The second thing we could do to solve the raw-material problem, and we could do it in a week, is simply change our immigration laws. I mean, every time I run a help-wanted ad for Cognetics in the newspaper, it gets put on the Internet, and half the people who respond are from outside Massachusetts, and half of those are actually from abroad.
Q. From which countries?
A. Romania, Russia, China. And I can't hire any of them. I mean, the government won't let them stay. I get them over here, and the feds send them home. I had a woman lined up whom I really wanted to hire as a computer programmer. She was Chinese, and she had made it over here as an environmental engineer.
Well, it turned out that she was really a computer programmer and she happened to work for an environmental company. I said, "Boy, I'd love to hire you." And she said, "Can't do it." I asked why. "Because that will change my job classification," she said. "You're not an environmental company, and they'll send me home." I said, "But you'd be doing exactly what you're doing now." She said, "I know, but that will completely disrupt my green-card application, and I can't risk it."
So I can't hire these people. Nor can anybody else. We're letting in only around 900,000 people a year. We could easily admit 2 or 3 million people a year--skilled people only, people with a university degree. And if we did that, we could double the growth of the American economy.
We're only 5% of the world's population. How can we be so arrogant as to sit here and think we don't need anybody else, when we desperately do?
Q. What prevents politicians and others from agreeing with you?
A. I'm not sure they wouldn't agree if they understood. I think it's more an unawareness of what's happened to the economy overall. The protectionist mentality will be there forever, as long as it thinks it's protecting what's important. For instance, if you have a bunch of trade unions that are protecting the manufacturing workforce, however small it may be, they will forever resist all these changes. Because they feel deep down that they're protecting something very important.
And yet, we haven't added one manufacturing job to the U.S. economy in the past half century. Fifty years--not one job. We've added more than 70 million jobs overall, and they're virtually all in the "knowledge value" economy, as Taichi Sakaiya has termed it. But the interests of the industrial economy, the interests of the past, don't want to see it. They don't want to see that the raw materials that matter aren't steel and boats and rail lines. They're brains. That's the oxygen. And the people who do understand aren't involved in the political debate. Because they're off working.
Q. Are you surprised at the number of contacts you get at Cognetics that come from overseas?
A. At first I was. But then it began to seem commonplace and to mirror the experience of the gazelle companies I study. The extent to which I deal with people from other countries has gone up so sharply that, particularly over the past year, I've almost stopped thinking of the U.S. economy as a self-contained thing. I find myself talking to people from Sweden and Denmark and Taiwan and Singapore. And you know, the really striking thing is that we're all talking the same language: English. Our nationalities aren't really an issue at all. I mean, I don't even think about it the way I would have two or three years ago.
Q. When did it change?
A. I'll tell you an anecdote. I was in Denmark in 1996, and I gave a talk in the original stock market in Copenhagen. And at the end of my talk, we had a performance by the Royal Danish Ballet--orchestra, the whole bit. I mean, this is pretty high cotton, right? And at the end of the performance, the ballerinas and the lead dancers put on their sweats and had a discussion with the audience. We're halfway through this discussion with the prima ballerina of the Royal Danish Ballet, and it suddenly hits me that the entire discussion is being conducted in English, despite the fact that I'm the only one in the room who doesn't speak Danish. Think of that. There are 350 or 400 business executives sitting in this room. They're all having a discussion with the most famous person in Denmark other than the queen, and they're all doing it in English for my benefit and only for my benefit. They would all desperately prefer to do it in Danish. And it all of a sudden hit me. Think how the world has changed. Can you imagine putting 350 American business executives in one room in the United States and having them all speak Danish because some kooky academic from Denmark came and talked?
Q. What do you think it means?
A. What that experience signified to me was that the world is a common place now, and we Americans happen to be the enormous beneficiaries of the language that the world speaks. Everybody in that room spoke English.
Q. In all your travels, do you ever deal with translators anymore?
A. Never. Everything is in English. When I talk to the European Economic Community, even the French will finally bend and speak English.
So I'm not surprised anymore by the global labor market that my own little company intersects with. You begin to realize very quickly that we are only 5% of the world's population. You know, we're a tiny, rinky-dink country. For the longest while, we sort of focused on ourselves. And we can't anymore. On our own, we're just a very small game.
Q. Do you see concrete examples of that?
A. All the time. I was talking to somebody in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. She was looking out her window. And she said, "David, you're not going to believe this, but I see 60 cranes outside." There are probably only 60 cranes working in the whole United States today. The United States is growing at 1% to 2% a year. China is growing at 12% a year--maybe 10%. You know, there were a few cranes in Dallas, where I was yesterday. If we don't change our immigration policy and education policy, we're not going to have a single crane in the United States.
The vacancy rate for office space in downtown Dallas is 33%, about to go to 43%. Boston, I suspect, might well be in a similar position in a couple of years, when the stock market gets back to where it belongs; we're solely depending on mutual funds.
We're grinding to a zero-growth economy here. And there are other economies in the world that are growing at 10%, 12%, and 14% a year. Not only are we rinky-dink, we're stagnant rinky-dink. And the notion that somehow we're important enough to keep to ourselves is a fatal notion in the business world.
Resources
COGNETICS, David Birch, 100 CambridgePark Dr., Cambridge, MA 02140; 617-661-0300; www.cogonline.com 34
