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May 02, 2008
The Cognitive Age
New York Times columnist David Brooks has discovered "The Cognitive Age". First he dismisses the "globalization paradigm":
Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change. Some Americans have seen their jobs shipped overseas, but global competition has accounted for a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few decades.
Then he lays out the case for a different view:
The central process driving this [economic shift] is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.
The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?
The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.
It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines which facts and remedies you emphasize.
Politicians, especially Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm. It’s time to move beyond it.
Brooks is absolutely correct that the skills revolution (and technology) play a big role in the changing economic structure and the shift to the I-Cubed Economy. He is dead wrong, however, in positing this as "trade versus technology". Globalization and the skills revolution are the woof and weave of the tectonic shift occurring in our economy. To leave one out is an incomplete analysis. Brooks chides the Democrats for their one side view (not mentioning that the Republicans have a mirror-image view - "globalization is good"). Ironically, his analysis falls into the same trap on the other side. By ignoring and dismissing globalization as part of the situation, he misses an opportunity to look at how the two interact and impact one another.
The Democrats need to tell the entire story. But so does Mr. Brooks.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at May 2, 2008 10:24 AM
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