Always on the side of the egg

Always on the side of the egg

By Haruki Murakami


I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.
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Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me - and especially if they are warning me - "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories - stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

Top Corporate Citizens 2009 -- Responsibility Generates Vitality

Top Corporate Citizens 2009

Responsibility Generates Vitality

By Isabella Wu
From CommonWealth Magazine
Published: March 19, 2009 (No.417)

CommonWealth Magazine's survey of Taiwan's top corporate citizens found that in these trying times, being socially responsible is more than a way to build an image or give back to society; it is now critical to reviving sagging bottom lines.

World trade is expected to decline by 2 percentage points in 2009, leaving nearly every business and industry facing a severely contracting global market. One consequence of the world's economic slump has been a reversal of the trend toward greater corporate social responsibility, which had been a major private sector battleground over the past two years.

There are no official statistics indicating that the global economic downturn has compelled companies to invest less in fulfilling their corporate social responsibility (encompassing corporate governance, training and R&D, charitable donations, and energy conservation). But considering the general economic environment, in which businesses have been obsessed with the bottom line and are cutting employee benefits or financial assistance to underprivileged groups, such a conclusion would seem reasonable.

It may be premature, however, to depict the rush to be a good corporate citizen in recent years as simply a temporary craze triggered by prosperity.

CSR on the Skids?

Ignoring for a moment the bleak financial statements and negative news dominating recent headlines and re-examining the trends that drove the rapid growth in emphasis on corporate social responsibility, one finds that not only do those trends still exist, they are pushing forward unabated.

Take corporate governance. Following the global financial tsunami, the American and British governments – both staunch free market advocates – began to intervene in the operations of troubled corporations. As a consequence, governments around the world are now imposing stricter regulations on corporate entities, requiring more transparent information disclosures.

Likewise, human rights and environmental activists have not relaxed in the least their monitoring of corporate activities. The Climate Conference in Copenhagen, scheduled for December 2009, will discuss the post-Kyoto Protocol era and is expected to raise each country's environmental standards and impose stricter controls on greenhouse gas emissions.

The pressures faced by corporations have not changed, while a series of new problems, including mounting poverty, drought, health-care issues and growing environmental crises, have emerged that can only be solved with private sector participation.

"We must break the tyranny of short-term thinking in favor of long-term solutions. This will demand a renewed commitment to core principles," United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon declared at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland at the end of January. He insisted that private-sector initiatives to solve society's needs were the key to revitalizing economic activity and would reflect which companies truly had values.

It cannot be denied that some enterprises have cut their contributions to charities and education amid the economic slump, but there are many others whose commitment to their social responsibility has remained firm. They remain dedicated to engendering social change and creating commercial opportunities.

The Big Responsibilities of Big Companies

For Starbucks, the world's biggest coffee chain, 2008 was a rough year. The company's share price tumbled by more than 50 percent, and CEO Howard Schultz introduced a US$400 million cost-cutting program in December. But Starbucks' spending on social responsibility remained unscathed. Not only did the company propose a new plan to provide assistance to fight AIDS in Africa, it continued to expand its purchases of Fair Trade Certified coffee and became the biggest single buyer of this socially responsible coffee in the world. Its purchases have helped improve the lives of coffee farmers in Colombia and Ethiopia.

"When we come out of this fog," said General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt last November, "this notion that companies need to stand for something – they need to be accountable for more than just the money they earn – is going to be profound."

Immelt's view explains why so many corporate leaders remain steadfast in having their companies meet their social responsibilities.

GE's share price also fell by more than half in 2008, but its charitable contributions to satisfy basic needs such as food and clothing actually rose. Through its response to future environmental challenges – the multi-billion U.S. dollar Ecomagination plan – GE has invested heavily in developing clean coal-fired power plants and electronic health records, among other green products. Revenues for these products rose 21 percent in 2008, bucking the generally downward trend.

Many companies in Taiwan have the same commitment to corporate social responsibility, which has also become for them an engine of progress.

Taiwan's Golden Supply Chain

When ASUStek Computer drew widespread attention in early 2009, the focus was on its 2008 fourth-quarter net loss of NT$2.8 billion due to inventory problems, the company's first quarterly loss in its history. But while it was losing money, ASUS became the first of the world's 10 leading computer vendors to receive EuP (Energy-using Product) certification, and it also earned nine U.S. EPEAT (Electronic Products Environment Assessment Tool) gold ratings.

"Look. 'Taiwan' is written there," said Hsiao Hui-chuan, the director-general of the Environmental Protection Administration's Department of Supervision, Evaluation and Dispute Resolution, as she looked at a copy of the EuP certificate. Hsiao, who helped ASUS with the EuP certification application process, proudly noted that Taiwan had come out in front in an extremely difficult competition.

But Frank Lin, the company's chief quality officer, says, "For ASUS to be good on its own is not enough." An even bigger project, says Lin, is for the computer maker to teach its more than 1,000 Taiwanese suppliers the new standards. Lin and his colleagues hold classes on the standards at each of their suppliers' offices and are on constant call to resolve design and production problems, all in the name of elevating the company's entire supply chain to a world-class level.

Companies in conventional industries are no less committed to corporate social responsibility. When Formosa Plastics Group founder Wang Yung-ching passed away last year, his own philanthropic activities and those of his company were thrust into the spotlight.

Formosa Plastics, which built its reputation on its management system and ability to improve existing processes, applied its standard operating procedures and acumen for getting results to solving a problem few were willing to touch – teaching professional skills to AIDS victims in Taiwan's prisons. The recidivism rate among prisoners who participated in the program fell to 34 percent, from 80 percent previously. Every AIDS patient who remained out of jail saved the prison system NT$1.5 million in medical expenses.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in his first annual letter after beginning to work full-time at the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation, wrote, "The wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequity. This is especially true when the constraints on others are so great. Otherwise, we will come out of the economic downturn in a world that is even more unequal, with... fewer opportunities for people to improve their lives."

Undaunted by the floundering economy, a growing number of companies in different corners of Taiwan are still investing money, contributing manpower, or unleashing their professional expertise to fulfill their roles as creators of those opportunities.

Where innovation creates value

Where innovation creates value

It doesn’t matter where scientific discoveries and breakthrough technologies originate—for national prosperity, the important thing is who commercializes them. The United States is not behind in that race.

FEBRUARY 2009 • Amar Bhidé

Now, perhaps, more than ever, the fear of globalization haunts the United States. Many manufacturing companies that once flourished there fell to overseas competition or relocated much of their work abroad. Then services embarked on the same journey. Just as the manufacturing exodus started with low-wage, unskilled labor, the offshoring of services at first involved data entry, routine software programming and testing, and the operation of phone banks. But today, overseas workers analyze financial statements, test trading strategies, and design computer chips and software architectures for US companies.

It is the offshoring of research and development—of innovation and the future—that arouses the keenest anxiety. The economist Richard Freeman spoke for many Americans when he warned that the United States could become significantly less competitive “as large developing countries like China and India harness their growing scientific and engineering expertise to their enormous, low-wage labor forces.”1 What is the appropriate response? One, from the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, the TV broadcaster Lou Dobbs, and their like, calls for protectionism. Another, seemingly more progressive, approach would be to spend more money to promote cutting-edge science and technology. Much of the establishment, Democratic and Republican alike, has embraced what the economists Sylvia Ostry and Richard Nelson call techno-nationalism and techno-fetishism, which both claim that US prosperity requires continued domination of these fields.

We’ve heard such fears and prescriptions before. In the 1980s, many people attributed the problems of the US economy to the proliferation of lawyers and managers and to a shortage of engineers and scientists; Germany and Japan were praised as countries with a better occupational ratio. Yet in the 1990s, their economies slackened while the United States prospered—and not because it heeded the warnings. Indeed, math and science education in US high schools didn’t improve much. Enrollment in law schools remained high, and managers accounted for a growing proportion of the workforce. The US share of scientific articles, science and engineering PhDs, and patents continued to decline, the service sector to expand, and manufacturing employment to stagnate.

Of course, the United States can’t count on the same happy ending to every episode of the “losing our lead” serial. The integration of China and India into the global economy is a seminal and unprecedented phenomenon. Could the outcome be different this time? Is the United States on the verge of being pummeled by a technological hurricane? In my view, the answer is no. Worries about the offshoring of R&D and the progress of science in China and India arise from a failure to understand technological innovation and its relation to the global economy. Innovation does play a major role in nurturing prosperity, but we must be careful to formulate policies that sustain rather than undermine it—for instance, by favoring one form of innovation over another.
Three levels of innovation

Innovation involves the development of new products or processes and the know-how that begets them. New products can take the form of high-level building blocks or raw materials (for example, microprocessors or the silicon of which they are made), midlevel intermediate goods (motherboards with components such as microprocessors), and ground-level final products (such as computers). Similarly, the underlying know-how for new products includes high-level general principles, midlevel technologies, and ground-level, context-specific rules of thumb. For microprocessors, this know-how includes the laws of solid-state physics (high level), circuit designs and chip layouts (midlevel), and the tweaking of conditions in semiconductor fabrication plants to maximize yields and quality (ground level).

Technological innovations, especially high-level ones, usually have limited economic or commercial importance unless complemented by lower-level innovations. Breakthroughs in solid-state physics, for example, have value for the semiconductor industry only if accompanied by new microprocessor designs, which themselves may be largely useless without plant-level tweaks that make it possible to produce these components in large quantities. A new microprocessor’s value may be impossible to realize without new motherboards and computers, as well.

New know-how and products also require interconnected, nontechnological innovations on a number of levels. A new diskless (thin-client) computer, for instance, generates revenue for its producer and value for its users only if it is marketed effectively and deployed properly. Marketing and organizational innovations are usually needed; for example, such a computer may force its manufacturer to develop a new sales pitch and materials and its users to reorganize their IT departments.

Arguing about which innovations or innovators make the greatest contribution to economic prosperity, however, isn’t helpful, for they all play necessary and complementary roles. Innovations that sustain prosperity are developed and used in a huge game involving many players working on many levels over many years.

Consider, for instance, the story of the key active component in almost all modern electronics: the transistor. A pair of German physicists obtained the first patents for it in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1947, William Shockley and two colleagues at Bell Labs built the first practical point-contact transistor, which Bell used only in small quantities. In 1950, Shockley developed the radically different bipolar junction transistor and licensed it to companies such as Texas Instruments, which at first implemented it in a limited run of radios that were used as a sales tool. Within two decades, transistors had replaced vacuum tubes in radios and TVs and spawned a whole world of new devices, such as electronic calculators and personal computers.

The German physicists’ discoveries began an extended process of developing know-how at a number of levels. Some steps involved high-level discoveries, such as the transistor effect, which earned Shockley and his colleagues a Nobel Prize. Other steps, such as those needed to obtain high production yields in semiconductor plants, called for lower-level, context-specific knowledge.

A similar complexity characterizes globalization. A variety of cross-border flows can be important to innovators—for instance, the diffusion of scientific principles and technological breakthroughs, the licensing of know-how, the export and import of final products, the procurement of intermediate goods and services (offshoring), equity investments, and the use of immigrant labor. Many kinds of global interactions have become more common, but not in a uniform way: international trade in manufactured goods has soared, but most services remain untraded. Of the many activities in the innovation game, only some are performed well in remote, low-cost locations; many midlevel activities, for example, are best conducted close to potential customers.
Where technomania goes wrong

Techno-nationalists and techno-fetishists oversimplify innovation by equating it with discoveries announced in scientific journals and with patents for cutting-edge technologies developed in university or commercial research labs. Since they rarely distinguish between the different levels and kinds of know-how, they ignore the contributions of the other players—contributions that don’t generate publications or patents.

They oversimplify globalization as well—for example, by assuming that high-level ideas and know-how rarely if ever cross national borders and that only the final products made with it are traded. Actually, ideas and technologies move from country to country quite easily, but much final output, especially in the service sector, does not. The findings of science are available—for the price of learned books and journals—to any country that can use them. Advanced technology, by contrast, does have commercial value because it can be patented, but patent owners generally don’t charge higher fees to foreigners. In the early 1950s, what was then a tiny Japanese company called Sony was among the first licensors of Bell Labs’ transistor patent, for $50,000.

In a world where breakthroughs travel easily, their national origins are fundamentally unimportant. Notwithstanding the celebrated claim of the author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, it doesn’t matter that Google’s search algorithm was developed in California. An Englishman invented the World Wide Web’s protocols in a Swiss lab. A Swede and a Dane started Skype, the leading provider of peer-to-peer Internet telephony, in Estonia. To be sure, the foreign provenance of such advances does not harm the US economy .

Case in point: Innovation in health care

The medical sector illustrates the high-level bias of public policy, as well as the large potential benefits of focusing more on the development and use of mid- and ground-level innovations. The United States spends more of its national income on health care—about 16 percent of GDP—than any other country. Yet in many ways it isn’t getting value for the money.1In 2007, 40 countries had lower infant mortality rates and 44 had a higher life expectancy.

Skimpy government support for high-level medical research certainly isn’t the problem. On the contrary, from 1998 to 2003 government funding for health care R&D, as a proportion of 2004 GDP, was more than ten times higher in the United States than in Austria, Sweden, or Switzerland—which had lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies. And government-funded research is far from the whole story: foundations and for-profit companies put up much more money than the tax-funded National Institutes of Health does.

Yet some people in the United States worry that China and India threaten US preeminence in basic medical research. In February 2006, for example, Business Week warned that China’s State Council had substantially increased R&D funding, with biotechnology at the top of the list. The story highlights an experimental gene therapy, for treating cancers, in which the country was ominously said to be “racing to a lead.” 2 How would US health care or economic prosperity suffer if government subsidies in China made it possible to cure cancers? An obsession with staying ahead in every possible frontier of medical research diverts money and attention from health services reform, which would provide far greater payoffs that would remain largely in the United States. Some experts advocate a broader role for the government in fixing the system’s troubles, others a more market-oriented approach. But almost all experts agree that the solution isn’t more or better medical research—it’s changing the game so that hospitals will be better managed, IT used more widely and effectively, and insurance schemes better organized.

In the effort to reform health care services, innovative entrepreneurs could play an important role, if they were allowed to do so. Although they have improved productivity in just about every other sector of the US economy, in the “bloated, inefficient health care system,” as Harvard’s Regina Herzlinger observes, innovation has been restricted to medical technologies and health insurance. Entrepreneurs have difficulty attempting to provide care at lower cost—the heart of any real solution—because “status quo providers, abetted by legislators and insurance companies, have made it virtually impossible for them to succeed.” 3
Notes

1. See Diana M. Farrell, Eric S. Jensen, and Bob Kocher, “Why Americans pay more for health care,” mckinseyquarterly.com, December 2008.

2. Bruce Einhorn, “A cancer treatment you can’t get here,” Business Week, March 6, 2006.

3. Regina Herzlinger, Who Killed Health Care? America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem—and the Consumer-Driven Cure, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.


What is true for breakthroughs from Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia is true as well for those from China, India, and other emerging economies. We should expect—and desire—that as prosperity spreads, more places will contribute to humanity’s stock of scientific and technological knowledge. The nations of the earth are not locked into a winner-take-all race for leadership in these fields: the enhancement of research capabilities in China and India, and thus their share of cutting-edge work, will improve living standards in the United States, which, if anything, should encourage these developments rather than waste valuable resources fighting them.

The willingness and ability of lower-level players to create new know-how and products is at least as important to an economy as the scientific and technological breakthroughs on which they rest. Without radio manufacturers such as Sony, for instance, transistors might have remained mere curiosities in a lab. Maryland has a higher per capita income than Mississippi not because Maryland is or was an extremely significant developer of breakthrough technologies but because of its greater ability to benefit from them. Conversely, the city of Rochester, New York—home to Kodak and Xerox—is reputed to have one of the highest per capita levels of patents of all US cities. It is far from the most economically vibrant among them, however.

More than 40 years ago, the British economists Charles Carter and Bruce Williams warned that “it is easy to impede [economic] growth by excessive research, by having too high a percentage of scientific manpower engaged in adding to the stock of knowledge and too small a percentage engaged in using it. This is the position in Britain today.”2 It is very much to the point that the United States has not only great scientists and research labs but also many players that can exploit high-level breakthroughs regardless of where they originate. An increase in the supply of high-level know-how, no matter what its source, provides more raw material for mid- and ground-level innovations that raise US living standards.

Techno-fetishism and techno-nationalism also ignore the implications of the service sector’s ever-growing share of the US economy. Manufacturing, with just 12 percent of US GDP, accounts for some 42 percent of the country’s R&D and employs a disproportionately large number of its scientists, technicians, and engineers. Services, with about 70 percent of US GDP, accounts for a disproportionately low one. But this doesn’t mean that the service sector shuns innovation. As the economist Dirk Pilat notes, “R&D in services is often different in character from R&D in manufacturing. It is less oriented toward technological developments and more at codevelopment, with hardware and software suppliers, of ways to apply technology” to products.3 Whatever proportion of resources a manufacturing economy should devote to formal research (or research labs) and to educating scientists, the appropriate proportion would be lower in a services-based economy.

Consider a particularly important aspect of the US service sector: its use of innovations in information technology. It simply doesn’t matter where they were developed; the benefits accrue mainly to US workers and consumers because, in contrast to manufacturing, most services generated in the United States are consumed there. Suppose that IT researchers in, say, Germany create an application that helps retailers to cut inventories. Wal-Mart Stores and many of its US competitors have shown conclusively that they are much more likely to use such technologies than retailers in, for example, Germany, where regulations and a preference for picturesque but inefficient small-scale shops discourage companies from taking a chance on anything new. That is among the main reasons why since the mid-1990s, productivity and incomes have grown faster in the United States than in Europe and Japan.
Changing course

Since innovation is not a zero-sum game among nations, and high-level science and engineering are no more important than the ability to use them in mid- and ground-level innovations, the United States should reverse policies that favor the one over the other, and it should cease to worry that the forward march of the rest of the human race will reduce it to ruin.

One obvious example of its mistaken policies is the provision of subsidies and grants for R&D but not for the marketing of products or for the development of ground-level know-how to help the people who use them. Similarly, companies such as Wal-Mart have very large IT budgets and staffs that develop a great deal of ground-level expertise and even develop in-house systems. But none of this qualifies for R&D incentives.

Policies to promote long-term investment by providing tax credits for capital equipment and for brick-and-mortar structures seem outdated as well. The purchase price of enterprise-resource-planning systems, for example, is just a fraction of the total cost of the projects to implement them. Yet businesses eligible for investment-tax credits to buy computer hardware or software don’t receive tax breaks for the cost of training users, adapting hardware and software systems to the specific needs of a company, or reengineering its business processes to accommodate them.

Immigration policies that favor high-level research by preferring highly trained engineers and scientists to people who hold only bachelor’s degrees are misguided too. By working in, say, the IT departments of retailers and banks, immigrants who don’t have advanced degrees probably make as great a contribution to the US economy as those who do. Likewise, the US patent system is excessively attuned to the needs of R&D labs and not enough to those of innovators developing mid- and ground-level products, which often don’t generate patentable intellectual property under current rules and are often threatened by easily obtained high-level patents.

Thomas Friedman to the contrary, the world is hardly flat: China and India aren’t close to catching up with the United States in the ability to develop and use technological innovations. Starting afresh may allow these countries to leapfrog ahead in some respects—building advanced mobile-phone networks, for example. But excelling in the overall innovation game requires a great and diverse team, which takes a very long time to build. Japan, for instance, began to modernize itself in the late 1860s. Within a few decades, it had utterly transformed its industry, educational system, and military. Today, the country’s highly developed economy makes important contributions to technological progress. Yet after nearly 150 years of modernization, Japan remains behind the United States in the overall capacity to develop and use those innovations, as average productivity data show. South Korea and Taiwan, which have enjoyed truly miraculous growth rates since the 1970s, are still further behind. Do China and India have any real likelihood, at any time in the foreseeable future, of attaining the parity with the United States that has so far eluded Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan?

Complacency is dangerous, but fretting over imaginary threats impairs the ability to address real ones. A misguided fear of scientific and technological progress in China and India distracts Americans both from its benefits and from the important problems created by the integration of these two countries into the global economy—such as the soaring per capita fossil fuel consumption of more than two billion people. We do have much to worry about. Let’s worry about the right things.


About the Author

Amar Bhidé is the Lawrence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. This article summarizes the first and last chapters of his book The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Notes

1. See Ashley Pettus, “Overseas insourcing,” Harvard Magazine, 2005, Volume 108, Number 2.

2. Charles F. Carter and Bruce R. Williams, “Government scientific policy and the growth of the British economy,” The Manchester School, 1964, Volume 32, Number 3, pp. 197–214.

3. Dirk Pilat, “Innovation and productivity in services: State of the art,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001.

森林裡的蘑菇為什麼都有圓點？

桃太郎為什麼是從桃子裡生出來的，橘子就不行嗎？從生物學、植物學的角度重新拆解童話故事中的情節，會讓我們看到意想不到的謎底。

【龜兔賽跑】

動作遲緩而被兔子取笑的烏龜，大膽的向兔子提議，比比看誰比較快跑到山腳下。從起跑線開始就以飛快速度衝出去的兔子，跑了一會兒回頭一看，發現烏龜還離得很遠。因此，兔子決定小睡一會兒。而烏龜的速度雖然很慢，但不眠不休踏著穩健的腳步向終點邁進，終於追過了兔子。睡過頭的兔子睜開眼睛，發現烏龜已經先抵達終點。

兔子與烏龜賽跑，如果認真跑起來，兔子的速度當然比較快。但我們可以發現，烏龜其實也挺逞強的。如果兔子沒有在中途打盹，牠打算怎麼做呢？恐怕烏龜早有勝算。要不是這樣，應該不會貿然向兔子提出挑戰，以賽跑來分勝負。

烏龜發狠，提出要和兔子賽跑到對面小山的山腳下。沒錯，這正是烏龜的策略。其實，兔子是短跑健將，牠最大的優點就是行動迅速，一旦遭到敵人襲擊，會敏捷的跳進樹叢裡躲起來，但牠並不擅長長跑。烏龜很清楚這點，才邀兔子跑長途賽。

烏龜的勝利方程式

兔子毫無警覺的掉進烏龜的算計裡，還在重要比賽中犯了致命的錯誤。人類在跑步時會出汗，以流汗來防止體溫過度升高。然而，兔子的汗腺不發達，無法以流汗來降低體溫。兔子是靠牠的長耳朵來吹風散熱，使血液冷卻、降低體溫。所以，兔子跑步時必須豎著耳朵跑。

但事情總有例外。翻看《兔子與烏龜》的繪本會發現，書上畫的兔子一定是垂著耳朵跑。這可能是兔子為了讓烏龜瞧瞧牠御風而跑的英姿吧，但牠這樣跑久了，身體吃不消。本來就只擅長短跑的兔子，由於耳朵沒迎風散熱，體溫不斷升高的結果，身體很快就熱得受不了。於是，跑累了的兔子不得不睡個覺。事後，兔子應該會後悔：至少不要只有外表看起來很酷，如果一直豎著耳朵跑的話……。

兔子眼睛不全是紅的

龜兔賽跑的結局，兔子的確因為輸給烏龜而自食苦果。但不知為何，自古還有很多關於兔子被弄哭的傳說。在傳說故事中，經常描述兔子哭了之後眼睛變紅的情節。至於兔子的眼睛為什麼是紅色的？

仔細觀察兔子可以發現，並不是所有兔子的眼睛都是紅色的。有紅色眼睛的兔子通常是白兔。眼睛黑色者是因為瞳孔四周有黑色素（melanin）。但小白兔的瞳孔四周沒有黑色素，眼球是透明的，經由眼球反射眼底的血管，使得小白兔的眼睛看起來是紅色的。

相傳白兔之所以有紅眼，是因為人工飼養的關係。其實，白兔是基因突變後不具黑色素的兔子。生物會出現少有的色素消失的基因突變現象，稱為白化症（albino）。然而，白色個體在自然界非常醒目，很容易遭天敵襲擊，所以白化症的生物很難在自然界生存。從前的人把白狐狸或白蛇等視為神的使者，非常敬畏牠們，就是因為稀有的緣故。由於人們非常珍視無法在大自然中生存的白化生物，所以經由飼養產生白色兔子。除了兔子之外，白色家鼷鼠（house mouse，學名Mus musculus）也是白化症的好例子。此外，植物界也可以看到白化症。如白花椰菜（cauliflower）就是從綠花椰菜（broccoli）基因突變而成的，我們平常吃的白色金針菇來自發生基因變異的茶褐色菇類。

相較於人工飼養出來的白兔子，野生的兔子多半是茶色或灰色。但為了能在下雪的地方生存，有些野生兔子冬天時會長出具保護色彩的白毛，這不是因為失去色素。野生兔子的毛色即使是白色的，眼睛也不會是紅色。

【螞蟻與蟋蟀】

夏天時，螞蟻為了儲存冬天的糧食勤奮工作，蟋蟀卻無視於螞蟻的忠告，整天只知道唱歌和玩樂。不久，冬天來臨，到處都找不到食物，蟋蟀哀求螞蟻說：「我的肚子快餓扁了，請分點食物給我吧！」可是，螞蟻拒絕的說：「當夏天我們在工作的時候，你只知道唱歌，所以沒辦法給你食物。」

蟋蟀、螽斯等會叫的昆蟲，經常被描寫成很會演奏樂器的音樂家。 當然，真實世界裡的蟋蟀並不會拿樂器。那麼，蟋蟀是怎麼演奏出美妙的音樂呢？蟋蟀的翅膀是銼刀狀，相互摩擦就能發出聲音。這個構造和小提琴等弦樂器，靠弓弦的摩擦發出聲音一樣。

一提到和蟋蟀一樣能大聲鳴叫的昆蟲，大家一定會聯想到蟬。但蟬和蟋蟀的發聲結構完全不同。

蟬的腹部有震動膜，震動此一震動膜所發出的聲音，在其腹部的空腔內產生共鳴，製造出更大的聲音。這樣的發聲器官，和太鼓發出聲音的構造非常類似。

蟋蟀真的是懶惰鬼嗎？

儘管如此，蟬和蟋蟀的鳴叫聲還是很吵。叫得這麼大聲，難道牠們自己不覺得煩嗎？以《法布爾昆蟲記》聞名的法布爾（Jean-Henri Fabre），也曾對蟬的聽覺抱持疑問。為了確認蟬的聽覺，他大膽的在有蟬叫的大樹下鳴放大砲。實驗結果令人驚訝。蟬並沒有因為大砲聲而安靜下來，反而繼續大聲鳴叫。因此，法布爾做了一個結論：蟬是聾子。

然而，日後證實法布爾的想法是錯的。其實，昆蟲只對固定的聲波有反應，也就是只聽得到某些聲波範圍內的聲音。因此，蟬對大砲的聲音沒有反應。根據不同品種，蟬的聲波頻率為兩千至兩千九百赫，蟋蟀則超過九千五百赫。因此，不管蟬叫聲多麼吵鬧，蟋蟀也不會有任何怨言。

在《伊索寓言》中被烙印上懶惰印記的蟋蟀，真的只知道玩樂嗎？

當然，蟬和蟋蟀在夏天大聲唱歌，並非為了玩樂。大家都知道，只有雄性的蟬和蟋蟀會叫。而牠們之所以鳴叫，都是為了求偶，吸引雌性的注意。此外，這種舉動也有向同類的雄性彰顯勢力範圍，不讓對方靠近的作用。也就是說，蟬和蟋蟀是為了傳宗接代才拚命鳴叫，絕不是在玩樂。

反觀，批評蟋蟀的螞蟻又如何呢？牠們根本不必尋找配偶，只知道拚命搬運食物。雖然專心工作過日子的感覺很酷，但光是拚命工作就可以傳宗接代嗎？大家都知道，螞蟻的社會是以蟻后為中心來建立階級，不同階級的螞蟻各自扮演不同的角色。例如，在工蟻中，有負責搬運食物的工蟻，也有負責照顧幼蟻的工蟻。兵蟻則擔任防止入侵者的衛兵角色。不過，連工蟻也應該留下後代。事實上，工蟻是靠勤奮工作、好好照顧幼蟻留下後代。

道金斯（Richard Dawkins）在《自私的基因》（The Selfish Gene）中闡明，所有生物體內的遺傳基因，都在進行利己的行動。換言之，生物繁衍的目的不是傳宗接代，而是想留下自己的遺傳基因。

由於是同一隻蟻后所生，所有工蟻都是姊妹關係。對工蟻而言，維持姊妹的團體生活，使得姊妹當中順利產生蟻后來產卵繁衍後代，留下與自己相同的遺傳基因，比繁衍自己的孩子更重要。也就是說，為了整個蟻巢做出自我犧牲的行為，反而是使整個螞蟻族群繁衍下去、留下自己遺傳基因的利己行為。

為了談一個夏日戀情而活的蟋蟀和蟬，與為了工作而活的螞蟻，乍看之下好像彼此的生活方式完全不同，但其實有同樣的目的，就是留下自己的遺傳基因。

螞蟻不是想像中的工作狂

螞蟻一直教導蟋蟀勤奮工作的重要性，但螞蟻真的是工作狂嗎？在《螞蟻與蟋蟀》故事中，一直在酷熱的夏天勤奮工作的螞蟻，據說溫度太高的日子一樣處於休息狀態。由於昆蟲是變溫動物，氣溫太高會使牠們活動力減緩。事實上，夏天開花的植物如牽牛花、鴨跖草等，大部分是在上午涼爽的時候開花，因為一到下午天氣變熱，蜜蜂和虻（horse fly）等幫忙傳播花粉的昆蟲就不會出現。不僅是工蟻，工蜂等也會在天氣熱時好好休息。

但關於螞蟻的工作實情，還有更驚人的研究結果。螞蟻總是給人勤奮工作的印象，但據說真正在工作的螞蟻只有八成，剩下的兩成只是假裝很勤奮的樣子，其實在混水摸魚。更令人玩味的是，如果移除這兩成怠工的螞蟻，在下次出勤的螞蟻中，同樣會出現怠工現象，而且也占全體的兩成。人類世界其實適用同樣的法則。連最勤奮工作的螞蟻都出現怠工者，我們人類老想偷懶的想法也就不足為奇了。

【傑克與豆子】

傑克把母牛帶到市場賣的途中，用牛和一位不認識的老爺爺交換了豆子。傑克的母親非常生氣，把豆子丟到窗外；隔天早上，豆子很快變成一株直達天上的大樹。爬上豆子樹到了天上的傑克，從巨人家盜走金幣、會生金蛋的雞和會唱歌的豎琴。巨人發現之後追著傑克，傑克的母親在傑克到達地面時，用斧頭砍倒豆子樹，巨人就摔死了。從此以後，傑克和母親靠著從巨人那裡得到的寶物，過著幸福的生活。

傑克真的有到天上去嗎？

一夜之間就長到天上的豆子樹，究竟是什麼植物？植物的確會在夜間生長，但可能長得這麼快嗎？

一般植物的種子是由胚及胚乳構成的，胚就像植物的胎兒，胚乳則是植物發芽時的營養來源。然而，豆科的種子卻不一樣。我們來看看比較容易觀察的蠶豆吧！蠶豆的種子裡只有兩片子葉，也就是它沒有胚乳。那麼蠶豆發芽時，是從哪裡獲得必要的營養來源呢？

其實，它的營養成分都在子葉裡。如果把蠶豆播種在泥土裡，最先冒出來的就是肥厚的子葉。那兩片子葉是蠶豆的能量庫。豆科植物是以內藏能量庫的方式，有效活用種子裡有限的空間，才得以順利生長。

不過，這樣只解決了植物發芽時的問題。不管芽發得多快，植物發芽之後，怎樣才能快速生長呢？

關於蔓生植物生長秘密的提示，就在本篇這個故事的標題裡。我查了一下原作發現，這個故事的標題原本並不是「傑克與豆子」，而是「傑克與蔓生的豆子」。這樣大家就可以理解了吧！蔓生的豆子就是指生長快速的蔓生植物。

一般植物的生長要靠莖來支撐，需要健壯的莖。但蔓生植物只須攀附在其他植物或支柱上就能生長，不需要健壯的莖，因此可以用多餘的能量來生長和伸展。如此一來，就可以在短時間內看到蔓生植物明顯的生長。此外，蔓生植物輸送水分的導管及輸送養分的篩管都很粗，可以有效率的輸送水與養分。

然而，蔓生植物得以快速生長的代價，就是沒有強壯的莖，無法靠自己的力量挺立。為了向上生長，蔓生植物必須有可攀附的支柱。換言之，就算豆藤有攀爬至天上的能力，如果沒有可倚靠的支柱，仍只能在地上到處蔓生。

那麼，世界上原本就有可以長到天上的植物嗎？

植物要長得巨大，問題在於是否能將水分輸送至頂端。植物將水往上輸送的力量，就是蒸散作用（transpiration）。植物的葉片裡有數個讓空氣進出的口狀器官，稱為「氣孔」。植物裡的水分變成水蒸汽，從氣孔向外蒸發，便是蒸散作用。植物有從氣孔連接到根部的一股水流，就像一條水柱。因此，如果因為蒸散作用而失去水分，水就會往上移動。就像我們一吸吸管，水就被往上吸的感覺。

然而，即使蒸散作用讓水往上移動，但移動得越高，水的重量越重，還是有高度限制。根據一種計算方式，從水往上移動的力量，算出樹木的高度極限大約是一百三十公尺至一百四十公尺。這和現存世界最高的巨杉（giant sequoia，學名Sequoiadendron giganteum）高度一致。遺憾的是，世界上並沒有像童話故事中描述的那樣生長到天上的植物。從現代植物學的知識來看，無法否認的是，豆子可以長到天上的故事完全是錯誤的。

揭開豆子樹的真面目

不過，還有新的疑問。暫不討論植物能否長到天上，先來談談什麼樣的種子可以一個晚上長成大樹。

傑克的豆子一個晚上就長大了，但植物必須進行光合作用才能生長。換言之，植物的生長一定要靠陽光。只有一個大膽的假設可以解決這個疑問，就是假設故事中的豆子是巨大的蘑菇類植物。

我們一般所說的蘑菇，是指菌類的子實體。蘑菇和黴菌是同類植物，一樣靠菌絲增生茁壯。子實體是製造孢子的生殖器官，就像一般植物製造種子的組織「花」一樣。蘑菇會在一個晚上從毫不起眼的菌絲拚命長大；原本眼睛還看不見的纖細菌絲，一夜之間突然變成巨大的子實體，也就是一般所說的蘑菇。蘑菇的菌絲一方面吸收營養，一方面分支增生，不斷向四周蔓延擴展，在一定的季節和發育階段，產生子實體。如果是蘑菇，就可能一夜之間生長完成。

蘑菇通常是靠菌絲的增生慢慢茁壯長大，但一旦受到刺激，立刻形成子實體。例如，大家都知道光或放電等刺激，可以促進蘑菇生長。 自然界一直存在著這種經由刺激而急劇產生質變的現象，如果在遍布地上的菌絲中投入關鍵物質，它們一口氣形成子實體，並非不可能。

傑克拿回來的究竟是什麼種子，至今無人知曉。但說不定是因為傑克的母親將種子丟到窗外，為布滿地面的菌絲帶來某種刺激，使菌絲一夜之間快速長成巨大的蘑菇呢！當然，由於大家都說傑克拿到的是豆子的種子，所以他認為快速長到天上的蘑菇是豆子樹，攀爬上去，也並非不合理的說法吧！