We need a national commitment to modernize our skills as well as our industries. Without one, we face continuing unemployment, a further drop in productivity, or both.
If you have wondered why so many people have been hammering away at computer literacy, here is one good reason. According to the American Productivity Center (APC), a Houston-based research group, "estimated national real output per employee in Japan [will] exceed that of the United States by the year 2000. Knowledgeable observers predict that by the turn of the century, Japan's real national productivity level, not just the growth rate, will be the highest in the industrial world -- significantly above the United States and far above all the European nations with the possible exception of Germany and France." (From Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1982.)
What does this have to do with computer literacy? For years, the Japanese have moved ahead in productivity at a faster pace than we have. This is because they have made a concerted national effort to further technologically advanced skills and industries. Unless we make a similar effort on a crash basis, the APC says we will fall behind permanently in the productivity race. The spur of Japanese competition may be a blessing. We have plenty of reasons to modernize already -- like the 12 million of our fellow citizens who are unemployed. Yet we have not done it.
These two critical problems -- unemployment and intensifying competition from abroad -- are inextricably linked. A necessary part of the solution for both is upgrading labor-force skills. Along with technology itself, these upgraded skills will determine how cost-effective we can be in producing new goods and services. If we aren't cost-effective, we will lose more markets at home and abroad. That will mean the loss of more jobs and sliding even further behind.
To get the job done will take at least three steps. First, and hardest of all, we need a clearer national commitment than we have. Second, we must recognize that it is not only machines that become obsolete. Attitudes, institutions, and skills do, too. Third, we must become educated ourselves and must teach our leaders to anticipate a faster, deeper pace of change for the rest of our lives. Education and training programs must assume the need for continual retraining. Each of us will need to know how to do more than one, inevitably replaceable, job.
We can succeed. It will not be the first time that we have played catch-up against ourselves or other nations. Not many people in the Western world thought we could deliver on Franklin D. Roosevelt's pledge to build 100,000 war planes a year to win World War II. We did it, just as we kept John F. Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Perhaps the goals of staying ahead of the Japanese, thinning the unemployment rolls at the same time, can make universal computer literacy that kind of national priority.
In a speech before the American Electronics Association (quoted in The Los Angeles Times, January 3), Samuel H. Armacost, president and chief executive officer of BankAmerica Corp., described the downward drift that we must stop:
Take a journey in time with me, back to the late 1950s and '60s. America stands supreme on the world economic stage. An inflation rate-of 1 1/2% to 2% a year means price stability. In addition:
* Unemployment of 3% is tantamount to full employment.
* Housing is plentiful, its cost is reasonable, mortgages are affordable.
* Detroit is the capital of the world motor-car industry, turning out 10 million to 12 million autos a year.
* New products and services pour from a seemingly bottomless cornucopia of innovation.
* The U.S. dollar fuels world trade.
* The productivity of the American worker is the highest in the world, and rising.
* From all over the globe, businessmen come to the United States to study the miracles of American management. Pundits speak of the dawning of a golden age, and, indeed, there is every reason to believe they are right.
But what of America today, a mere 20 years later? Unemployment is running at the 10% level -- a human and economic tragedy of incalculable proportions. In addition:
* The nation has experienced 10 years of rampant double-digit inflation.
* Housing is in short supply and expensive beyond belief.
* The productivity of the U.S. worker has been on a steady 10-year decline.
* The center of the automobile industry is no longer the Detroit/Dearborn axis, but rather the Osaka/Tokyo axis.
* Innovation has dried up and the new-product flow has been reduced from a torrent to a trickle.
* Public trust in American business is near its all-time low.
* World trade is threatened by protectionism sentiment, both here and abroad.
Pundits no longer speak of the dawning of a golden age, but, rather, of a tragic future. How did the United States manage to journey from there to here?
Our situation is chilling, but it is not irreversible. Consider where the Japanese were only two decades ago. They cut our lead far deeper and faster than most of us thought possible. Those who describe our faltering position as "irreversible" should remember that Japan started from nearly zero.
It is now 25 years since Japan committed itself to building a major electronics industry that would allow it to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world. In 1957, it passed a law, Extraordinary Measures for the Promotion of the Electronics Industry, which set in motion the governmental and business partnership that has proven such a successful strategy. In 1974, the oil crisis led Japan to reaffirm electronics as a top national priority. One spokesman said at the time that electronics technology is "energy-saving, resource-saving, labor-saving, and space-saving."
By 1980, Japan's electronics industry was 150 times greater in size than it was in the mid-'50s. It has been largely successful in challenging the dominance of U.S. consumer goods in worldwide markets. Now it is said to be planning an intensive 10-year effort to become dominant in artificial intelligence, in the socalled fifth generation of computers. Leadership in that area, it is anticipated, will enable Japan to dominate, in turn, a number of other Western industries.
