In his latest column ("The Secret of Our Sauce" ),
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/opinion/07FRIE.html?hp
professional patriot Tom Friedman tells that the US will always be the leading economic powerhouse no matter how many jobs are shipped to India or China or anywhere else because of its exceptionally advanced educational system and consequent capacity for perpetual innovation in all things. For some reason, this sounded eerily familiar:
"On the other hand, what economic development needed at a higher level [in 1848-1875] was not so much scientific originality and sophistication -- that could be borrowed -- as the capacity to grasp and manipulate science: 'development' rather than research. The American universities and technical academies, which were undistinguished by the standards of, say, Cambridge and the Polytechnique, were economically superior to the British ones because they actually provided a systematic education for engineers such as did not yet exist in the old country. They were superior to the French, becuase they mass produced engineers of adequate level instead of producing a few superbly intelligent and well-educated ones. ... [Cheap US products] worried intelligent Europeans, who already noted in the 1860s the technological superiority of the United States in mass production, but not yet the 'practical men,' who merely thought that the Americans would not have to bother to invent machines to produce inferior articles, if they had as ready a supply of skilled and versatile craftsmen as the Europeans. After all, did not a French official as late as the early 1900s claim that, while France might not be able to keep up with other countries in mass-production industry, it could more than hold its own in the industry where ingenuity and craft skill were decisive: the manufacture of automobiles?"
-- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1975