The first session of Day 2 of the New York Forum was a hot, flat and crowded panel with a half dozen heavy hitters on the inexhaustible topic of America in decline. Has the U.S. lost its edge? asked CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo as moderator. And if so, what can we do to get it back?
The discussion tended to focus on the cultural and attitudinal shifts that need to take place in the U.S. to regain momentum on the global playing field. New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman lamented that “we interpreted the end of the Cold War as a victory when it was the onset of the greatest challenge. When we should have been lacing up our shoes to run the race farther and faster, we put up our feet. We decided to chase the losers of globalization (al Qaeda) rather than the winners (India and China).”
Nobel prize winning-economist Edmund Phelps believes that America has lost its way due to loss of productivity over the past 25 years. “This optimism about innovation in America is inspired by headline innovations in Silicon Valley but if you look across the breadth of the economy, you come away feeling that the typical company is less innovative than it was before. Companies don’t think even three to five years ahead but one quarter ahead.”
That lack of long-term vision also concerns start-up investor and chairman of EDventure Holdings Esther Dyson, who offers “too much self- esteem” as the cultural problem in the U.S. “Everyone thinks they can be the new Mark Zuckerberg,” she said. “We are sitting here smug and fat and happy and not really doing the valuable innovations we used to… We don’t care about the long term anymore. Even in politics, when you talk to legislators, they care about how many jobs in their districts, how many votes in their district, but they don’t care about the long term.”
Friedman pointed fingers at the “corrupt duopoly” of the political system, noting that the rise of the Tea Party is just a hint at what a Third Party might do to “blow up the system.” Lack of leadership was a shared concern of Pfizer Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Kindler, who noted “Sputnick led to Darpa which led to the Internet. Not today. Today no one is exercising the leadership we need to address these issues. Our public policies aren’t permitting us to solve them.”
The session was not all warnings and worries. “We still have a vibrant set of true innovations going on, said Jonathan Miller, CEO of NewsCorp Digital. “Cloud computing, social web, YouTube… they all came out of the US literally in this last decade. We have a system in which people can get money from angels, VC and that system is really good. The top ten tech companies have $350 billion in cash on hand, which they put into R&D. We still have a lot of firepower, both intellectual firepower and cash in hand. We are not ordinary yet.”