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Preface

What impelled me to write this book? During my long academic career in planning and public policy, I have weighed in often on many critical policy issues, generally driven by an optimistic outlook on the possibilities for constructive change, offering what I have believed were reasonable solutions to long-standing local, state, or national concerns. So it is with The Smart Society.

What is different this time, however, is the subject matter. I have written most extensively on issues related to urbanization, specifically on policies tied to physical places: housing, land use regulation, and the economic and social vitality of New York City. My first important foray in considering policies that directly affect the welfare of people rather than places was my last book-length work, Assimilation, American Style (Basic Books, 1997), which looked at America’s remarkable history in welcoming and assimilating immigrants. That was also my first venture in reflecting on American human capital, the focus of this book, because—as The Smart Society emphasizes—immigrants are above all one of its most indispensable wellsprings.

My intense interest in policies that can strengthen the capabilities of the American people (in other words, their human capital) took a quantum leap in the nearly ten years (1997 to 2006) that I served as chief academic officer—provost—of the State University of New York system (SUNY), the country’s largest public collection of colleges and universities. In this role I needed to give serious thought to the university’s underlying mission and how that related to the day-to-day operations of the system’s institutions. Being an agency of the state of New York, heavily dependent on revenues provided by the state’s taxpayers, we needed to be very clear on what the citizens and political leaders of the state expected of us and what our contribution to the state’s welfare might be.

On reflection, the answer was simple: New York, like every other American state, was in a desperate competition for human capital—with other states as well as other countries—and we were the state’s most comprehensive, and hopefully effective, vehicle to help New York grow its human capital and win that race. Because of the university’s vast size, and the great diversity among its sixty-four campuses, SUNY touched just about every aspect of human-capital development. Our thirteen teacher training programs and thirty community colleges prepared teachers, aides, and administrators for preschool through high school; our Charter School Institute oversaw half the state’s charter schools; all of our campuses together turned out the lion’s share of New York’s college graduates; our research universities, medical schools, and partner Cornell University conducted path-breaking research and development that enriched the human capital of American workplaces; SUNY’s alliances with educational institutions and industries abroad generated human capital across the world; and, finally, great numbers of our faculty and students were immigrants, what I refer to as imported human capital.

My efforts as university provost to help our campuses succeed in carrying out their diverse missions gave me a close-up view of the places that actually generated human capital and many of the problems they faced in doing so. Let me cite just a few examples.

The university’s original and still paramount human-capital contribution was in turning out tens of thousands of college graduates each year. Yet SUNY community-college and baccalaureate campuses were continually bedeviled by unsatisfactory graduation rates—a problem because the full benefits of a costly college experience depend on successful completion. Tracking that issue down, we found a nearly perfect correlation of graduation rates with the quality of students’ high school preparation. Since a majority of our students come from the state’s high schools, and the majority of those schools’ teachers are trained in SUNY colleges, we took a hard look at our teacher training programs. What we found there was weak grounding in core subjects—mathematics being a prime case—and shockingly little classroom exposure, especially in New York City schools. This resulted partly from a dearth of student-teaching mentors, but also an unhealthy faculty bias against sending their charges to the state’s urban schools (where two-thirds of New York children happen to be enrolled). In another part of our academic forest, SUNY’s community and technical colleges were constantly preoccupied with ensuring that their curricula kept up with requirements of an ever-changing American labor market. Even SUNY’s most prestigious institutions faced daunting challenges in fulfilling their human-capital missions: attracting the best students, retaining the best faculty, and reaching faculty agreement on a rigorous foundation of general education. In working with campuses on all of these issues and many others, I essentially underwent a thorough apprenticeship in the inner workings of America’s educational system from preschool through graduate school, leading to the development of my thinking on education policy as reflected in chapters 2 through 5.

My reflections on human capital in the workplace flow from my work with SUNY’s impressive research universities, including Cornell (affiliated through complex historical and financial ties) and our four medical centers. I was then—and continue to be—highly impressed by the breathtaking scientific and technological discoveries emerging from these places, which underscore how critical New York’s—and the nation’s—universities are in securing America’s global leadership in science and technology. Further, I saw firsthand how these discoveries rapidly morphed into new products and industries, a key determinant of how much human capital is generated in the workplace: SUNY campuses gave America and the world magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners; the bar code; the latest generation of computer chips; “virtual” colonoscopies; and three-dimensional printing, among countless other transformational breakthroughs. But all of the undeniable and quite awe-inspiring output of these places depended very heavily, if not in many cases exclusively, on financial support from the federal and state governments. I spent a fair amount of time and ingenuity in helping our campuses gain that support. My years toiling in SUNY’s research vineyards strongly shaped my ideas in chapter 6.

Although my desire to write this book owes a great deal to my experience in Albany, it is also grounded in a deeply held conviction that has influenced all my work. Among the things I have been most certain of my entire adult life is that the United States truly is an exceptional country. Earlier in my adulthood I had plenty of company in this belief, at a time when this notion of American exceptionalism was celebrated across our nation’s partisan and ideological spectrum. Today, however, the term has fallen into some disrepute, especially among America’s cosmopolitan and intellectual elites. How dare we, with all our faults and shortcomings, hold ourselves apart and think of our country as better than any other?

Well, sorry, I still firmly hold on to my belief in this country’s exceptionalism. Even so, it does require that I give some thought to what it is, exactly, that makes us exceptional. It begins, of course, with our founding documents, notably the Declaration of Independence, which is still the most idealistic civic charter ever written, an ongoing inspiration for freedom fighters everywhere. Certainly, being the world’s oldest true democracy—at least among nations of any size—is part of the story, as is the fervent attachment of Americans to untrammeled personal freedom and individual initiative. Then there is our social egalitarianism: despite the existence at all times of great disparities of income and wealth in our midst, Americans really do believe that “all men are created equal”; that no one is intrinsically any better than anyone else; that every newborn American child should have the same shot at opportunity and success.

But the inspired civic architecture and individualistic and egalitarian values of the United States have not served just as the country’s backdrop. Americans long ago realized that, for the country to remain “the promised land” (using an enduring popular metaphor), the United States needed to sustain a robust set of institutions and practices to keep its people prosperous and free; in other words, to make extraordinary—by the standards of every age—investments in the human capital of their children and fellow citizens, and to embrace human capital from abroad. That is the real basis of American exceptionalism—and the subject of this book.

I want to thank all those who made the completion of this book possible. First, I want to express my appreciation for my publisher, Encounter Books, and its staff, both for their initial confidence in my conception of the book and for their unwavering help as the book was being written and produced.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Manhattan Institute, which has provided critical support for this book, as it has for many of my previous ones. I want especially to thank its president, Larry Mone, for his ongoing faith in the project; its book director, Bernadette Serton, for her indispensable guidance throughout the long journey from the germ of an idea to finished manuscript, and my research assistant, Yevgeniy Feyman, who helped in the writing and supplied some of the book’s key data.

I also want to acknowledge the many people who provided the inspiration and evidence I needed to shape my thinking on what has made the United States a smart society, from my former colleagues in SUNY System Administration to the many experts on American human capital—both scholars and practitioners—upon whose ideas, analyses, and experiences the book’s arguments are based.