We must be able to compete in global market

Why are we now better able to predict the future, yet less able to do anything about it?

That's the question I found myself asking after reading John Naisbitt's book, "Megatrends" 21 years ago. Now, even in the face of danger to our national security, we are unable to do something about it. Thomas Kean, a member of the 9/11 commission who earlier this month expressed the commission's frustration over the slow pace of action on its recommendations for strengthening homeland security, said it best: "We know many of these recommendations are going to be implemented. The question is whether they are going to be implemented before the next attack or after it."

What is most disturbing about that statement is that even when our nation is confronted with a disaster, such as 9/11, more than three years later we find our institutions suffering from paralysis and unable to change. We have come to believe that those institutions we built to solve problems for a different era, and which made our nation strong, would serve us forever, but now we can see that they are decaying and dying of old age.

Somewhere along the way we have forgotten a most important lesson Thomas Jefferson left us: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times."

We have become victims of our own success. We became complacent, indulged in self-congratulation and assumed our social institutions that made our society thrive would last forever. That may have been true for the industrial era. We now find our nation trying to cope with change, and we seem unable to find the will to do something about it.

And while we worry about the terrorist threats, the greater threat is in our inability to compete in today's global economy. We can continue to do more studies, build walls and missiles to protect ourselves, but we now live in a world without walls or borders, a wireless place where individuals are empowered, communicating and sharing ideas on cyberspace platforms, and where the currency to succeed is the intellectual knowledge needed to innovate.

Knowledgeable people have warned us of the need to restructure our educational system if we are to remain competitive in the world market place, starting with the "Nation at Risk" report 22 years ago. Yet we continue to do a lot of studies, hand wringing and finger-pointing waiting for the White House to come up with more political quick fixes.