interruptions when they fail. The third and most important trend is automation. In remote offshore oil fields, robots have already begun to perform dangerous tasks, such as connecting pipes during drilling operations, a job traditionally carried out by the versatile workers known as “roustabouts.” Soon, intelligent automated systems will enable remote drilling, controlled almost entirely by a handful of high-tech workers in onshore data rooms hundreds of miles away. And companies are developing robots that can live on the ocean floor and inspect offshore pipe lines and underwater equipment. At the moment, offshore oil rigs typically employ 100–200 workers, a figure that could fall. Although people remain indispensable for critical safety roles that require complex decisionmaking, automation will transform the industry’s work force. According to a McKinsey study, within ten years, oil and gas companies could employ more data scientists with Ph.D.’s than geologists. Schooling kills creativity – stopping progressive innovationDalile 12 -- Line Dalile is a 14-year-old homeschooled student, blogger and a passionate writer. She has spoken at TEDxAjman about education, and at the present time Line is writing articles on education reform and youth voices. Her articles offer a student’s perspective on education around the world, The HuffingtonPost, 2012 (“How Schools Are Killing Creativity, June 10, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/line-dalile/a-dictator-racing-to-nowh_b_1409138.html,Accessed 6-28-2017, AIN) Years continue to pass, some students graduate, some fail out, some drop out and nothing really changes. The education system reminds me of a dictator that is unwilling to step down. I’m aware that no education system is perfect, and I believe they are all the same across the world. We memorize, study for the test and forget, only to know 10 years later what an atrocious world we have been constructing. I strongly feel that our methodologies in schools are demolishing creativity. Students have lost their capacity of creation simply because our teaching methods don’t stimulate innovation and creativity. Remember being a kid and wanting to play around? No one told you how to use your imagination or taught you how to be creative. You played with LEGOS. You pretended you were an astronaut and imagined traveling in space. Being naturally creative, you asked questions like “Why is the grass green?” and “Are we alone?” — questions no wise man could answer. Then came school, a child’s worst nightmare. You learned to live in a rotten environment. You were bullied, made fun of, and you had this teacher that told you to stop dreaming and live in reality. So what did you learn at school? You learned to stop questioning the world, to go with the flow, and that there’s only one right answer to each question. The “whys” you have always wanted to ask are never on the test, and they are omitted from the curriculum. Creativity isn’t a test to take, a skill to learn, or a program to develop. Creativity is seeing things in new ways, breaking barriers that stood in front of you for some time. Creativity is the art of hearing a song that has never been written or seeing a work of art on empty canvas. Its essence is in its freshness and the ability to make dreams come to life. Imagine this: A normal classroom with cheerful faces. Students’ excitement to start school ignites the classroom. The teacher asks the students to draw a tree. Some students were talented, others were okay, and some students couldn’t give a visual figure of a tree. The teacher rates every student’s work. Some students get an A+, some get a D and others get a big fat F. Those students who got A’s now believe they’re highly talented and artistic, but those who got an F... Well, they start to think they are losers and their works is rubbish. From this “draw a tree” assignment, creativity starts to linger in the air and then, in time, fades away. This is why many adults say “I can’t draw!” In school, children are “taught” to draw shapes like a “perfect” triangle. Everything is “properly” drawn. Whenever a child attempts to color something, the teacher screams in panic: “Do NOT color outside the lines!” In the 21st century, the world demands students who can think creatively and critically. As technology develops, we will have robots to do all the basic work for us. However, it is our mission to ensure that the next generation will be full of inventors, musicians, painters, mathematicians who will, in turn, bring humanity to another level. In his TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Sir Ken Robinson said that instead of growing into creativity in school, we grow out of it. Students all over the world have had more years of schooling than they care to count. During this process, students are taught that making a mistake is a sin. We have planted in our students’ minds a picture of a perfectly, carefully drawn life. When I play golf I sometimes feel that I’m focused so much on the line that I forget about the flow of the putt. The same thing is being applied to schools. We focus too much on standardized testing and then we forget what the real aim of education is. Today’s teaching techniques are taking the beauty out of learning. Diminishing creativity from our student’s mind is a serious problem with wide-reaching effects. How exactly are schools diminishing creativity? We learn that being “good” means sitting still and nodding yes, while being “bad” means attempting to do things differently. The cycle of sitting still, memorizing, testing and getting a job have existed for a long time now and few dared to challenge it. However, those who dared to challenge the status quo like Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, and Walt Disney have changed the course of history. I understand that memorizing is the fastest way to get good grades, get into a good college, and get a job (which we equate with a good life). We are being educated for the promise of money. As a student I know one thing for sure: I never want to be a product living my life inside a box. I want to cherish my brilliant mind. I want to imagine, to create, to be the best I can possibly be. I never want to be a robot. I want to argue, to challenge and define the impossible. I cannot possibly let someone assemble my life. How do we expect students to be creative if teachers give them the outline, the title, and the structure of their “creative writing assignment?” We give students model answers to memorize, we give a specific title to write a poem about, and we truly give them everything but the freedom to express their ideas. Youth have fresh ideas. While teachers complain that students are spending an awful lot of time on social networking, they forget to mention that it’s the only way we, the students, can have our voice heard. Education isn’t about facts being stored in our minds so that we can get tested on them. Education is the beauty to nurture creativity, to fuel curiosity and to create a well-rounded person. America is battling its way out to the top and promising that no child will be left behind. Behind this competition, we forget the purpose of education. Schools become business, and factories where children come out as pale as ghosts with everything being structured “perfectly” and “properly” in their minds. Somewhere in our battle and pursuit of meaningless papers, diplomas and money, we have lost the true meaning of learning. During our insane worship to win the race, during our mad love to become number one, we forget that our schools are raising children that are racing to nowhere. No internal link –1. No “Competitiveness” Impact — no economic basis.Krugman 94 — Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994 (“Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession,” Foreign Affairs, March-April, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe) It was a disappointing evasion, but not a surprising one. After all, the rhetoric of competitiveness – the view that, in the words of President Clinton, each nation is "like a big corporation competing in the global marketplace" – has become pervasive among opinion leaders throughout the world. People who believe themselves to be sophisticated about the subject take it for granted that the economic problem facing any modern nation is essentially one of competing on world markets – that the United States and Japan are competitors in the same sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi – and are unaware that anyone might seriously question that proposition. Every few months a new best-seller warns the American public of the dire consequences of losing the "race" for the 21st century. n1 A whole industry of councils on competitiveness, "geo-economists" and managed trade theorists has sprung up in Washington. Many of these people, having diagnosed America's economic problems in much the same terms as Delors did Europe's, are now in the highest reaches of the Clinton administration formulating economic and trade policy for the United States. So Delors was using a language that was not only convenient but comfortable for him and a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, his diagnosis was deeply misleading as a guide to what ails Europe, and similar diagnoses in the United States are equally misleading. The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets. The growing obsession in most advanced nations with international competitiveness should be seen, not as a well-founded concern, but as a view held in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. And yet it is clearly a view that people very much want to hold – a desire to believe that is reflected in a remarkable tendency of those who preach the doctrine of competitiveness to support their case with careless, flawed arithmetic. This article makes three points. First, it argues that concerns about competitiveness are, as an empirical matter, almost completely unfounded. Second, it tries to explain why defining the economic problem as one of international competition is nonetheless so attractive to so many people. Finally, it argues that the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the international economic system. This last issue is, of course, the most consequential from the standpoint of public policy. Thinking in terms of competitiveness leads, directly and indirectly, to bad economic policies on a wide range of issues, domestic and foreign, whether it be in health care or trade. 2. STEM is not key to innovation or competitiveness – the US’s history in both of these departments is derived from creativity and diversity - Japan and Israel both prove.Zakaria 15 Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for The Washington Post, is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and the author of “In Defense of a Liberal Education,” 2015, “Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous,” The Washington Post, 03/26, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-stem-wont-make-us-successful/2015/03/26/5f4604f2-d2a5-11e4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html?utm_term=.475e605bf8aa Accessed 07/28/2017 //jsaltman If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” asked Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott. “I don’t think so.” America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher. This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want. America will not dominate the 21st century by making cheaper computer chips but instead by constantly reimagining how computers and other new technologies interact with human beings. subscribe The story must be told. Your subscription supports journalism that matters. Try 1 month for 99¢ For most of its history, the United States was unique in offering a well-rounded education. In their comprehensive study, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” Harvard’s Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz point out that in the 19th century, countries like Britain, France and Germany educated only a few and put them through narrow programs designed to impart only the skills crucial to their professions. America, by contrast, provided mass general education because people were not rooted in specific locations with long-established trades that offered the only paths forward for young men. And the American economy historically changed so quickly that the nature of work and the requirements for success tended to shift from one generation to the next. People didn’t want to lock themselves into one professional guild or learn one specific skill for life. That was appropriate in another era, the technologists argue, but it is dangerous in today’s world. Look at where American kids stand compared with their peers abroad. The most recent international test, conducted in 2012, found that among the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 27th in math, 20th in science and 17th in reading. If rankings across the three subjects are averaged, the United States comes in 21st, trailing nations such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Estonia. In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation. Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies. But other than bad test-takers, their economies have a few important traits in common: They are flexible. Their work cultures are non-hierarchical and merit-based. All operate like young countries, with energy and dynamism. All three are open societies, happy to let in the world’s ideas, goods and services. And people in all three nations are confident — a characteristic that can be measured. Despite ranking 27th and 30th in math, respectively, American and Israeli students came out at the top in their belief in their math abilities, if one tallies up their responses to survey questions about their skills. Sweden came in seventh, even though its math ranking was 28th. Thirty years ago, William Bennett, the Reagan-era secretary of education, noticed this disparity between achievement and confidence and quipped, “This country is a lot better at teaching self-esteem than it is at teaching math.” It’s a funny line, but there is actually something powerful in the plucky confidence of American, Swedish and Israeli students. It allows them to challenge their elders, start companies, persist when others think they are wrong and pick themselves up when they fail. Too much confidence runs the risk of self-delusion, but the trait is an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship. My point is not that it’s good that American students fare poorly on these tests. It isn’t. Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have benefitted enormously from having skilled workforces. But technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success. America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically-trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook. A country like Japan, by contrast, can’t do as much with its well-trained workers because it lacks many of the factors that produce continuous innovation. Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are oriented around memorization and test-taking. I went through that kind of system. It has its strengths, but it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving or creativity. That’s why most Asian countries, from Singapore to South Korea to India, are trying to add features of a liberal education to their systems. Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Internet behemoth Alibaba, recently hypothesized in a speech that the Chinese are not as innovative as Westerners because China’s educational system, which teaches the basics very well, does not nourish a student’s complete intelligence, allowing her to range freely, experiment and enjoy herself while learning: “Many painters learn by having fun, many works [of art and literature] are the products of having fun. So, our entrepreneurs need to learn how to have fun, too.” No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon (and the owner of this newspaper), insists that his senior executives write memos, often as long as six printed pages, and begins senior-management meetings with a period of quiet time, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, while everyone reads the “narratives” to themselves and makes notes on them. In an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, Bezos said: “Full sentences are harder to write. They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.” Companies often prefer strong basics to narrow expertise. Andrew Benett, a management consultant, surveyed 100 business leaders and found that 84 of them said they would rather hire smart, passionate people, even if they didn’t have the exact skills their companies needed. 3. Innovation alone fails to solve warming – they can’t change social problems or fix alt causesBoucher and Loring 17 (Martin J Boucher – a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability, Philip Loring – Doctor of Philosophy in Indigenous Studies, University of Alaska Fairbanks Master of Arts in Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies (Philosophy and Classic Studies), Florida Atlantic University; Article; 3/20/17; Ensia; “CLIMATE CHANGE IS MORE THAN A TECH PROBLEM, SO WE NEED MORE THAN A TECH SOLUTION”; https://ensia.com/voices/climate-change-social-fix/; accessed 7/10/17) [DS] March 20, 2017 — At the COP 21 climate change convention in Paris at the end of 2015, leaders from 194 nations agreed to pursue actions that will cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming within 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial conditions. Meeting this goal will avoid continued and increasing harm to people and ecosystems around the world caused by a changing climate, and it is also a great opportunity to turn the world into a place that embodies our collective and pluralistic values for the future. Nevertheless, there remains a notable gap between current trajectories of global GHG emissions and the reductions necessary to see COP 21’s goals realized. Numerous technological and economic strategies for bridging that gap are currently being discussed, including transitions to renewable energy and/or nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and cap and trade. However, many overlook the fundamental social issues that drive climate change: overconsumption, poverty, industrial agriculture and population growth. As such, even if these strategies succeed in mitigating CO2 emissions — renewable energies, for instance, seem to have achieved irreversible momentum — they leave unaddressed a second gap, a sustainability gap, in that they allow issues of ecological overshoot and social injustice to persist. We argue that there is an opportunity to reverse climate change by attending to these sustainability issues, but it requires that we reject the convenience of technological optimism and put aside our fears of the world’s “big” social problems. In 2004, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow wrote in Science that it is possible to address climate change by breaking the larger problem of CO2 emissions down into a series of more manageable “wedges.” They offer 15 different solutions based on existing technology, including nuclear energy, coal carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency, and increased adoption of conservation tillage, for mitigating climate change one wedge at a time. Their pragmatic approach to the problem has been popularly received, as evidenced by the thousands of citations that the paper has received. However, their approach can also be critiqued for glossing over the immense costs involved and for its piecemeal and top-down nature. In other words, they assume that this complex global environmental problem can be fixed with a handful of standardized solutions. A systems approach to solving problems requires that we look to root causes and seek interventions that change patterns of outcomes. Climate change is just one of many related sustainability problems that the world faces. In addition to rising atmospheric CO2, we are approaching or have already exceeded multiple other planetary boundaries — such as fresh water, nitrogen, phosphorus and biodiversity loss — that CO2-mitigating technologies cannot solve. Solving climate change on its own would require immense investments but leave too many other problems unaddressed. That is not to say that these technological innovations are irrelevant; Pacala and Socolow’s desire to break down the challenge into manageable pieces is both valid and appreciable. What’s missing from their assessment is the fact that the world is a complex system, and systemic problems require systemic solutions. A Systems Approach A systems approach to solving problems requires that we look to root causes and seek interventions that change patterns of outcomes. The root causes of climate change are not technologies such as coal power and industrialized, chemical-intensive agriculture, but the underlying social and cultural systems that created and locked people into these technologies through unsustainable patterns of consumption, growth and inequity. It is possible to address other environmental and social issues and climate change together. Consider the issue of empowering women. We know population growth is at the epicenter of global overshoot; programs that empower women by creating equitable employment and education opportunities and recognizing their reproductive rights consistently lead to voluntary regional declines in population growth rates. Countries in which women have higher political status also emit less CO2 per capita. While empowering women may seem to many people to be an immense and somewhat intangible goal, successes have been made through small-scale economic and policy interventions that give women access to land and other capital. And communities that empower women also become more resilient and adaptable to challenges like environmental change. Or, consider the potential of transitioning agriculture and other land management systems away from industrial practices and toward agroecological ones. Agroecological systems of food production allow smallholders to improve food security while increasing household income potential. Olivier De Schutter, a former U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, has argued that agroecological food production could double food production in 10 years while also mitigating climate change through reductions in fossil fuel inputs, sequestering carbon in soil, and alleviating rural poverty in developing nations. In Grass, Soil, Hope, author and rancher Courtney White similarly describes a portfolio of small-scale land management changes that add up to global impacts for carbon mitigation. Others have repeatedly shown that agroecological methods of land management and food production are at least as effective, if not more effective, than increased industrial intensification from the perspective of meeting human needs and protecting biodiversity. Also, decreases in meat consumption — another strategy for addressing climate change — will necessarily accompany agroecological reforms, because these modes of production simply do not produce meat in the same unsustainable quantities as industrial agriculture. It stands to reason that as people increasingly see the social and ecological benefits of alternative farming practices and choose to participate, their meat eating habits will decline. Finally, as these reforms address food security and hunger, population growth will also be reduced, because these are among its primary drivers. These are yet more examples of how thinking about the problem from a whole systems approach can yield solutions that seem small but, through feedbacks and interactions, can ultimately accumulate to significant gains. We are not arguing against technology reform. We are arguing that climate change is not, fundamentally, a technological problem. Other strategies include moving to decentralized energy generation and changing home-size preferences in the developed world. What they all have in common is that they attend to social and behavioral aspects of the problem. And rather than being piecemeal, such solutions can work together synergistically. For example, agroecological transitions at the community level have emerged as a successful venue for empowering women. Too Big, Too Wicked A common critique of our argument is that problems such as women empowerment and meat consumption are simply too big, too wicked, too complex to solve. This is, however, a psychological hang-up that is not backed up by evidence. The power of small-scale change, whether through incremental and place-based intervention or relatively innocuous “nudges,” is increasingly evinced in ongoing social change, including around issues such as women empowerment and meat eating. Additionally, psychological research suggests that people are generally more comfortable with small-scale change than they are with large-scale reform, which is salient in this age when environmental problems and their possible solutions are so heavily politicized. It is worth noting that for place-based solutions, the question of scalability is somewhat different than it is for technological fixes: Place-based strategies are rarely intended to scale in a uniform or industrial way. Rather, they scale in a more cultural sense, to create a heterogeneous landscape of solutions that are similar in philosophy but often quite different in implementation. In general, while social change is generally a slow process that happens through learning and innovation, research has shown that simple, incentive-based interventions through subsidies or taxes can encourage people to switch from one behavioral regime to another without the need for a fundamental change in their values. For instance, studies have shown that small taxes and increased knowledge about health risks both drive decreases in meat consumption. Many of today’s most widely debated solutions to climate change fall into a category that emphasizes technological optimism and top-down, engineered solutions. The strategies we highlight here largely fall into another category: solutions that emphasize place-based, social and behavioral innovations. We are not arguing against technology reform. We are arguing that climate change is not, fundamentally, a technological problem. To be sure, social problems are not easy to solve, but neither are they intractable, unless viewed only from a global, one-size-fits-all perspective. If we use the tools of social innovation alongside technological innovation and embrace a socially focused and place-based approach to our global climate change and sustainability challenges, we will be far better off for it. Leadership Decline Inevitable — Trump dysfunctionality.Sokolsky and Miller 17 — Richard Sokolsky, Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Office, holds an M.A. from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Aaron David Miller, Distinguished Scholar and Vice President for New Initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served in the U.S. Department of State for 24 years, holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic and Middle East History from the University of Michigan, 2017 (“Trump’s Foreign Policy: 100 Days of Global Bafflement,” Politico, April 24th, Available Online at http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/04/24/trump-s-foreign-policy-100-days-of-global-bafflement-pub-68763, Accessed 06-27-2017) 3. Trump’s Foreign Policy Process Is Deeply Dysfunctional. There have been times during the past 100 days when the administration looked like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Of course, all administrations suffer from infighting and turf wars, and new administrations always take some time to get their sea legs. But in the six administrations in which we worked, we have never seen a national security decision making process as dysfunctional as this one. What makes it so? First, there is the president’s heavy-handed and uncoordinated intervention in the policy making process. His off-hours twitter storms have left allies and friends uncertain and confused about U.S. policies and intentions. Being unpredictable can sometimes create leverage in a transaction, but when taken to an extreme, as has happened, it can also damage American credibility, leadership and influence. Second, there is the cacophony of voices—or in some cases no voices at all. On a number of issues, notably U.S. policy toward Syria, Israeli-Palestinian peace and North Korea, the president and his foreign policy team are not using the same set of talking points—as when U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley declared that peace in Syria would require Assad’s departure while Tillerson stated that Assad’s fate was up to the Syrian people to decide. The mixed signals sow further confusion and doubt about who’s speaking for the administration on foreign policy. The failure so far of Tillerson and the State Department to effectively articulate and explain U.S. foreign policy is a particular problem, leaving foreign governments guessing about American plans. Third, effective policy coordination and execution has been MIA largely because almost none of the key policy positions at State or Defense has been filled. Without officials at the deputy, under secretary, assistant secretary, and deputy assistant secretary levels offering ideas, issuing strategic direction and policy guidance, the bureaucracy is left rudderless and U.S. embassies are left without instructions or guidance to explain American policy to the host government. Fourth, all administrations like to centralize control over sensitive foreign policy issues in the White House, but this typically occurs within a structured interagency decision-making process; ideas bubble up through the bureaucracy in the form of papers, meetings and more meetings. We have seen no evidence that such a process is in place on most issues; instead, there is an ad hoc and improvisational quality to many of Trump’s decisions. More importantly, the portfolios for many important foreign policy issues, such as China, Mexico and Middle East peace, have been handed to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, a foreign policy neophyte overloaded with responsibilities that no mortal can manage and lacking the government experience to work the system to see his preferences enacted. Kelly, Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson have had a modicum of success lately in bringing a semblance of order to an unruly process. But the administration still does not have the right people in the right positions and with the right process to consistently produce, articulate and implement coherent and sustainable policies. Over time, this situation may improve as the president begins to understand that people, process and experience matter, and that you can’t have an effective foreign policy without them. But we’re betting the current dysfunction isn’t going to disappear quickly. This will not be a linear process—there will be more zigs and zags because all too often Trump will continue to be Trump—impulsive, pugilistic and volatile. No Impact –1. No impact to heg decline — benefits are empirically disproven.White 16 — Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, former Intelligence Analyst with Australia’s Office of National Assessments and Senior Official with Australia’s Department of Defence, 2016 (“What’s So Great About American World Leadership?,” The Atlantic, November 23rd, Available Online at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/trump-world-order-foreign-policy/508547/, Accessed 02-19-2017) So it appears the American electorate no longer accepts the American role in the world that policymakers have long taken for granted. And what if the electorate is right? Maybe the foreign-policy assumptions of the past few decades do need to be overhauled. The record, after all, is not very impressive. So far this century, America has failed to achieve most of the key national-security objectives it has set for itself. Does that sound harsh? Here is a list, in no particular order, of some key goals both the Bush and Obama administrations set for themselves in foreign policy: Prevent North Korea getting nuclear weapons; prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons and contain its growing influence in the Middle East; transform Iraq and Afghanistan into stable, progressive, pro-Western states, or at least leave them as minimally functioning countries; contain and eventually crush jihadist extremism; harness the Arab Spring to enhance U.S. influence in the Arab world; reconcile Russia to the U.S.-led order and resist its efforts to rebuild a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe; resist China’s challenge to the U.S.-led order in Asia; broker a durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians; and prevent another 9/11 on U.S. soil. Of all these, the only clear success is the avoidance of another direct major attack on America itself. The nuclear deal with Iran may prove a partial success, but even there the best we can hope is that an Iranian nuclear capability has been deferred. All the rest have been total failures. And yet these are exactly the kind of goals that America should have been able to achieve if it was to fulfill the orthodox vision of its global leadership. That vision is, or has been, that America can and should create and uphold in every region of the world an international order which is based on American values and which supports America’s interests. And it should be able to do that without incurring the immense costs and risks it bore in the conflicts of the last century. It is a noble vision, and the world would be a better place if it was realized. But the record suggests it does not corresponded to reality. We’d better ask why. 2. No impact to econ declineRobert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425 Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable. 3. Enough warming is inevitable to trigger all of their impacts – we cite the best studiesLongley 16 (Robert, 26 years in municipal government in both Texas and California, two of the largest economies and territories in the world, About.com’s expert on US Government since 1997. “Global Warming Inevitable this Century, NSF Study Finds”, 7/11/16. https://www.thoughtco.com/global-warming-inevitable-this-century-3322005, 7/19/17)//JM Despite worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and ever greater rises in sea levels are inevitable during by 2100, according to research conducted by a team of climate model scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Indeed, say the researchers, whose work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), globally averaged surface air temperatures would still rise one degree Fahrenheit (about a half degree Celsius) by the year 2100, even if no more greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere. And the resulting transfer of heat into the oceans would cause global sea levels to rise another 4 inches (11 centimeters) from thermal expansion alone. The dire predictions come from the papers, The Climate Change Commitment, by T. M. L. Wigley, and How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?, by Gerald A. Meehlm et al, as published in the March 17, 2005, edition of Science magazine. “This study is another in a series that employs increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques to understand the complex interactions of the Earth,” says Cliff Jacobs of NSF’s atmospheric sciences division in a press release. “These studies often yield results that are not revealed by simpler approaches and highlight unintended consequences of external factors interacting with Earth’s natural systems.” TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE TO CUT OFF THE WARMING ENGINE “Many people don’t realize we are committed right now to a significant amount of global warming and sea level rise because of the greenhouse gases we have already put into the atmosphere,” says lead author Jerry Meehl. “Even if we stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate will continue to warm, and there will be proportionately even more sea level rise." "The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future.” The half-degree temperature rise predicted by the NCAR modelers is similar to what was actually observed by the end of the 20th century, but the projected sea level rise is more than twice the 3-inch (5-centimeter) rise that was observed then. Moreover, these forecasts do not take into account any fresh water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, which could at least double the sea-level rise caused by thermal expansion alone. The models also predict a weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, which currently warms Europe by transporting heat from the tropics. Even so, Europe heats up along with the rest of the planet because of the overwhelming effect of greenhouse gases. Though the study finds signs that the temperature rise will level off some 100 years after the greenhouse gases stabilize, it also finds that ocean waters will continue to warm and expand beyond then, causing global sea level to rise unabated. According to the report, the inevitability of climate change results from thermal inertia, mainly from the oceans, and the long lifetime of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Thermal inertia refers to the process by which water heats and cools more slowly than air because it is denser than air. The studies are the first to quantify future “committed” climate change using coupled global 3-dimensional climate models. Coupled models link major components of Earth's climate in ways that allow them to interact with each other. Meehl and his NCAR colleagues ran the same scenario a number of times and averaged the results to create ensemble simulations from each of two global climate models. Then they compared the results from each model. The scientists also compared possible climate scenarios in the two models during the 21st century in which greenhouse gases continue to build in the atmosphere at low, moderate, or high rates. The worst-case scenario projects an average temperature rise of 6.3 °F (3.5 °C) and sea level rise from thermal expansion of 12 inches (30 centimeters) by 2100. All scenarios analyzed in the study will be assessed by international teams of scientists for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due out in 2007. Extend: No Stem ShortageAff isn’t key – there is a surplus of workers right nowHiltzik 15 - Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, 2015("Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony", latimes, 8-1-2015, Available Online from http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150802-column.html, Accessed on 7-10-2017)//BM Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, "the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry." Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions. Nevertheless, high-tech employers such as Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft and Facebook lobby hard for more latitude in employing workers on H-1B visas. These are designed to serve high-skilled immigrants but often enable the importing of Indian and Chinese guest workers to replace an older, more experienced, but more expensive domestic workforce. Visa issuance is capped at 85,000 per year, including foreign holders of U.S. advanced degrees, but a bill sponsored by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) would raise the limit to as many as 195,000. "If you can make the case that our security and prosperity is under threat, it's an easy sell in Congress and the media," says Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at Harvard Law School and author of the 2014 book "Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent," which challenges claims of a STEM shortage in the U.S. Despite its "cost-cutting initiative," a company spokesperson says, Qualcomm "continues to have open positions in specific areas, and still faces a "'skills deficit' in all areas of today's workforce, especially engineering." Fears about an American deficit in science and technical know-how have erupted regularly since World War II, Teitelbaum observes. Often they produce a boom in demand and supply, followed by a bust. Interest in science and engineering courses arose after the 1957 Sputnik launch, which raised public concerns that the Soviet Union's technical capability was surpassing America's. By the 1970s, when many of these inspired students were deeply into their doctoral or post-doc careers, they were discovering that demand for their skills had disappeared. An entire generation "had been told that this was a great national emergency, that we needed scientists," the chairman of MIT's physics department lamented at the time. "Now they are out on the street and naturally they feel cheated." California aerospace workers in the 1980s and high-tech engineers after the dot-com collapse in 2000 felt the same dizzying sensation. Nailing down demand and employment in STEM fields is difficult because there's no single accepted definition for a STEM job. Estimates of the number of STEM jobs range from 5 million to 19 million, according to the National Science Foundation, depending on what's included. Many are technical jobs that don't require even a bachelor's degree. Teitelbaum and others observe that the tech industry's lobbying to hire more foreign engineers is at cross purposes with its call to encourage more U.S. students to acquire STEM degrees. After all, why should students labor for four or six years to enter industries in which they can be suddenly replaced in an outsourcing campaign? The industry's push for more visas glosses over other issues. As we've reported, the majority of H-1B visas go not to marquee high-tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, but to outsourcing firms including the India-based giants Infosys and Tata. They're not recruiting elite STEM graduates with unique skills, but contract workers to replace American technical employees — who often are required to train their foreign-born replacement as a condition of receiving their severance. This is the scandalous method of cost-cutting used by companies such as Southern California Edison, which outsourced the jobs of some 500 information technology employees, as we reported in February. For such companies, raising the visa limit is about exploiting a loophole in immigration law to save money — workers on these temporary visas are typically paid less than U.S. employees doing the same work, and more complaisant with American bosses because they'll be deported if they lose their jobs. Companies such as Google and Qualcomm do benefit from H-1B visas, but on a lower scale than the outsourcing firms. In 2013, Qualcomm secured visa approvals for 909 new workers, according to government figures compiled by Computerworld. Infosys got 6,300. It's unlikely that such hard numbers will silence the drumbeat for more high-tech immigration, Teitelbaum says, as long as big tech companies have Congress' attention. "The lobbying opposition is weak," he says. "There's no interest group that's as well organized and financed to say that this is an emperor with no clothes on." No STEM shortage—already a surplusCharette 13—Robert, An IEEE Spectrum contributing editor, Charette investigates the impact of risk on technology and society. His interest is both professional and personal: He's a 33-year member of the IEEE Computer Society, 8-1-2013, "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth," IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth, accessed 7/28, JMB So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there? The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field. Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades. Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available. Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline. What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.” That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.” Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.” “None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.” So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India. You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race. “The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.” At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured. Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high. Q. If a student came to you for advice, would you encourage him or her to pursue a career in STEM? IEEE Spectrum recently posed that question to a select group of IEEE members. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would “strongly encourage” the student to take such a career path because it is “interesting and stimulating work” and one in which a person “can make a difference in the world.” For more, view the complete results from the latest IEEE Spectrum Forecasters Survey. Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments. An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown’s Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can’t find traditional STEM jobs, she says, “they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.” The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn’t exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their “bust” phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. “In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.” Extend: No STEM Gender GapSquo solves – Since the recession, STEM enrollment has been booming with both males and females.Jaschik 14 Scott Jaschik, Editor, is one of the three founders of Inside Higher Ed. With Doug Lederman, he leads the editorial operations of Inside Higher Ed, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Scott is a leading voice on higher education issues, quoted regularly in publications nationwide, and publishing articles on colleges in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Salon, and elsewhere. He has been a judge or screener for the National Magazine Awards, the Online Journalism Awards, the Folio Editorial Excellence Awards, and the Education Writers Association Awards, 2014, “The STEM Enrollment Boom,” Inside Higher Ed, 04/07, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/07/study-finds-increased-stem-enrollment-recession Accessed 07/28/2017 //jsaltman Policy makers regularly talk about the need to encourage more undergraduates to pursue science and technology fields. New data suggest that undergraduates at four-year institutions in fact have become much more likely to study those fields, especially engineering and biology. And while much of the public discussion of STEM enrollments has suggested a STEM vs. liberal arts dichotomy (even though some STEM fields are in fact liberal arts disciplines), the new study suggests that this is not the dynamic truly at play. Rather, STEM enrollments are growing while professional field enrollments (especially business and education) are shrinking. The research, presented here Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, is by Jerry A. Jacobs, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Linda Sax, professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles. Much of the data typically discussed on student enrollment patterns come from the National Center for Education Statistics. But the new study is based in large part on the “freshman survey” conducted annually by UCLA on a national pool of freshmen at four-year institutions. In their paper, Jacobs and Sax write that this data set enables them to spot trends much earlier than is possible with the federal database, since that information is based on graduation (which comes much later than enrollment) and because government cuts have led to delays in federal data. Using data collected by UCLA, Jacobs and Sax write that from 1997 through 2005, the proportion of freshmen planning to enroll in STEM fields declined, hitting a low in 2005 of 20.7 percent. After modest gains in 2006 and 2007, real increases started to show up in 2008. The percentage of freshmen planning to major in STEM increased from 21.1 percent in 2007 to 28.2 percent in 2011, just as the recession was prompting many students and families to focus on the job potential of various fields of study. That represents a 48 percent increase in just a few years. The growth was not consistent across STEM fields. Engineering saw a 57.1 percent increase (consistent with findings from the American Society for Engineering Education) and biology saw gains of 28.2 percent. But the physical sciences saw gains of 11.1 percent, and mathematics was up by 12.6 percent. Generally, the STEM gains were seen for both male and female students, so gender gaps that remain in some STEM fields weren’t significantly changed. The paper notes that disciplines such as biology and mathematics, while STEM fields, are located in arts and sciences at many institutions, so that a “STEM vs. liberal arts” comparison doesn’t make sense. But the fields showing declines during this period were not traditional liberal arts fields, but applied fields. The paper notes that business and education saw declines of 5.9 percent, suggesting that they -- more than the liberal arts -- are losing freshmen. Jacobs said in an interview that those concerned about STEM education shouldn't pursue that goal at the expense of the humanities. He said that the critical thinking skills associated with the humanities are needed by all kinds of students. Those who want more STEM students should focus on attracting more female students, some of whom may not feel encouraged in the area, rather than offering "criticism of the humanities," as a number of politicians have done lately. He said he was pleased to find that the increase in STEM enrollments was coming from professional programs, rather than liberal arts programs. Gender discrimination is down by every measure worldwide.Beauchamp 13 — Zack Beauchamp, Zack Beauchamp, World Correspondent at Vox.com, has an MSc in International Relations from The London School of Economics and Political Science, a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from Brown University, 2013 (“5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History,” ThinkProgress, December 11th, Available Online at https://thinkprogress.org/5-reasons-why-2013-was-the-best-year-in-human-history-392c4888e603#.err2q7kz6, Accessed 10-06-2016) The story about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the 20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011. IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history. Status quo solves—Trump’s new bill supports women entrepreneurs and women in STEMArter 17 – Melanie Arter, Melanie has been with CNSNews.com since November 2000 as an evening editor responsible for writing, editing and posting stories to the website. She was promoted to deputy managing editor in 2002, overseeing the radio production department in addition to her daily editing duties. Prior to working at CNSNews.com, Melanie served as news director for WKYS-FM, one of Washington, D.C.’s top-rated radio stations. Mrs. Arter also worked as a traffic reporter for Shadow Broadcasting in the nation’s capital and prior to that, as a news anchor/reporter for WAMO-FM in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her television experience was obtained at several Washington, D.C. stations. She worked for America’s Most Wanted at Fox affiliate WTTG, the Creative Services Department of WUSA-TV and the Evening Exchange on WHUT-TV. She holds a bachelor’s degree in television production from Howard University., 17 ("Trump Signs Bills Supporting Women Entrepreneurs and Women in STEM Fields," CNS News, 2-28-2017, Available Online at http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/melanie-arter/trumps-signs-bills-supporting-women-entrepreneurs-and-women-stem-fields, Accessed on 7-10-2017 //JJ) President Donald Trump signed into law two bills on Tuesday aimed at encouraging women to pursue careers in science and business fields. “Today I’m signing two bills that promote women entering and leading the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and math. Currently, only one in four women who gets a STEM degree is working in a STEM job – which is not fair, and it’s not even smart for the people that aren’t taking advantage of it,” Trump said. “It’s unacceptable that we have so many American women who have these degrees but yet are not being employed in these fields, so I think that’s going to change, and it’s going to change very rapidly. Protecting women with STEM degrees and all Americans with STEM degrees – very important, but it also means you have to crackdown on offshoring, because the offshoring is a tremendous problem that displaces many of our American workers and brains, the brain power,” he said. “Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act” (H.R. 321) directs NASA “to encourage women and girls to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), pursue careers in aerospace, and further advance the nation’s space science and exploration efforts through support of the following initiatives: NASA GIRLS and NASA BOYS; Aspire to Inspire; and Summer Institute in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Research.” NASA is expected to support a specific plan to Congress on how best to “facilitate and support both current and retired astronauts, scientists, engineers, and innovators, including early career female astronauts, scientists, engineers, and innovators, to engage with K-12 female STEM students and inspire the next generation of women to consider participating in STEM fields and to pursue careers in aerospace,” the bill stated. The “Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act” (H.R. 255) “amends the Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act to authorize the National Science Foundation to encourage its entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.” Trump said the bill “enables the National Science Foundation to support women inventors – of which there are many – researchers and scientists in bringing their discoveries to the business world, championing science and entrepreneurship and creating new ways to improve people’s lives.” “We need policies that help support women in the workforce, and that’s very much going to be addressed by my administration over the years and to get more and more of these bills coming out, and address the barriers faced by female entrepreneurs and those in STEM fields,” the president said. “We want American women who graduate from college with STEM degrees to be able to get STEM jobs that can support their families and help these American women to live out the American dream, which they are so qualified to live out,” Trump added. Squo solves through recent legislationAP 17 - (“Trump Signs Bills Aimed at Recruiting More Women in STEM Fields”, 2/28/17. http://kutv.com/news/nation-world/trump-signs-bills-aimed-at-recruiting-more-women-in-stem-fields,7/10/17)//JM WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has signed a pair of bills into law aimed at recruiting more women for the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Trump said at an Oval Office ceremony that it's unfair that only 1 in 4 women with a degree in one of these areas works in the field. One measure authorizes the NASA administrator to encourage young women to study STEM fields and pursue careers that will help advance science and space exploration. It also requires NASA to report to Congress on its plans for achieving the goals spelled out in the legislation. The second measure authorizes the National Science Foundation to encourage its entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world. Extend: Competitiveness High NowUS competiveness high now—infrastructure, innovation, GDP, investmentHolmes 14—Frank, BA in economics from University of Western Ontario, Global Economic analyst, CEO and Chief Investment Officer at U.S. Global Investors, 10-19-2014, "The US Is Still The Preeminent Place On Earth To Invest," Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/new-economic-report-card-shows-that-the-us-still-has-the-competitive-edge-2014-10, accessed 7/28, JMB America’s still got it. That’s according to the latest Global Competitiveness Report, which names the U.S. the third-most competitive nation in the world, our highest ranking since 2008. For 10 years now the World Economic Forum (WEF) has published its annual competitiveness report, which assesses the strength of 144 countries’ 12 “pillars,” including institutions, infrastructure, health and primary education and higher education. It then ranks these countries based on their overall ability to promote prosperity for their citizens. Singapore retains its number two spot for the fourth straight year, while Switzerland leads for the sixth year in a row. Top 20 Countries in 2013 - 2014 Global Competiveness Index From 2006 until 2008, the U.S. held the top position, but following the financial crisis, our ranking slipped to number seven in 2012. This year, the WEF notes: “U.S. companies are highly sophisticated and innovative, and they are supported by an excellent university system... Combined with flexible labor markets and the scale opportunities afforded by the sheer size of its domestic economy—the world’s largest by far—these qualities make the United States very competitive.” You might be thinking: But wait, didn’t China’s economy just exceed our own? Yes and no. It’s true that, when U.S. and China’s economies are not adjusted for costs of living, the U.S. is still “the world’s largest by far.” Our GDP stands at around $16.8 trillion whereas China’s is $9.3 trillion. But based on purchasing power parity (PPP), a calculation that factors in relative costs of living to make comparisons between and among countries “fairer,” China has indeed caught up with and surpassed the U.S. China's Economy Surpasses the U.S.'s Based on Purchasing Power Parity This news might bruise some readers’ egos, but it’s actually a tailwind for both commodities and our China Region Fund (USCOX). China is such an important player in the global economy that it’s nearly impossible for any serious investor to see China’s ascent as anything but positive. Below are some of the key takeaways from the Global Competitiveness Report. Strengths The economic report card gives the U.S. many accolades, including its capacity to attract and retain talented people from abroad. I always say that when people want to innovate and start businesses, they typically come here to the United States. The report reveals it’s relatively easy in the U.S. for “entrepreneurs with innovative but risky projects to find venture capital.” Our financial services are strong, and we have ready access to bank loans for sound business plans. When it comes to the ease of raising money by issuing shares on the stock market, we come in at sixth place, following Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Africa, New Zealand and Qatar. The United States ranks high in company spending on research and development. Only Switzerland beats us in our capacity for innovation. We score very well in our availability and corporate adoption of the latest technologies, as well as availability of scientists and engineers, quality of scientific research institutions and company spending on R&D. We rank eleventh in the number of patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), amounting to 149.8 per one million U.S. citizens. In the business sophistication pillar, we excel above all other countries in our use of sophisticated marketing tools and techniques. Areas for Improvement It comes as no surprise that the top three most problematic factors for doing business in the U.S., according to the report, are tax rates, tax regulations and inefficient government bureaucracy. It’s for these reasons that some businesses, including Burger King, Medtronic and Chiquita, are in the process of moving their corporate headquarters to countries with friendlier tax rates—Ireland, Canada and Singapore, among others. High tax rates, burdensome regulations and inefficient government bureaucracy are all cited as "problematic factors" for doing business in the U.S.To prevent such tax inversions from occurring, our tax code sorely needs amending. Our 35-percent corporate income tax rate is the highest among the 34 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and we actually rank 32 out of 34 in the 2014 International Tax Competitiveness Index. Only Portugal and France fare worse. Indeed, the Global Competitiveness Report shows that, to a large extent, taxes reduce the incentive to work: in this department we come in at number 37, just between China and Ghana. As for wastefulness of government spending, we rank number 73, trailing France by one point and China by 49 points. The report also shows that it can often be difficult for some businesses to comply with U.S. government regulations. If our government were to simplify the tax code and ease regulations, there’s no doubt that the U.S. could once again claim top honor. Other crucial areas for improvement include quality of electrical supply (we come in at number 24, following Barbados), soundness of banks (number 49), gross domestic secondary enrollment rate (59) and quality of math and science education (51). Emerging Countries Some of the emerging markets that we track at U.S. Global Investors either made gains this year or maintained their positions. Poland, for instance, held on to its rank of 43. The WEF noted the country’s “improvements… in institutions, infrastructure and education,” its “increased flexibility in labor market efficiency” and its “[c]ontinued structural reforms geared toward strengthening its innovation and knowledge-driven economy.” A well-educated population and secure financial market make Poland globally competitive, but to truly boost its innovative capacity, it needs to improve its infrastructure, soften regulations and make settling business disputes more efficient. Greece jumped 10 spots to reach the rank of 81. Despite its high levels of government debt, the Mediterranean country has managed to improve the functioning of its goods and labor markets and reduce its budget deficit. However, its government is still inefficient and its financial market has yet to recover from the recent crisis that hit parts of Europe. A lack of access to financing is the most problematic factor for doing business in Greece. Other key emerging markets that rose up the list were China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Keep Investing in America Despite a few areas for improvement, the United States is still the preeminent place on earth to invest, with plenty of openings for growth. As we continue to recover from the recession, now is the most opportune time in years to place your trust in America’s future. Our two U.S. equity funds, All American Equity Fund (GBTFX) and Holmes Macro Trends Fund (MEGAX), have been impacted by the global economic slowdown and growth scare. Cyclical stocks—the kind we focus on in these two funds—have lagged defensive stocks, by about 6 percent in the last month and a half. Cyclicals are those types of goods and services consumers can afford to purchase when the economy is performing well. Examples include discretionary-type companies such as Apple, Priceline and Tesla Motors. Defensives, on the other hand, typically remain stable, even in times of market downturns. Examples include electricity, gas and food. Cyclical Stocks Have Dropped 6 Percent in Last Month-and-a-Half Compared to Defensive Stocks This might sound like troubling news, but we view it as an opportunity. As you can see, a similar discrepancy between cyclical and defensive stocks occurred in April and May of last year, and yet mean reversion corrected it. We’re optimistic that such a turn will occur again, which means that now might be an ideal time to accumulate cyclicals. Our Near-Term Tax Free Fund invests in the schools that keep America competitive. Another way to potentially capitalize on our nation’s successes is U.S. Global Investors’ Near-Term Tax Free Fund (NEARX), which invests in high-quality, U.S. municipal bonds. A significant portion of the fund is invested in health services, public schools and higher education, three of the 12 pillars that the WEF assesses. To keep these services operational and efficient, state and local governments rely on funding from the very bonds we invest in, which in turn improves Americans’ livelihood as well as the businesses they run. US global competitiveness and innovation high nowDrzeniek-Hanuoz 14 — Margareta, Head of Global Competitiveness and Risks, Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum Geneva (“Why US competitiveness is on the rise,” World Economic Forum, September 3rd, Available Online at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/09/us-competitiveness-rise/, Accessed 07-10-2017 AZ) For an economist whose job it is to measure countries’ success (or otherwise) in laying the foundations for long-term prosperity, the concept of green shoots for me takes on a different meaning to those most often reported in the press as harbingers of better times. Increases in gross domestic product, falls in joblessness and upticks in new housing starts are of course good and welcome, but taken alone these indicators offer us little insight into how the US economy will be doing in five or ten years’ time. This is the purpose of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, which every year attempts to measure each of the factors that we feel are critical to an economy’s long-term success. We measure 112 of them in total, from the amount of red tape involved in starting a business and trust in political leaders to a country’s capacity to train and retain skilled workers. Why do we care about these? Because without these fundamental drivers of productivity, no economic recovery could ever be sustained. If this year’s report, which is published today, is anything to go by, green shoots of the kind I am used to looking out for are indeed starting to flower across the US. Of the 144 countries we measured, America climbed two places to third in our global ranking. It’s tough at the top and this two-place rise is not to be sniffed at – by leapfrogging Germany and Finland in this year’s Index (it now trails only Switzerland and second-placed Singapore), the country is sending a clear message that its long-term prospects are on the up. Looking beyond the US’s rise to third place, what does this year’s report tell us? For one thing, it confirms the US’ status as an innovation powerhouse. Not only is it home to some of the most sophisticated and innovative companies in the world, it is also excelling in efforts to groom the next generation of bluechip companies. Efforts such as the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which aims to revive the manufacturing sector by bridging the gap between early-stage public research and private commercialization, are indicative of the efforts being made here that other parts of the world find so hard to replicate. Competiveness high nowPerlberg 13—Steven, Steven Perlberg is a former reporter for Business Insider covering markets and finance, 6-22-2013, "10 Reasons Why America Will Continue To Dominate The Global Economy For Years," Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/10-ways-us-competitive-advantage-2013-6, JMB The U.S. economy is in recovery mode right now. Sure, investors have been spooked by Fed taper talks, the Bank of Japan's unprecedented economic experiment, persistent jitters out of Europe, and concerns of a credit crisis in China. But by in large, investors should be pleased with the way things are going domestically, according to a new report from Joseph Quinlan, Chief Market Strategist for U.S. Trust. We walk you through U.S. Trust's 10 theses that show "what's right with America." 1) The U.S. economy is the largest and most productive in the world - The U.S. accounts for one-fifth of global GDP with only 4.5% of the world's population. America's economy is nearly twice the size of China's in nominal dollars. Plus, the U.S. is one of just a few developed countries with real GDP higher than it was before the crisis, according to the report. real gdp post crisis US U.S. Trust 2) The U.S. leads the world in manufactured goods - Nominal manufacturing output totaled $1.9 trillion in 2012, a rise of 27% from 2009. Employment in the sector has increased by 500,000 workers since 2010, according to U.S. Trust. manufacturing employment in the us U.S. Trust 3) The U.S. is among the largest exporters of goods and services - Exports since the recession have taken off. In 2012, total exports totaled $2.2 trillion, nearly a 40% rise from 2009 levels, according to the report. US exports since recession U.S. Trust 4) Foreign investors still love the U.S.- U.S. Foreign Direct Investment inflows in the post-crisis years racked up $736 billion. That's 15% of the global total, according to U.S. Trust. And while people talk about investment in China, America is still on top by a landslide. FDI inflows US China U.S. Trust 5) America has the top global brands - In 2008, eight out of 10 of the world's top brands were American. top global brands U.S. Trusts 6) The U.S. is the world leader in technology - People still flock to America to become tech innovators. The U.S. is home to the major social media players and beats out other countries in spending levels. global IT spending U.S. Trusts 7) America has the world's best colleges - American college kids fill their minds with kegs worth of knowledge at some of the world's best universities. Six out of the top 10 universities in the 2012 Quacquarelli Symonds World Rankings’ were American. top 10 world universities U.S. Trusts 8) The U.S. dollar is king - It's the world's reserve currency. From the U.S. Trust report: "The greenback accounted for roughly 62% of global central bank reserves as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to the IMF, a share down slightly from 2008 but relatively constant over the post-crisis years." It crushed the beleaguered Euro. Dollar versus Euro world central bank reserves U.S. Trusts 9) The U.S. has one of the most competitive economies - In the latest competitiveness survey from the World Economic Forum, the U.S. slipped to seventh place, down two spots, according to the report. Still, U.S. Trust guesses America will head north on the list in the future. top 10 most competitive countries U.S. Trusts 10) America is in the middle of an energy Renaissance - Much to the chagrin of some environmentalists, U.S. domestic oil production is in revival mode. It exceeded imports for the first time in 16 years, according to the report. Thanks to "fracking" that unlocked shale in North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, the U.S. has seen a major surge in production, the report notes. US weekly crude oil production U.S. Trusts Extend: Edu/STEM not K2 CompetitivenessIndustry elites prove it takes more than STEMZakaria 15 Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for The Washington Post, is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and the author of “In Defense of a Liberal Education,” 2015, “Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous,” The Washington Post, 03/26, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-stem-wont-make-us-successful/2015/03/26/5f4604f2-d2a5-11e4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html?utm_term=.475e605bf8aa Accessed 07/28/2017 //jsaltman Innovation in business has always involved insights beyond technology. Consider the case of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and majored in psychology while he attended college. And Facebook’s innovations have a lot to do with psychology. Zuckerberg has often pointed out that before Facebook was created, most people shielded their identities on the Internet. It was a land of anonymity. Facebook’s insight was that it could create a culture of real identities, where people would voluntarily expose themselves to their friends, and this would become a transformative platform. Of course, Zuckerberg understands computers deeply and uses great coders to put his ideas into practice, but as he has put it, Facebook is “as much psychology and sociology as it is technology.” Twenty years ago, tech companies might have survived simply as product manufacturers. Now they have to be on the cutting edge of design, marketing and social networking. You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes and coffee. The value added is in the brand — how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained. Or consider America’s vast entertainment industry, built around stories, songs, design and creativity. All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum. Critical thinking is, in the end, the only way to protect American jobs. David Autor, the MIT economist who has most carefully studied the impact of technology and globalization on labor, writes that “human tasks that have proved most amenable to computerization are those that follow explicit, codifiable procedures — such as multiplication — where computers now vastly exceed human labor in speed, quality, accuracy, and cost efficiency. Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense — skills that we understand only tacitly — for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet.” In 2013, two Oxford scholars conducted a comprehensive study on employment and found that, for workers to avoid the computerization of their jobs, “they will have to acquire creative and social skills.” This doesn’t in any way detract from the need for training in technology, but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out — yet. And for those jobs, and that life, you could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition. One final reason to value a liberal education lies in its roots. For most of human history, all education was skills-based. Hunters, farmers and warriors taught their young to hunt, farm and fight. But about 2,500 years ago, that changed in Greece, which began to experiment with a new form of government: democracy. This innovation in government required an innovation in education. Basic skills for sustenance were no longer sufficient. Citizens also had to learn how to manage their own societies and practice self-government. They still do. The aff doesn’t solve – STEM isn’t the main contributor to competitiveness and higher education is where the incentives should goStudy.com citing Paul Whitely 10 (Paul; Paul Whiteley, professor of politics at the University of Essex; “STEM Education Not Necessarily Linked to Economic Growth”; http://study.com/articles/STEM_Education_Not_Necessarily_Linked_to_Economic_Growth.html; published 8/31/10; accessed 7/10/17) [TG] Saving Ourselves with STEM In education communities across the globe, STEM subjects are all the rage. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and many believe these fields hold the key to innovation, technological advancement and, perhaps most importantly, renewed economic health. In the U.S., the Obama administration has led the STEM charge with programs like Educate to Innovate, a campaign that promotes extracurricular strategies to supplement STEM education in the classroom. The feds hope that by increasing STEM literacy in America's youth, they'll see more STEM students in higher education and, in the long term, in the workforce. The British government has been similarly vocal about promoting STEM subjects. In January 2010, then business secretary Lord Mandelson addressed the House of Lords to detail, among other things, the government's plan to create 10,000 extra university places in England for the 2010-2011 school year. The new places are intended to focus on priority job skills, and almost all of them are in STEM subjects. Mandelson argued that this is necessary because STEM education is 'crucial in securing future prosperity.' It's clear that whether you're in the U.S., the U.K. or just about anywhere in the world, the commonly accepted belief is that science, technology, engineering and math are the building blocks of society. Without more students focusing on these subjects, innovation will falter and the economy will suffer - or so the story goes. Science Education STEM: Magic Bullet or Education Trend? In England, some people are questioning the accuracy of this perception. In July, the British education journal Times Higher Education (THE) spoke with Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics. He argued that the focus on STEM subjects is 'economically irrational' when the current labor market is demanding graduates in fields like finance, media and law. But it's these very fields that are being sacrificed in order to promote STEM subjects., at least in the U.K. The Higher Education Council for England is offering universities funding to move places away from lower price-band subjects and into STEM and modern languages. THE analyzed funding requests under the program and discovered that business, law, sociology, English and history were the subjects most commonly being reduced to make room for more STEM students. This month, Paul Whiteley, a politics professor at the University of Essex, has also come out in criticism of the STEM-above-all mentality - and he has data to back up his claims. Professor Whiteley's research shows that while educational attainment in general is clearly linked to economic growth on a national level, there's no clear correlation for any specific field, including the STEM subjects. Professor Whiteley compared two sets of data: Information on economic growth from 2000-2007 for 30 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries from the Penn Database and UNESCO statistics on the number of students studying different types of subjects for the same time period. He analyzed the two data sets to determine if there is a relationship between the number of students studying STEM - or any other - subjects and the rate of economic growth. Correlation Between Science Studies and Economic Growth by Professor Whiteley Source: Professor Paul Whiteley, from Economic Growth and Tertiary Education Data Contrary to the claims made by many STEM advocates, there was no statistically significant relationship between economic growth and the percentage of students enrolled in any particular discipline. The percentage of graduates in science showed only a 0.23 correlation to economic growth (see above), and the link was even weaker (0.11) for engineering graduates and economic growth. These findings have been criticized for the crude nature of the analysis. Simply comparing the two sets of statistics doesn't leave a lot of room for considering other factors that might strengthen the link between STEM education and economic health. Commenters on the original THE article, published last week, note that there are many other factors that may be at work, including the presence of foreign STEM students in total enrollment figures, the fact that economies grow over time (and there were STEM grads before 2000), the presence of policies and laws affecting growth that may disrupt the relationship and the simple fact that the quality of STEM education can vary significantly both between countries and between institutions. Clearly, Professor Whiteley's analysis isn't the final word on the subject. In fact, the project may be more aptly labeled an exercise than a study. It's a quick survey of available data that serves to make a point: The popularity of STEM subjects among politicians may be unfounded. And that's dangerous when it means that education funding, an increasingly precious resource, is following trends, not facts. Before higher education dollars are directed to STEM at the expense of other subjects, education policymakers around the world need to take a hard look at their assumptions. College Graduates However, Professor Whiteley did find one relationship with which no one in the education community disagrees: Higher numbers of students enrolled in postsecondary education in any subject has a positive correlation (0.46) with economic growth. In other words, the more students enrolled in colleges and universities, the faster a nation's economy will grow. While many of the same confounds may apply, from the short span of the analysis to the missing 'other' factors, the contrast between this relationship and his other correlations demonstrates Professor Whiteley's fundamental complaint: 'The important point for policymakers is that they should invest in higher education in general, not necessarily in particular subjects.' Education isn’t key to productivityRycx, Saks, & Tojerow 15 (François Rycx is Professor of Economics at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and affiliated to the Centre Emile Bernheim (CEB), the Department of Applied Economics of ULB (DULBEA) and the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). He received his Ph.D. in Economics in 2001 from the ULB. His research is in the area of empirical labour economics, in particular the analysis of matched employer-employee data and the determinants of earnings inequality and firm productivity. He does also research on the economics of trade unions, income inequality, minimum wages, and personnel economics. He has advised various organisations including the European Central Bank, Eurofound, the European Trade Union Institute, the National Bank of Belgium, the European Commission and the OECD. Yves Saks works at the National Bank of Belgium. Ilan Tojerow has a Degree in Economics & Political Science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), a Master (DEA) in European Economic Integration at University of Sussex (UK) and a PhD in Economics at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). Since October 2012, he is Assistant Professor at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (ULB). He is affiliated to the Centre Emile Bernheim (CEB) and the Department of Applied Economics of ULB (DULBEA). He was previously FNRS research associate, visiting Scholar (Fulbright/BAEF Fellow) at the University of California, Berkeley (Center for Labor Economics), visiting research fellow at the Research Department of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB) and visiting assistant professor at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). His fields of competence are: wage inequalities and economic performance, labour economics, and European integration and labour market policies. May 2015 “Does Education Raise Productivity and Wages Equally? The Moderating Roles of Age, Gender and Industry”, IZA, http://ftp.iza.org/dp9043.pdf Accessed 7/1/17 LJB) A vast literature examines the impact of education on wages (Ashenfelter et al., 1999; Card, 1999). Empirical results typically document a substantial wage gap between high- and loweducated workers. Moreover, they show that this gap has been increasing over the last few decades (Harmon et al., 2003; Picketty and Saez, 2003). Diversity in individual, job and/or firm characteristics accounts for a significant fraction of the educational wage differential. However, a substantial wage premium is still recorded for more highly educated workers after controlling for observable heterogeneity and other econometric issues such as endogeneity (Chevalier, 2011; Dickson and Harmon, 2011; Devereux and Fan, 2011). Human capital theory (Becker, 1964) posits that: i) education develops skills that make workers more productive, and ii) wage differentials reflect differences in productivity. Accordingly, more highly educated workers would earn higher wages ceteris paribus simply because they are more productive than their less educated counterparts. This explanation of pay inequality has been challenged by empirical and theoretical work on labour markets: “Sociologists have long been dissatisfied with [neoclassical and human capital theory], particularly with their silence about the many forces that generate a mismatch between marginal productivity or skills and wages in the ever-present short run” (Weeden, 2002: 71). Indeed, a range of labour market theories hypothesize sources of inequality other than labour productivity, such as collective action, labour market institutions or the use of power and authority to obtain economic advantages (Berg, 1981; Kalleberg and Sørensen, 1979). Although each of these theories on inequality focuses on distinct social processes, they appear to have in common that they associate labour market inequality at least implicitly to an element of ‘unearned’, or ‘unjust’ allocation of resources to dominant groups. On the other hand, economists have also developed explanations of differences between productivity and wages without abandoning the assumptions of individual rationality and profit-maximizing firms. In this literature, productivity-wage gaps are thought to be rational strategies of firms to address a range of market distortions (Lazear and Shaw, 2007). The abundance of theories on education-driven productivity-wage gaps is not matched by a corresponding body of empirical literature. Indeed, very few studies have actually examined how the composition of the labour force affects firm productivity (Galindo-Rueda and Haskel, 2005; Haegeland and Klette, 1999; Haltiwanger et al., 1999; Lebedenski and Vandenberghe, 3 2014; Moretti, 2004). 1 Moreover, the evidence on whether education raises productivity and wages equally is very thin, inconclusive and subject to various possible econometric biases. The endogeneity of education and the presence of firm-level time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity are for instance seldom controlled for. Most estimates regarding the educationproductivity nexus and the existence of possible education-driven productivity-wage gaps are thus potentially inconsistent. What’s more, to our knowledge, no study has tried to assess whether the education-productivity-wage nexus varies across working environments. Yet, numerous arguments (notably related to working conditions, adjustment costs, information asymmetries, social norms or labour market regulations) suggest that this is probably the case. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we put the relationship between the educational composition of the workforce and firm productivity to an updated test, using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data for the years 1999-2010. These data offer several advantages. The panel covers a large part of the private sector, provides accurate information on average productivity (i.e. the average value added per hour worked) and allows us to control for a wide range of worker and firm characteristics. It also enables us to address important methodological issues, often neglected in other studies, such as firm-level timeinvariant heterogeneity, endogeneity and state dependence of firm productivity. To do so, we rely on both the generalized method of moments (GMM) and the Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) estimators. A second objective is to examine whether education increases productivity and wage costs equally (i.e. to extend the analysis to productivity-wage gaps). Finally, our study aims to provide first evidence on whether the alignment between productivity and wage costs across educational levels depends on the characteristics of workers (i.e. their age and sex) and the sector in which they work (i.e. industry vs. services). Education not key to global economic competiveness- research flaws prove no link between economic decline and poor educationWest 12 (Martin West, associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, deputy director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Program on Education Policy and Governance, executive editor of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. West studies the politics of K-12 education in the United States and how education policies affect student learning and non-cognitive development. His current projects include studies of public opinion on education policy, the effects of charter school attendance and on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, data use in schools, and the influence of relative pay on teacher quality. In 2014-15, West worked as senior education policy advisor to the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. He previously taught at Brown University and was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is now a nonresident senior fellow; 2012; “Education and Global Competitiveness, Lessons for the United States from International Evidence”; Harvard; 2012; https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9544459/West%20Education%20and%20Global%20Competitiveness%20chapter%20for%20DASH.pdf?sequence=1; Accessed on 7-4-2017; CRB) American students now complete less schooling than those in many other developed countries and, at the secondary level, perform substantially worse in math and science. Moreover, America’s longstanding edge in higher education is fading as developing countries increasingly make investments in higher education a central part of their economic development strategies. How concerned should we be about these developments? And is it the improvement in educational outcomes abroad that should motivate our concern? After all, until very recently the performance of the U.S. economy had far surpassed that of the industrialized world as a whole, despite our students’ mediocre performance on international tests. Some observers have gone so far as to question the existence of a link between available measures of the performance of national education systems and economic success. Education researcher Gerald Bracey in 2002 criticized those asserting that low-quality education threatened our national prosperity, noting that “none of these fine gentlemen has provided any data on the relationship between the economy’s health and the performance of schools. Our long economic boom suggests there isn’t one—or that our schools are better than the critics claim” (Bracey 2002, B01).7 Bracey’s evidentiary concern was not entirely misplaced. Economists as far back as Adam Smith have highlighted the theoretical importance of human capital as a source of national economic growth. For technologically advanced countries, highly educated workers represent a source of innovations needed to further enhance labor productivity (Benhabib and Spiegel 1994). For countries far from the frontier, education is necessary to allow workers to be able adopt new technologies developed elsewhere (Nelson and Phelps 1966). Because a given country is likely to be both near and far from the technological frontier in various industries at any given point in time, both of these mechanisms are likely to operate simultaneously. Yet rigorous empirical evidence supporting these commonsense propositions has been notoriously difficult to produce. One key limitation of early research examining the relationship between education and economic growth is that it was based on crude measures of school enrollment ratios or the average years of schooling completed by the adult population. Although studies taking this approach tend to find a positive relationship between schooling and economic growth across countries, years of schooling is an incomplete and potentially quite misleading indicator of the performance of national education systems (see, for example, Krueger and Lindahl 2001). As noted above, measures of educational attainment implicitly assume that a year of schooling is equally valuable regardless of where it is completed—despite the clear evidence from international assessments that the skills achieved by students of the same age vary widely across countries. Education not key to economic competitiveness- US has other methods that make it competitiveHanushek, Jamison, Jamison, et-al Woessmann 08 (Dean T. Jamison, professor of health economics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Eric A. Hanushek, economist, professor, and fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, Eliot A. Jamison, investment professional at Babcock & Brown, and Ludger Woessmann, Professor of Economics at the University of Munich, joint appointment as Head of the "Human Capital and Innovation" Department atIfo Institute for Economic Research, Germany; 2008 “Education and Economic Growth”; Education Next; 2008; http://educationnext.org/education-and-economic-growth/; accessed 7-4-17; CRB) The United States has never done well on international assessments of student achievement. Instead, its level of cognitive skills is only about average among the developed countries. Yet the country’s GDP growth rate has been higher than average over the past century. If cognitive skills are so important to economic growth, how can we explain the puzzling case of the U.S.? Part of the answer is that the United States may be resting on its historic record as the world’s leader in educational attainment. In addition, the United States has other advantages, some of which are entirely separate and apart from the quality of its schooling. The U.S. maintains generally freer labor and product markets than most countries in the world. There is less government regulation of firms, and trade unions are less powerful than in many other countries. Put more broadly, the U.S. has generally less intrusion of government in the operation of the economy, including lower tax rates and minimal government production through nationalized industries. Taken together, these characteristics of the U.S. economy encourage investment, permit the rapid development of new products and activities by firms, and allow U.S. workers to adjust to new opportunities. Those economic institutions seem to matter on their own and in conjunction with cognitive skills. Our analyses suggest that the value of a high-quality education system is substantially diminished in closed economies. We estimate that the effect of a one-standard-deviation improvement in cognitive skills on annual economic growth is 0.9 percentage points per year in closed economies, identified by heavy restrictions on international trade, but 2.5 percentage points in open economies. It may be that rich human capital combines with a laissez-faire economy to foster robust economic growth. Extend: Competitiveness not K2 Heg/Econ“Competitiveness” is the wrong focus — it’s a bankrupt metaphor.Krugman 11 — Paul Krugman, Columnist for the New York Times, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, 2011 (“The Competition Myth,” New York Times, January 23rd, Available Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html, Accessed 08-11-2013) Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.” This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing. But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America. About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness? It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly. Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals. But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No. Krugman is right — “competitiveness” is economically bankrupt.Schrage 94 — Michael Schrage, writer, consultant and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994 (“The Myth of a 'Competitive' Economic Policy,” Los Angeles Times, March 10th, Available Online at http://articles.latimes.com/print/1994-03-10/business/fi-32358_1_economic-policy, Accessed 08-11-2013) An American economy that cares a great deal about boosting domestic productivity requires policy-makers who care very little about global competitiveness. A Zen koan for the nationalistic '90s? The sound of one Keynesian clapping? A lyric for aspiring autarkists? None on the above. It's the startling pronouncement of MIT's Paul Krugman, one of the country's most brilliant young economists, a nonpartisan academic with a reputation for intellectual honesty and a cruel tongue. You might recall that Krugman was widely quoted criticizing industrial-policy economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson's research when President Clinton named her chairwoman of his Council of Economic Advisers. Alternating between statistical scalpels and macroeconomic machetes, Krugman bloodily eviscerates "competitiveness" as a policy doctrine without any kind of economic validity. What supply-side "economics" was to Reaganomics, Krugman asserts, competitiveness has become to Clintonomics: a sort of psuedo-rational pastiche that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir once described as "pathological science"--that is to say, no science at all. "To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy," he says in his essay "Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "a government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the theory of evolution." "Gee, we must be making progress," smiles Dan Burton, president of the Council of (sigh) Competitiveness, which was formed by frustrated high-tech executives in the wake of the Ronald Reagan Administration's rejection of its own presidential commission on the topic. "In 1987, competitiveness was dismissed as a buzzword. Today, it's graduated to being a dangerous obsession." Might Krugman be the one with the dangerous obsession? Not after you see the numbers. His arguments would command respect even without his impeccable credentials. They're important because he takes the global competitiveness champions like Tyson, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and health care guru Ira Magaziner on their own terms, impatiently redoes their arithmetic for them and makes a strong case that competitiveness issues amount to little more than a rounding error in the $6-trillion U.S. economy. Threats to hegemony are inflatedZenko and Cohen, 12 - Micah, Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Michael A., Fellow at the Century Foundation (“Clear and Present Safety: The United States Is More Secure Than Washington Thinks,” Foreign Affairs, http://www.umanet.org/interfaith/index.cfm/a/is-world-a-safer-place-now/fa/view/articleID/58, accessed 7/28, JMB There is just one problem. It is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts and greater political freedom than at virtually any other point in human history. All over the world, people enjoy longer life expectancy and greater economic opportunity than ever before. The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful, and even in the middle of a sustained downturn, the U.S. economy remains among one of the world’s most vibrant and adaptive. Although the United States faces a host of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens and can be managed with existing diplomatic, economic, and, to a much lesser extent, military tools. This reality is barely reflected in U.S. national security strategy or in American foreign policy debates. President Barack Obama’s most recent National Security Strategy aspires to "a world in which America is stronger, more secure, and is able to overcome our challenges while appealing to the aspirations of people around the world." Yet that is basically the world that exists today. The United States is the world’s most powerful nation, unchallenged and secure. But the country’s political and policy elite seems unwilling to recognize this fact, much less integrate it into foreign policy and national security decision-making. The disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering results from a confluence of factors. The most obvious and important is electoral politics. Hyping dangers serves the interests of both political parties. For Republicans, who have long benefited from attacking Democrats for their alleged weakness in the face of foreign threats, there is little incentive to tone down the rhetoric; the notion of a dangerous world plays to perhaps their greatest political advantage. For Democrats, who are fearful of being cast as feckless, acting and sounding tough is a shield against GOP attacks and an insurance policy in case a challenge to the United States materializes into a genuine threat. Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government -- defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments. There is also a pernicious feedback loop at work. Because of the chronic exaggeration of the threats facing the United States, Washington overemphasizes military approaches to problems (including many that could best be solved by nonmilitary means). The militarization of foreign policy leads, in turn, to further dark warnings about the potentially harmful effects of any effort to rebalance U.S. national security spending or trim the massive military budget -- warnings that are inevitably bolstered by more threat exaggeration. Last fall, General Norton Schwartz, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, said that defense cuts that would return military spending to its 2007 level would undermine the military’s "ability to protect the nation" and could create "dire consequences." Along the same lines, Panetta warned that the same reductions would "invite aggression" from enemies. These are a puzzling statements given that the U.S. defense budget is larger than the next 14 countries’ defense budgets combined and that the United States still maintains weapons systems designed to fight an enemy that disappeared 20 years ago. Of course, threat inflation is not new. During the Cold War, although the United States faced genuine existential threats, American political leaders nevertheless hyped smaller threats or conflated them with larger ones. Today, there are no dangers to the United States remotely resembling those of the Cold War era, yet policymakers routinely talk in the alarmist terms once used to describe superpower conflict. Indeed, the mindset of the United States in the post-9/11 world was best (albeit crudely) captured by former Vice President Dick Cheney. While in office, Cheney promoted the idea that the United States must prepare for even the most remote threat as though it were certain to occur. The journalist Ron Suskind termed this belief "the one percent doctrine," a reference to what Cheney called the "one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon." According to Suskind, Cheney insisted that the United States must treat such a remote potential threat "as a certainty in terms of our response." Such hair-trigger responsiveness is rarely replicated outside the realm of national security, even when the government confronts problems that cause Americans far more harm than any foreign threat. According to an analysis by the budget expert Linda Bilmes and the economist Joseph Stiglitz, in the ten years since 9/11, the combined direct and indirect costs of the U.S. response to the murder of almost 3,000 of its citizens have totaled more than $3 trillion. A study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that during an overlapping period, from 2000 to 2006, 137,000 Americans died prematurely because they lacked health insurance. Although the federal government maintains robust health insurance programs for older and poor Americans, its response to a national crisis in health care during that time paled in comparison to its response to the far less deadly terrorist attacks. Rather than Cheney’s one percent doctrine, what the United States actually needs is a 99 percent doctrine: a national security strategy based on the fact that the United States is a safe and well-protected country and grounded in the reality that the opportunities for furthering U.S. interests far exceed the threats to them. Fully comprehending the world as it is today is the best way to keep the United States secure and resistant to the overreactions that have defined its foreign policy for far too long. BETTER THAN EVER The United States, along with the rest of the world, currently faces a period of economic and political uncertainty. But consider four long-term global trends that underscore just how misguided the constant fear-mongering in U.S. politics is: the falling prevalence of violent conflict, the declining incidence of terrorism, the spread of political freedom and prosperity, and the global improvement in public health. In 1992, there were 53 armed conflicts raging in 39 countries around the world; in 2010, there were 30 armed conflicts in 25 countries. Of the latter, only four have resulted in at least 1,000 battle-related deaths and can therefore be classified as wars, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program: the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia, two of which were started by the United States. Today, wars tend to be low-intensity conflicts that, on average, kill about 90 percent fewer people than did violent struggles in the 1950s. Indeed, the first decade of this century witnessed fewer deaths from war than any decade in the last century. Meanwhile, the world’s great powers have not fought a direct conflict in more than 60 years -- "the longest period of major power peace in centuries," as the Human Security Report Project puts it. Nor is there much reason for the United States to fear such a war in the near future: no state currently has the capabilities or the inclination to confront the United States militarily. Competitiveness isn’t key to hegFerguson, Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, ‘3 [Niall, Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, Professor of Financial History at NYU, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Foreign Policy #134, 1-2/2003, pp. 18-22, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Power,” JSTOR, RSR] But GDP doesn't stand for great diplomatic power. If institutions aren't in place to translate the economy grows faster than public interest in foreign affairs-then product is nothing more than potential power. The United States over-took Great Britain in terms of GDP in the 1870s. But it was not until World War I that the United States finally overtook the British Empire as a global power. In any case, national growth rates in the next 20 years are unlikely to match those of the last three decades. Depressed Japan's will almost cer-tainly be lower, while growth in the United States might conceivably be higher, if there is any truth to the claim that investments in information tech-nology during the 1990s permanently boosted U.S. productivity. And China will have trouble sus-taining average annual growth rates of more than 5 percent in the coming decades. Already the Asian behemoth is suffering serious social growing pains as market forces rend asunder what was once a command economy. Before 1914, Russia had the fastest growing economy in Europe. But the ensu-ing social polarization and war caused Russia's collapse in 1917. Extend: Edu not K2 WarmingPolitics outweigh any effect education has on warmingWorland 15 – Justin Worland, Justin Worland is a New York-based writer for TIME covering energy and the environment, 2015("This Factor Predicts What People Think About Climate Change", Time, 7-27-2015, Available Online from http://time.com/3972986/climate-change-education/, Accessed on 7-4-2017)//BM Around the world, people with higher levels of education are more likely to understand climate change than their less-educated counterparts, according to new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Using data collected by Gallup from 119 countries, researchers found that education level was a key determinant of climate change risk perceptions in 62% of countries around the world. But all bets are off when it comes to education and views of climate change in the United States, along with a select few English speaking countries. Political party and ideology predicted views of climate change in the U.S., not education alone. (Information on political ideology and climate change beliefs was not available for countries outside the U.S.) "[For Americans] just having higher education does not mean that you understand or accept the science," says study co-author Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "[Americans] who have attained higher education are better at cherry picking evidence that seems to validate what we already believe." Read More: How the Recession Accidentally Helped the Planet Overall, different regions had vastly different levels of awareness of climate change. Two-thirds of people in Egypt, Bangladesh and Nigeria, for instance, had never heard of climate change, the study found. Still, many in developing countries who lacked formal knowledge of the concept said they had noticed changes in their local weather patterns indicative of climate change. The lack of climate change awareness in developing countries should be of particular concern because many of those countries have been deemed more vulnerable to environmental changes. "If you don't know you're at risk, you're even more at risk because you can't possibly be taking the actions to prepare," says Leiserowitz. Global public awareness about climate change could also play a role in negotiations for a global treaty on climate change at a United Nations conference on the issue later this year. Public support for an agreement will help countries to follow through on commitments made at the summit, Leiserowitz said. "It won't be some top-down commandment from a legally binding treaty from the UN making everybody do it," he says. "It's going to be national dynamics where each government commits to doing this and then they have to get people onboard to support those policies." Extend: Heg Decline InevTrump already ended U.S. leadership.Brands 17 — H.W. Brands, Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas-Austin, former Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University, holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas-Austin, 2017 (“From Wilson to Trump: How the ‘American Century’ of global leadership ends with ‘America First’,” The Hill, July 2nd, Available Online at http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/340277-from-wilson-to-trump-how-the-american-century-of-global, Accessed 07-14-2017) The American Century couldn’t last forever. Its underpinning was the economic hegemony that peaked in 1945, when America’s industrial output matched that of the rest of the world combined and the dollar’s dominion let American negotiators dictate rules for the world economy. America’s economic edge was bound to erode as Germany and Japan recovered from the war. It lost additional ground after China ditched one-party socialism in favor of one-party capitalism. American presidents had to adjust. The World Trade Organization bent less readily to American will than the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, its predecessor. Antitrust actions by the European Union mattered as much to multinational firms as decisions by the U.S. Justice Department. The dollar, once the anchor of global finance, floated on the same uncertain sea of hopes and fears as other currencies. Yet if the American Century rested on American economic strength, it also rested on American leadership. Wilson staked America’s claim to leadership; every president from FDR to Obama confirmed it. And Trump threw it away. Thus the American Century ends, not with a bang but a tweet. Trump has already abrogated U.S. leadership.Bremmer 16 — Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of Eurasia Group—a global political risk research and consulting firm, Global Research Professor at New York University, Founding Chairman of the Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk at the World Economic Forum, Harold J. Newman Distinguished Fellow in Geopolitics at the Asia Society Policy Institute, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, 2016 (“The Era of American Global Leadership Is Over. Here's What Comes Next,” Time, December 19th, Available Online at http://time.com/4606071/american-global-leadership-is-over/, Accessed 07-14-2017) Trump's "America first" approach fundamentally changes the U.S. role in the world. Trump agrees with leaders of both political parties that the U.S. is an exceptional nation, but he insists that the country can't remain exceptional if it keeps stumbling down the path that former Presidents, including Republicans and Democrats, have followed since the end of World War II. Washington's ambition to play the role of indispensable power allows both allies and rivals to treat U.S. taxpayers like chumps, he argues. Better to build a "What's in it for us?" approach to the rest of the world. This is a complete break with a foreign policy establishment that Trump has worked hard to delegitimize—and which he continues to ostracize by waving off charges of Russian interference in the election and by refusing the daily intelligence briefings offered to all Presidents-elect. American power, once a trump card, is now a wild card. Instead of a superpower that wants to impose stability and values on a fractious and valueless global order, the U.S. has become the single biggest source of international uncertainty. Extend: No Impact to Heg DeclineNo leadership impact — the U.S. is not indispensable.Zenko 14 — Micah Zenko, Douglas Dillon Fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Research Assistant at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, former Researcher at the Brookings Institution, 2014 (“The Myth of the Indispensable Nation,” Foreign Policy, November 6th, Available Online at http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/11/06/the-myth-of-the-indispensable-nation/, Accessed 08-10-2015) Indispensables also hold an unrealistic faith in the latent power of leadership that flows from suppose it indispensable-ness. During a House hearing in September, Gerald Feierstein, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, declared: "When the United States stands up and demonstrates resolve and demonstrates a direction, the international community generally supports and falls into place behind." Really? This hypothesis would surprise anyone who tracks multilateral fora where U.S. officials state their policy positions and then repeatedly fail to compel other leaders to get in line — see, for example, the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, and the WTO trade talks since the Doha Round opened in 2001. And if Feierstein is referring only to warfare, then why do so few countries with deployable military assets participate in U.S.-led campaigns in a meaningful way? The United States provided the majority of the actual combat forces and airpower in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and is doing so again in the air campaign to counter the Islamic State (IS). Most countries that could participate have either declined to do so, or are taking part by providing such limited and constrained capabilities that they are not significantly enhancing the coalition’s capabilities. In each of these military interventions, the United States decried unilateralism, attempted to form a large coalition, and then found itself paying most of the costs, dropping most of the bombs, sacrificing the most soldiers, and losing most of his credibility. Whether it is multilateral talks or military operations, other governments do not do as Washington demands because, quite simply, it is not in their national interests to do so. Moreover, the United States refuses to employ the political will or coercive leverage to force them to. The point being is that few, if any, substantive and enduring foreign-policy activities can be done unilaterally, and asserting one’s indispensability does nothing to alter others’ interests. It is often stated that countries in the Middle East or East Asia are looking for America "to lead," but they actually want U.S. leadership on their terms, and in support of their own narrow objectives. The moment that leadership conflicts with the visions and objectives those countries hold, they cease or severely limit their partnerships with the United States. Finally, the Indispensables belief that America’s role in the world is "absolutely necessary" in all areas is simply arrogant. It discounts the tremendous and essential contributions from non-U.S. countries, international non-governmental organizations, and civil society. This includes the 128 countries contributing 104,184 troops and police forces currently deployed in support of sixteen U.N. peacekeeping operations worldwide. The United States provides only 113 troops to U.N. peacekeeping operations, but, importantly, foots 27 percent of the bill and provides logistics support. Or, consider the billions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, Norwegian Refugee Council, Mercy Corps, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, and countless others, which improve the lives of the poorest and most in need. Each of these public health, humanitarian, and development organizations offer the deep pockets and political neutrality that allows them access to areas where the United States simply cannot or will not go. The reason that the United States is not the indispensable nation is simple: the human and financial costs, the tremendous risks, and degree of political commitment required to do so are thankfully lacking in Washington. Moreover, the structure and dynamics of the international system would reject or resist it, as it does in so many ways that frustrate the United States from achieving its foreign policy objectives. The United States can be truly indispensable in a few discrete domains, such as for military operations, which as pointed out above has proven disastrous recently. But overall there is no indispensable nation now, nor has there been in modern history. Indispensables may feel compelled to repeat this feel-good myth, but nobody should believe them. Other countries fill-in — retrenchment doesn’t cause war.Preble and Friedman 10 — Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, holds a Ph.D. in History from Temple University, and Benjamin H. Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010 (“A U.S. Defense Budget Worthy of Its Name,” The Globalist, November 18th, Available Online at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12582, Accessed 01-07-2011) Another argument for high military spending is that U.S. military primacy underlies global stability. According to this theory, our forces and alliance commitments dampen conflict between potential rivals, preventing them from fighting wars that would disrupt trade. This logic liberates defense planning from old-fashioned considerations like enemies and the balance of power. It sees the requirements of global policing as the basis for the size of the U.S. military. That is no standard at all, which is why hawks embrace it. Boundless objectives justify limitless costs. That argument overestimates both the American military's contribution to international stability and the danger that instability abroad poses to Americans. U.S. force deployments in Europe and Asia now contribute little to peace, at best making already low odds of war among states slightly lower. Inertia, rather than our security requirements, explains the perseverance of U.S. military alliances. During the Cold War, Japan, Western Europe and South Korea grew wealthy enough to defend themselves. We should let them do so. These alliances heighten our force requirements and threaten to drag us into wars, while providing no obvious benefit. Without our forces there, our allies would pay the cost of balancing local adversaries. Extend: No Impact to Econ DeclineNo impact to economic decline – prefer new dataDaniel Drezner 14, IR prof at Tufts, The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during the Great Recession, World Politics, Volume 66. Number 1, January 2014, pp. 123-164 The final significant outcome addresses a dog that hasn't barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.42 They voiced genuine concern that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fueled impressions of a surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggest otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has concluded that "the average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007."43 Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis, as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict, as Lotta Themner and Peter Wallensteen conclude: "[T]he pattern is one of relative stability when we consider the trend for the past five years."44 The secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed. Rogers Brubaker observes that "the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected."43 No impactBarnett 9 (Thomas, Senior Strategic Researcher – Naval War College, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis”, Asset Protection Network, 8-25, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx) When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for. Extend: Warming InevWarming is inevitable – it’s a global issue, not one that can be solved through the US onlyJohnston 17 - Ian Johnston, Environment and science correspondent at The Independent, 2017("Avoiding dangerous global warming no longer 'feasible', top economist warns", Independent, 1-11-2017, Available Online from http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/deadly-global-warming-is-inevitable-due-to-inaction-feasible-rhetoric-climate-change-fight-paris-a7521111.html, Accessed on 7-4-2017)//BM The world can no longer avoid dangerous global warming because countries have done little to tackle the problem apart from spout “rhetoric”, a leading economist has warned. Professor William Nordhaus, of Yale University in the US, said it was no longer practicably feasible to keep the level of warming to within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the point at which climatologists believe the world will start to experience particularly dangerous climate change. This would see devastating storms, droughts, deadly heat waves and floods all become significantly more common, making some areas of the planet increasingly difficult for humans to inhabit. The US military, among others, has expressed concern about the security implications of the mass movements of people that such scenarios would likely bring about. Professor Nordhaus, a noted expert on the economics of climate change, wrote in a paper called Projections and Uncertainties About Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies: “The international target for climate change with a limit of 2C appears to be infeasible with reasonably accessible technologies. “And this is the case even with very stringent and unrealistically ambitious abatement strategies. “This is so because of the inertia of the climate system, of rapid projected economic growth in the near term, and of revisions in several elements of the model. “A target of 2.5C is technically feasible but would require extreme virtually universal global policy measures.” He said in all the world only the European Union had introduced major policies designed to reduce global warming – but was scathing about what those would actually achieve. “Notwithstanding what may be called ‘The Rhetoric of Nations’, there has been little progress in taking strong policy measures,” Professor Nordhaus wrote. “For example, of the six largest countries or regions, only the EU has implemented national climate policies, and the policies of the EU today are very modest. Climate policies do nothing to stop the impact of climate change—its inevitableZycher 15—Benjamin, U.S. News Contributor, 7-16-2015, "The Inconvenient Truth About Climate Policy," US News & World Report, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/07/16/climate-change-policy-wont-change-global-temperatures Climate change is a manmade crisis, and so the need to implement sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is paramount. That summarizes the constant drumbeat of conventional wisdom, which raises an interesting question: If the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan – a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – were to be implemented immediately, what temperature reduction would that yield by the year 2100? The answer: 15 one-thousandths of a degree. Yes, you read that correctly. The effect would be too small even to be measured, let alone to affect sea levels and cyclones and all the rest. That number, by the way, is not some screwy calculation from the back of an envelope. It comes from the Environmental Protection Agency's own climate model, not that the EPA has ever admitted this publicly, obviously because it is embarrassing. That is why the EPA's benefit/cost "analysis" of its Clean Power Plan and the other components of its climate policy assumes a deeply dubious array of "co-benefits" in the form of particulate reductions and other impacts that are simply invented out of whole cloth or that already are counted as justifications for other regulatory policies. Without such machinations, the Climate Action Plan would collapse as a regulatory framework, because it is all cost and no benefit. Literally. But let us ignore that. Maybe the U.S. acting alone cannot do much, but cooperation at the international level would be meaningful. That is the advertised rationale for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has been holding meetings, traveling on jets and feasting at upscale restaurants for 25 years, the forthcoming climax of which will be the 21st "Conference of the Parties" in Paris in December. Let's assume that the agreement between the U.S. and China that was announced last November will be implemented fully, even though the Chinese effectively disavowed it almost immediately, and did so smack dab in the middle of the 20th Conference of the Parties in Lima, Peru. That agreement calls for an additional 10 percent reduction by the U.S. by 2025, with no actual reduction by the Chinese; this additional cut in U.S. emissions gets us another temperature reduction of one one-hundredth of a degree. But let's not stop there. Let's use our imagination and assume that China reduces its emissions by 20 percent by 2030. That gets us two tenths of a degree. Throw in a 30 percent reduction by Europe and Japan and the rest of the industrialized world, also by 2030. That's another two tenths of a degree, for a grand total of 0.425 degrees, under a "climate sensitivity" (loosely, the effectiveness of greenhouse gas reductions) assumption 50 percent greater than that adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest assessment report. Is an effect that small worth 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion per year, inflicted disproportionately upon the world's poor? But, you say, isn't there a looming crisis? Aren't the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations already observable and serious? That is the argument heard constantly. But what is the actual evidence on climate trends published by government agencies, by research bodies funded by government agencies and in the peer-reviewed literature? Answer: The temperature record is ambiguous, as is the correlation of greenhouse gas concentrations and the rate of sea-level increases. The Arctic and Antarctic sea ice covers do not differ by a statistically significant amount from the respective 1981-2010 averages. The Arctic ice cover is near the bottom, but within, the relevant range, and the Antarctic ice cover is near the top, and exceeds in some months, the relevant range. Tornado counts and intensities are in a long-term decline. The frequency and accumulated energy of tropical cyclones are near their lowest levels since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. U.S. wildfires are not correlated with the temperature record or with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. Over the last century, flooding in the U.S. has not been correlated with increased greenhouse gas concentrations. World per capita food production has increased and undernourishment has decreased, both more-or-less monotonically, since 1993. Can’t Analyze Competitiveness*Trades off with reading competitiveness high now* Productivity is slowing down, but there is no real reason behind it – even the experts don’t know whyIrwin 16 - Neil Irwin, Neil Irwin is a senior economics correspondent for The New York Times, where he writes for The Upshot, a Times site for analysis of politics, economics and more. He is the author of “The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire,” about the efforts of the world’s central banks to combat the global financial crisis, published by the Penguin Press in 2013. Irwin has an M.B.A. from Columbia University, where he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism, and his undergraduate studies were at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 2016("Why Is Productivity So Weak? Three Theories", New York Times, 4-28-2016, Available Online from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/upshot/why-is-productivity-so-weak-three-theories.html, Accessed on 7-1-2017)//BM More than 151 million Americans count themselves employed, a number that has risen sharply in the last few years. The question is this: What are they doing all day? Because whatever it is, it barely seems to be registering in economic output. The number of hours Americans worked rose 1.9 percent in the year ended in March. New data released Thursday showed that gross domestic product in the first quarter was up 1.9 percent over the previous year. Despite constant advances in software, equipment and management practices to try to make corporate America more efficient, actual economic output is merely moving in lock step with the number of hours people put in, rather than rising as it has throughout modern history. We could chalk that up to a statistical blip if it were a single year; productivity data are notoriously volatile. But this has been going on for some time. From 2011 through 2015, the government’s official labor productivity measure shows only 0.4 percent annual growth in output per hour of work. That’s the lowest for a five-year span since the 1977-to-1982 period, and far below the 2.3 percent average since the 1950s. Productivity is one of the most important yet least understood areas of economics. Over long periods, it is the only pathway toward higher levels of prosperity; the reason an American worker makes much more today than a century ago is that each hour of labor produces much more in goods and services. Put bluntly, if the kind of productivity growth implied by the new data published Thursday were to persist indefinitely, your grandchildren would be no richer than you. But it is also really hard to measure, particularly for service firms. (How productive were employees at Facebook, or your local bank, last quarter? Have fun trying to figure it out.) And even with years of hindsight, economists are never quite sure why productivity rises or falls. During the 2008 recession, labor productivity soared. Was this because employers laid off their least productive workers first? Because everybody worked harder, fearful for their jobs? Or was it a measurement problem as government statistics-takers struggled to capture fast-moving changes in the economy? We don’t know for sure. (Here’s one analysis that emphasizes the first explanation.) That is a long way of saying we don’t know for sure what is going on right now, or how long it will last. But the possible answers range from utterly depressing to downright optimistic. The Depressing Scenario The productivity slowdown is real, and it’s not going away. Earlier waves of innovation in technology (a computer on every office worker’s desk, for example) and management strategies (like outsourcing noncore functions) have been fully put into place across corporate America, and so are no longer increasing productivity. Add to that a slowdown in capital spending by businesses since the 2008 recession, which means workers aren’t getting better equipment or software that might help them do their jobs more efficiently. Moreover, if you believe the theory mentioned above about low-productivity workers being more likely to lose their jobs during the recession, the people returning to the labor force now may be less effective at boosting economic output for each hour they put in. In the depressing scenario, Americans’ standards of living are just going to grow more slowly in the future, and there’s not much we can do about it. Fortunately, this isn’t the only possible one. The Neutral Scenario Maybe we just aren’t counting things right — or, to use the economists’ preferred term, there is measurement error. After all, entire industries are being transformed in ways hard to account for in data on gross domestic product, particularly in technology and services. Having a high-powered computer in our pockets and social networks that let us stay in touch with friends may make us better off than the narrow math of gross domestic product — which counts only what we pay for — would suggest. Still, it’s not clear why these nonmarket gains in quality of life would be so different now than they were in earlier generations when, for example, videocassette recorders became widespread or the air became cleaner thanks to environmental regulation. 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