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Op-Ed Columnist: The Secret of Our Sauce
March 7, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BANGALORE, India
Yamini Narayanan is an Indian-born 35-year-old with a Ph.D.
in economics from the University of Oklahoma. After
graduation, she worked for a U.S. computer company in
Virginia and recently moved back to Bangalore with her
husband to be closer to family. When I asked her how she
felt about the outsourcing of jobs from her adopted
country, America, to her native country, India, she
responded with a revealing story:
"I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to
India and he made a T-shirt that said, `I lost my job to
India and all I got was this [lousy] T-shirt.' And he made
all kinds of money." Only in America, she said, shaking her
head, would someone figure out how to profit from his own
unemployment. And that, she insisted, was the reason
America need not fear outsourcing to India: America is so
much more innovative a place than any other country.
There is a reason the "next big thing" almost always comes
out of America, said Mrs. Narayanan. When she and her
husband came back to live in Bangalore and enrolled their
son in a good private school, he found himself totally
stifled because of the emphasis on rote learning - rather
than the independent thinking he was exposed to in his U.S.
school. They had to take him out and look for another, more
avant-garde private school. "America allows you to explore
your mind," she said. The whole concept of outsourcing was
actually invented in America, added her husband, Sean,
because no one else figured it out.
The Narayanans are worth listening to at this time of
rising insecurity over white-collar job losses to India.
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever
existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because
it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme
freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a
steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with
no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt
bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital
system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning
them into global products.
"You have this whole ecosystem [that constitutes] a unique
crucible for innovation," said Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O.
of Infosys, India's I.B.M. "I was in Europe the other day
and they were commiserating about the 400,000 [European]
knowledge workers who have gone to live in the U.S. because
of the innovative environment there. The whole process
where people get an idea and put together a team, raise the
capital, create a product and mainstream it - that can only
be done in the U.S. It can't be done sitting in India. The
Indian part of the equation [is to help] these innovative
[U.S.] companies bring their products to the market
quicker, cheaper and better, which increases the innovative
cycle there. It is a complimentarity we need to enhance."
That is so right. As Robert Hof, a tech writer for Business
Week, noted, U.S. tech workers "must keep creating leading
edge technologies that make their companies more productive
- especially innovations that spark entirely new markets."
The same tech innovations that produced outsourcing, he
noted, also produced eBay, Amazon.com, Google and thousands
of new jobs along with them.
This is America's real edge. Sure Bangalore has a lot of
engineering schools, but the local government is rife with
corruption; half the city has no sidewalks; there are
constant electricity blackouts; the rivers are choked with
pollution; the public school system is dysfunctional;
beggars dart in and out of the traffic, which is in
constant gridlock; and the whole infrastructure is falling
apart. The big high-tech firms here reside on beautiful,
walled campuses, because they maintain their own water,
electricity and communications systems. They thrive by
defying their political-economic environment, not by
emerging from it.
What would Indian techies give for just one day of
America's rule of law; its dependable, regulated financial
markets; its efficient, noncorrupt bureaucracy; and its
best public schools and universities? They'd give a lot.
These institutions, which nurture innovation, are our real
crown jewels that must be protected - not the 1 percent of
jobs that might be outsourced. But it is precisely these
crown jewels that can be squandered if we become lazy, or
engage in mindless protectionism, or persist in radical tax
cutting that can only erode the strength and quality of our
government and educational institutions.
Our competitors know the secret of our sauce. But do we?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/opinion/07FRIE.html?ex=1079778210&ei=1&en=21ff1c1ffa7b7646
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