Software, Growth, and the Future of the U.S Economy Report of a Symposium (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Panel V — Participants’ Roundtable— Where Do We Go from Here? Policy Issues?
Panel V — Participants’ Roundtable— Where Do We Go from Here? Policy Issues?
Pages 150-155
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From page 150... ...
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that other countries had learned the prevailing techniques and become competitors of the United States. Unless there were investment that fundamentally changed the ways in which software was created, the industry would have to be considered mature even though what it produced was at the cutting edge of advanced technology.
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From page 151... ...
A decade later the only assembly that remained in the United States involved relatively short runs of very specialized product that had to be fabricated close to the market. Meanwhile, the commodity production had stayed in Hong Kong only until wages for unskilled labor were bid up there, when it moved to Korea.
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From page 152... ...
While he was skeptical of the widespread notion that an infinitely elastic supply of top-notch university graduates was coming out of the schools of China and India, he argued that if the United States really wanted to compete, it had to invest in education. Likewise, to make less-industrialized areas of the country more attractive and to keep workers from the departing industrial sector employed, domestic investment in communications infrastructure would be necessary.
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From page 153... ...
government gave General Motors tax benefits for R&D and other advantages, such as the benefits of a strong public education system, and as a consequence both General Motors and the United States prospered. The substance of the complaint that the American workers had been bringing to Capitol Hill was: "It seems like this whole deal has been broken." Since they understand how the world works, being familiar with similar stories from agriculture and manufacturing, they were not so much objecting to the loss of a specific job as to what they saw as evidence that "the game has changed."
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From page 154... ...
They will no longer give the United States comparative advantage but will chase what Ricardo called "absolute advantage." In his famous example of wine and wool trading between Portugal and England, Ricardo lays this out very clearly. But Ricardo notes that the "factors of production" would never leave England, for no English capitalist would ever invest so substantially in another country out of loyalty to his mother country and out of fear for the security of his investments overseas.
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From page 155... ...
Hira observed that both terms were somewhat vague and that they tended to be "situationally implemented." As to the specific issue of software, he recalled the 1980s question of whether manufacturing matters, asking whether software matters. "If it does," he stated, "we need to think about how to go about making software a viable profession and career for people in America," since the field did not appear sufficiently attractive at present.
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