Chapter 5Greasing the Cognitive Skids
5.4Obstacles for Education Reform
5.5The Operations Side of Education
5.8The Interdisciplinary Aspect
5.9The Academic Program and Curricula
5.10Current Undergraduate Programs
Chapter 6Government Finally Gets It Right
6.2Designing an Effective Sustainable Business Policy
6.3Reforming the Corporate Rules
6.4Operational Advances for the Government
Chapter 7Healthy, Beautiful, Diverse, and Durable
8.2Opportunistic or Altruistic
8.5Indecent Exposure — TTL Value Fraud
8.6Pretenders and Emasculators
8.7The Six Essential Characteristics
Chapter 9Getting Our Business Right
9.2A Long-Standing Controversial Obstacle
Chapter 1
Houston, We Have a Problem
The U.S. is the third most populated nation in the world, behind only China and India, and is home to over 300 million people. Immigration from many locations around the globe has sparked the recent increase in U.S. population. The U.S. is behind only Russia and Canada in total land area and still holds substantial natural resources including farmland, timber, metals, coal, and even crude oil. The abundant supply of usable raw materials has greatly contributed to prosperity for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. for more than two centuries. Although the U.S. still has considerable poverty, crime, and economically depressed areas within its borders, the standard of living enjoyed in most U.S. communities is significantly higher than the day-to-day reality for billions of people throughout the developing world.
Over the past 200 years, our nation has developed an extensive industrial complex to provision food, transportation, shelter, and various industrial products for over 10 generations of Americans. Today the U.S. accounts for approximately 20% of the global natural resource consumption, although it has only 4.5% of the world’s population. In spite of some negative international sentiment toward America, many, often desperate, people from around the world try any means available to enter our nation and start a new life on the U.S. soil, sometimes repeatedly, even though their attempts are sometimes unsuccessful. In contrast, most Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and today few U.S. citizens choose to emigrate in search of more promising lives abroad. The U.S. has always offered exceptional quality-of-life opportunities for its residents that are unavailable in most other nations.
The continued expansion of the U.S. industrial complex over the past century has indeed provided the means for considerable economic prosperity. The unique heritage of capitalism, democracy, natural resource availability, and diverse human spirit has enabled a standard of living envied by many around the world. This heritage includes an immense economy that today is targeted by most major international manufacturers and investors as a lucrative market for products and a reliable location for speculative ventures. But a complete accounting of our economic legacy also includes a dark side. Not only has the U.S. industry provided a dependable stream of goods and services but it has also contributed a laundry list of serious problems for humanity and most biota, including an increase of cancer and other major health threats, loss of domestic jobs, decreasing soil fertility, a variety of compromised natural systems, and global climate change (discussed in detail later). We shall see how these pernicious and seriously regrettable health, environmental, social, and economic realities that have accompanied industrial expansion are for the most part unnecessary.
1.1Our Early Approach to Mounting Problems
By the middle of the 19th century, many American cities