The Racial-Justice War On Merit-Based Schools
By Vince
Bielski, RealClearInvestigations
Vince Bielski
from Real Clear Investigations has a long and important article about whether
public schools should include advanced schools for gifted children or whether
that concept consists of a racist tinged ideology. The article is here:
Comment from
the blog author: The United States is in a long, chilly cold war with mainland
China over technology and engineering.
This tips the argument strongly in favor of gifted public schools for
America’s cleverest children, an argument not made in Bielski’s article.
Here is an argument on my side from Andy Serwer of yahoo finance:
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“….this economic tug-of-war between the U.S. and
China will be the defining geopolitical mega-trend of our lifetime. And that
rivalry, (and rivalry is the perfect word for our relationship), for global
hegemony, will take place primarily on one virtual battlefield, that being the
business of technology, writ large.
Welcome then,
to the new Digital Cold War.
Think back to
the last time the U.S. was engaged in a bilateral rivalry like this. It was
with Russia during the (original) Cold War, which began the day the Axis powers
surrendered in 1945 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989.
Just to delve
into that Cold War for a minute. The reason it was called cold of course is
because it never really got hot, i.e., the Americans and Russians never fought
any direct battles. But that’s a bit misleading. Both sides spent trillions of
dollars on weaponry, including vast nuclear arsenals, (nevermind the space
race), countless KGB and CIA operations (check out the Safari Club, Air America and Operation Valuable Fiend) and proxy wars fought on every
continent. Try telling the family of one of the 58,318 Americans killed in
Vietnam that the Cold War was never actually fought.
Sadly and
perhaps predictably, many are now of the view that all of this death and
expenditure was for naught. The Soviet Union wasn’t defeated because of
military action, covert or otherwise, rather it was the free economy of the
West, in particular that of the U.S., that was responsible for capitalism’s
triumph over communism.
As for this
next conflict, it will not be fought and won with guns and bullets or god
forbid nuclear warheads, but instead by which party dominates the businesses of
semiconductors, AI, 5G, networks—and the cybersecurity that protects it all.
Certainly there will be other players besides the U.S. and China, but mostly
they will be customers or surrogates, beholden to the Big Two for these core
products and services.
None of this
is lost on the Chinese who are building a national policy based very much on
this thinking. Neither is it lost on in-the-know Americans. The problem is that
we are much less organized and coordinated than the Chinese, never mind going
bumpily from Trump to Biden.
Here’s where
things stand in these early days of this Digital Cold War.
Though the
Obama administration was initially not so worried about the threat of Chinese
technology (and indeed the signs were less clear then), by the second term that
began to change.
Let’s use the
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, now embattled with the Trump
administration, as a case study.
“Huawei
concerns started with national security people in the Obama administration,”
says Ho-Fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins and the
author of “The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World.” “The White House
and Congress did an investigation in 2013 and found Huawei was a big
cybersecurity threat.”
Concerns about
the company stepped up once Trump became president. Huawei, among other items, makes a key product called radio
access networks, (or RANs) the part of a telecommunications system that connects
phones to telco networks through radio connections including base stations,
antennas, chips and controllers. Besides Huawei, the RAN business, (which is
about $76 billion in annual sales,) is dominated by Samsung (Korean), Ericsson
(Swedish), Nokia (Finnish) and ZTE (also Chinese and also at loggerheads with
the U.S. government.)
The Trump
administration at first began telling allies in Europe that buying Huawei
technology posed a national security risk, though with no hard evidence. That gained
little traction. “The message was ‘trust us,’ but that is not a strong suit
from this administration,” says an industry source. But what if the argument
was framed in terms of economics, this source continued. If Huawei and ZTE gain
more and more market share then the non-Chinese suppliers, which like all
companies in the sectors need to spend billions of dollars of capital
expenditure each year, might be forced to drop out of the business. “If that
happened wouldn’t the inevitable outcome mean being wholly reliant on the
Chinese?” the source asks. This argument gained traction in April when Europeans complained about the quality of PPE the
Chinese were sending over, resulting in the Chinese slowing those shipments in
apparent retaliation.
“Trump’s early
approach was to bully and threaten U.S. allies like Germany and the UK to
abandon Huawei,” says Ho-Fung Hung. “It didn’t quite work. “The Biden
administration would talk to allies and persuade them to ditch Huawei...[in] a
multilateral approach.”
And of course
RANs are just one piece of the puzzle. Expanding market share in businesses
like semiconductors and AI is also a strategic imperative for the Chinese
government as part of its Belt and Road and Made in China 2025 initiatives,
aimed at producing economic growth and providing national security.
‘An economic race and a security race’
U.S. national
security experts increasingly see the Chinese modus operandi is to go to
developing countries and offer a bundle of aid, investment and packages,
including infrastructure projects like ports and highway systems, but now along
with 5G networks even national security facial recognition systems. Consider the
potential here to create quasi-vassal states that knowingly or unknowingly
source data and intelligence back to China.
And when the
Trump administration has blocked the export of U.S. tech to China, the Chinese
have responded maybe not the way Trump anticipated. “Rather than confront any
U.S. restrictions, what they’ve basically done is make stronger efforts to try
to reduce reliance on imported technologies, particularly U.S. ones. That seems
to be part of the broader multi-year strategy that they’re implementing,” says
Bruce Kasman, chief economist and managing director of global research at
JPMorgan Chase.
“We’re in a
race with an adversary; an economic race and a security race,” says William
Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
who served in the Clinton administration. “There are two ways to win a race:
run faster or trip the other guy. Export controls are about tripping the other
guy and getting in the way of what they want to do. There’s a place for that.
But the more important option is running faster — making sure we stay ahead of
them technologically. This will be hard to implement going forward because the
Chinese have spent enormous amounts of money and consistently achieved
technology goals faster than any expected.”
Now consider
the consumer technology front in this conflict, which has shifted rapidly.
Earlier generations of U.S. consumer tech made inroads in China. Microsoft’s
suite of products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) for instance are widely
available in China. Same for Apple’s laptops, (Dell too), and remember Lenovo
bought IBM’s PC business. But the Chinese made the environment tougher for the
next crop of companies. Google introduced its search engine to China in 2006,
but abruptly left four years later after being hacked and “disputes over censorship of search results,” (though the company
still has a footprint in the country as versions of its Android operating
system power a majority of China’s phones.) But as for the newer social
networks; Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest? Forget it. They’re banned in
China. (The business network, LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft, being an
exception.)
And that was
the status quo—until the Chinese social media platform TikTok took America by
storm starting two years ago.
“From the
perspective of many Silicon Valley companies, the China market has been closed
to them, but there wasn’t too much concern,” says Rui Ma, a San Francisco-based
host of a podcast called Tech Buzz China. “Until TikTok, which caused a growing
alarm. ‘Hey, before we were these two separate worlds. Now they’re starting to
collide. Why is a Chinese company able to operate here, and be number one in
its category?’ If there’s no fairness or equitable access to the markets,
there’s this fear we might get crushed. It’s patently unfair.”
And the Trump
administration has moved to ban TikTok, which now has 80 million-plus monthly
active users in the U.S. A key bone of contention here: Money, money, money.
“The payment
system associated with the apps—that’s the main concern,” says Ho-Fung Hung.
“There’s a vested interest at Facebook and other U.S. tech companies to limit
[Chinese messaging app] WeChat and TikTok expansion into electronic payment
systems. The U.S. government may try to restrict and contain this expansion.
The ability to launch a mobile payment system might be put in check by the new
administration.”
Payments is
very much in the news, as China President Xi Jinping himself reportedly scotched the
IPO of Ant, (which is a part of Chinese platform behemoth Alibaba), after
clashing with its charismatic and Western-facing billionaire founder Jack Ma,
who raised hackles in late October when he stated there was “‘outdated supervision’ of financial regulation [which
stifled] innovation and said Chinese banks operated with a ‘pawnshop
mentality.’”
I asked
Alibaba President Michael Evans about Ant’s IPO—which at that point was only on
hold—and news of a greater regulatory crackdown this past week. “I don't know
if I would use the term ‘regulatory crackdown,’” Evans said. “What Ant has
experienced is quite typical of what you would experience in the world, which
in an industry, financial services, the key is we need to be in close
collaboration with the regulator.”
Initially
Evans’ comment smacked of simply kowtowing to Chinese officials, and I still
say he’s glossing some, but then I considered what U.S. tech companies face
with regard to European regulators and increasingly here in the U.S. Our
national bipartisan discontent, love-hate affair with Big Tech now plays out in
Zoom confrontations between the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack
Dorsey and Sundar Pichai versus indignant, ill-informed senators and
Congressmen.
There is no
doubt the scrutiny and incipient regulatory efforts will be taken up by the
Biden administration. The real dilemma for Biden is how to rein in Big Tech,
but not so much that it can’t compete with the Chinese. “That’s the biggest and
most complicated question of all,” says Reinsch. “Personally, I think there’s a
real risk that a too far-reaching approach on the Big Tech antitrust side could
end up compromising their abilities to further innovate.”
“China will be
building more and more of the technology platforms that matter in the coming
years,” says Hoffman. “What that means is you don't disable your own player,
right? What you want to do is you want to shape them. But the classic notion of
an antitrust or breakup, I think those are generally speaking going to be
actually, in fact, a counter to American health and prosperity.”
If Trump was
right about the diagnosis when it came to China (it’s not playing fair), but
not so much about the remedy (trade war), then how should Biden proceed? First,
in a way he has air cover from Trump, because Biden can tone down the rhetoric,
be more diplomatic and unwind the trade war, but at the same time stay just as
tough in the tech sector. Second, Biden now has the backing of U.S. businesses
to move aggressively on tech issues like IP protection and security. From 2000
to say 2015, businesses wanted the U.S. government to tread lightly so as not
to upset the Chinese who held out the promise of open markets. Now in many
cases, that’s seen as a fool’s errand. It’s as if the Chinese are holding up a
shiny toy that U.S. companies can never grasp. Getting other nations to
confront China along with the U.S. will be key for Biden.
So once the
U.S. is post-COVID (which is how Evans described the Chinese economy to me) and
we restore our economy, this battle for tech supremacy will become the main
event. It’s a struggle which will inform the future of all business—banking,
medical (vaccines and biotech), transportation, agriculture and energy.
But more than
that, this is a rivalry which will define societies; education, culture, the
military, and in the end personal freedom and responsibility.
Though
algorithm-worshiping technologists in both China and America might disagree, in
the end it will come down to a common set of humanistic values and making
ethical decisions.
It’s no
overstatement to say the future of humanity depends on that.
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