The following excerpt is from
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/266/
In his book The World is Flat Thomas Friedman explains
how the U.S. is in a crisis. We are holding this competition to
help do our part to change the culture of our youth to better
prepare them for the new global economy.
Friedman describes
the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that
effectively leveled the economic world, and “accidentally made
Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors.” Today,
“individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will
be able to plug and play.” Friedman’s list of “flatteners”
includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and
the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in
fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms
and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise
of outsourcing, off shoring, supply chaining and in sourcing.
Friedman says these flatteners converged around the year 2000,
and “created a flat world: a global, web-enabled platform for
multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of
time, distance, geography and increasingly, language.” At the
very moment this platform emerged, three huge economies
materialized -- those of India, China and the former Soviet
Union --“and three billion people who were out of the game,
walked onto the playing field.” A final convergence may
determine the fate of the U.S. in this final chapter of
globalization. A “political perfect storm,” as Friedman
describes it -- the dotcom bust, the attacks of 9/11, and the
Enron scandal -- “distract us completely as a country.” Just
when we need to face the fact of globalization and the need to
compete in a new world, “we’re looking totally elsewhere.”
A quote that captures the essence of why we are creating this
competition comes from an interview conducted by Friedman:
"In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. The problem is that in
the United States Britney Spears is Britney Spears."
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