以下是為了提升大家的英文能力，讓我們一起來"朗讀"~
Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s
your favorite country, other than your own?”
I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan.
“Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren
rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even
has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the
fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in
the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million
people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my
friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so
lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a
few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed
the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be
the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did
you get so lucky?”
That, at least, was my gut instinct. But
now we have proof.
A team from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little
study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for
International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests
math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries
— and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for
each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on
math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?
The
results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between
the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and
skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees
the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65
countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t
mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)
As the Bible notes, added Schleicher,
“Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring
them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have
gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative
economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich
countries in the region are not able to offer.”
So hold the oil, and pass the books.
According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore,
Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores
and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the
highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman,
Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while,
interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East
states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA
scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin
America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada,
Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources,
still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three
countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these
resource rents, and not just consuming them.
Add it all up and the numbers say that if
you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t
count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers,
involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,”
says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes
that countries will reap in the long run.”
Economists have long known about “Dutch
disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting
natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its
domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become
too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies
that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young
people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework
and honing skills.
By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in
countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or
Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part
because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its
knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. … Every
parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life
chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a
whole culture and education system around it.”
Or as my Indian-American friend K. R.
Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy,
likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”
That’s why the foreign countries with the
most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India,
South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.
But there is an important message for the
industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it
is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even
greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for
stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our
way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate
and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.
In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and
skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is
no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own
how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they
can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re
used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will
keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the
table yourself.”
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讀完了嗎!?
有沒有覺得一股驕傲油然而生呢?(如果沒有的話，自己檢討一下!)
台灣身為一個極度缺乏天然資源的"國家"，居然能擠身世界科技強權實屬不易，
在開心之餘，我們也要發現，這些已然是過去式了!
我們在高科技產業的優勢逐漸被取代，縱使在國際級設計展屢屢獲獎，
對於產業升級而言，無疑是杯水車薪。
21世紀是知識經濟的年代，一開始我們領先了! 但未來呢?
我們大學生有警覺嗎? 除了批評政府，抱怨財團之外呢?
我們了解未來的競爭對手嗎!? 對岸的年輕人競爭力與我們較之如何!?
“knowledge and
skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is
no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own
how much they will print.” says Schleicher.
知識和技術將會成為21世紀的經濟主流，沒有任何一個國家的中央銀行能印製它，但我們每一個人卻可以決定它的印量。這句話告訴我們，縱使沒有天然資源，在21世紀仍然可以很有競爭力，終點在"腦礦"，不過"腦礦"也不是取之不盡，用之不竭的，重點是我們的"教育"，如何讓我們的"腦礦"源源不絕呢!? "學習"是不二法門。
除了學校教你的，你還有多少未開發的"資源"?
你的未來有多少，關鍵在於你投資自己多少。
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