Our RAND-Y (And Wrong) Take On Technology

(And you know where else I posted, right?)

This is probably going to be “water wet, sky blue” stuff, but it bears repeating (from here)…

The competitive edge of the United States economy has eroded sharply over the last decade, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.

The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness. They included venture capital investment, scientific researchers, spending on research and educational achievement.

But the American economy placed last in terms of progress made over the last decade. “The trend is very troubling,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the foundation.

Measuring national competitiveness and the capacity for innovation is tricky. Definitions and methods differ, and so do the outcomes. For example, the World Economic Forum’s recent global competitiveness report ranked the United States first. Much of the forum’s report is based on opinion surveys.

Now, I admit that what we get out of any “think tank” or any allegedly nonpartisan advocacy group is going to be a bit skewed based on their statistics (which, as the writer Mark Twain said, can easily be paired with “lies and damn lies”), but this is probably closer to the truth.

Particularly when you consider the following…

A report last year by the Rand Corporation concluded that the United States was in “no imminent danger” of losing its competitive advantage in science and technology.

And this is typical, considering the following from Chalmers Johnson, a former RAND consultant and author of a quite damning book on the “uber” think tank of them all; as noted here…

RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

…

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. (Co-Author Alex) Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.

…

Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).

…

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

So the whole “don’t worry, be happy” prognosis of RAND on our precarious standing among other industrialized nations in technological development and innovation is pretty much “par for the course,” assuming that American hegemony will last forever, I guess; Johnson, in his article, recalls Albert Wohlstetter – “easily the best of the RAND researchers,” as Johnson puts it – displaying his fabled arrogance during a 1967 gathering in New Delhi to promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with Wohlstetter telling the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb," with Johnson adding that “as I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974.”

So what of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, then? Well, as I looked over the group’s web site, I found it hard to attach any kind of ideological bent to them, though they (primarily Foundation president Robert Atkinson) are proponents of a mileage-based gas tax, which is an utterly ridiculous idea, for all the reasons listed by Atrios and Kagro X here.

Also, Dem U.S. House Rep (and gubernatorial candidate) Artur Davis of Alabama is a board member, he of the Blue Dog corporate/centrist Democratic “cred,” so presumably, he supports the group (which has a lot of wonky “position papers” to peruse; I don’t know about you, but after the last eight years of “let’s shoot first, count the bodies and see if we were right later” decision making, I could go for some wonky stuff now and again).

So RAND tells us that everything’s fine, the ITIF says we’re sixth out of 40…so who’s right, exactly?

Well, I would side more towards the ITIF, though the World Economic Forum here says that we’re fourth behind Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland (jeez, how did those zany Danes end up as Number One? And why did the Times note above that that's where the Forum put the U.S. instead of fourth?).

So, bringing all of this stuff “down to earth” a bit, what are we talking about here? Well, as noted here…

The U.S. trade balance in high-technology manufacturing industries and advanced products has declined.

The U.S. world market share of exports by high-technology industries dropped from about 20% in the early 1990s to 12% in 2005, primarily because of losses in export share by U.S. industries producing communications equipment and office machinery and computers.

The trend for China has been quite different. China’s share has grown rapidly; its world market share of high-technology industry exports has more than doubled, from 8% in 1999 to an estimated 19% in 2005. Exports by China’s high-technology industries surpassed those of Japan in 2001, the EU (excluding intra-EU exports) in 2002, and the United States in 2003. China has become the world’s largest exporter.

The reduction of U.S. industry’s world export share has coincided with the decline in the U.S. trade balance in high-technology manufacturing industries that began in the late 1990s.

The historically strong U.S. trade balance in advanced technology products exhibited a similar reduction, shifting from surplus to deficit starting in 2002. The overall U.S. trade deficit is largely driven by U.S. trade with Asian countries, especially China and Malaysia.

So, it sounds like the decline became apparent in 2002 through 2005, and you know who resided in “an Oval Office” back then, don’t you?

Sigh…