The Right Kind of Networks!

"From this story you can see that economic power in the 21st century is not going to look like economic power in the 20th century. The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power... In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks."

"The Crossroads Nation", David Brooks, New York Times Nov. 8th, 2010

I love the way David Brooks paints these broad strokes of U.S. History. All of these op-ed columnists are so good at condensing truly complex questions into bite sized morsels for us to chew on. I like the way David's mind works, his wide reading, and his politeness. He strikes me as a gentlemen, and in a paper as liberal as the NY Times, a radical centrist. My problem with Mr. Brooks is I have never met any people in the America he writes about. Its a novel with big ideas, but no characters.

I agree with his central thesis, the U.S. does not know who we are as a nation and we do not have a vision for who we will be in the future. We invented the information age, and we are the only truly global nation on the planet. It is only natural we will remain the largest hub in the global economy in the near future, not because we consume all of the world's goods, or because we sell the most weapons, but because we are the home to innovation, the meritocracy that attracts the best and the brightest.

I just don't buy that in an increasingly interconnected world, where learning and work are decentralized, the brain drain will continue unabated. Is a world where the talent leaves Latin America, Africa and Asia for the U.S. a world we want to live in anyway. The economic engine of the United States was fueled by slavery when we had a cotton economy and fueled by cheap immigrant labor during the industrial revolution. The American corporate economy today is dominated by finance and technology, not really labor intensive industries. The jobs of today and tomorrow require a highly educated workforce capable of complex problem solving, interdisciplinary thinking, and cross-cultural collaboration. These skills are the engine of the 21st Century, but the power elite have forgotten we cannot just import tomorrow's work force. The children of previous migration waves, forced and unforced, are still here. An economy based solely on innovation by the elite, without addressing the educational inequity in the U.S. is incredibly narrow and short sighted. An America where the few work and create and the rest of us play with our smart phones sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, and misses the point of network theory.

And in case you think there is not a problem with education check out the results of the National Assessment for Education Progress for Black males:

Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

by Trip Gabriel, New York Times Nov. 9th, 2010

"Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys."

In this article the solutions to the achievement gap are retraining the parenting of Black families to be more middle class and a No Excuse, Tough Love approach to teaching, aka Harlem Children Zone Waiting For Superman model.

Making Jim Crow work is not a solution to the achievement gap. We have an experience gap, a family and community resource gap, a segregated society with folks on the inside and too many on the outside. We have a global economic network that leaves out billions of human beings. We need systems that link to more nodes (humans) and unleash the untapped potential within our black and brown communities. Skimming off the global top is not a viable strategy for 21st Century America, and it does nothing for the moral and economic impetus to develop our own communities.