Transcripts For CSPAN3 2016 National Competitiveness Forum M

CSPAN3 2016 National Competitiveness Forum Morning Session Part 1 February 17, 2017

And how to advance americas trade agenda to President Trump and the 115th congress. This is about an hour and a half. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the president and ceo of the u. S. Council on competitiveness, the honorable deborah wincesmith. Good morning. Welcome to the 2016 National Competitiveness forum and the u. S. Council on competitivenesss 30th anniversary. Last night, many of you were with us at the Smithsonians National museum of American History and we were so pleased and delighted to celebrate with so many friends and colleagues from around the country and the world. The councils 30th anniversary and to honor two great leaders of american competitiveness for their contributions. The secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz and the long time science adviser, john hold wren. Today we have a full and engaging day of presentations and recommendations and we hope you all will participate in the conversation. Allow me to just share a few thoughts about todays anniversary forum. In some ways, when you think of 30 years back and where we are today it is a little bit of a back to the future story, but not really. Because when you look at the threats and the challenges 30 years ago, they were very, very different from today although we were living in times of turbulence and transition. And Many Americans had tremendous anxiety about their future and it was really the vision and creativity of our founder john young who felt we needed to create a Nonpartisan Group of ceos from all sectors who would join with our University President s, labor leaders and now National Lab Leaders to develop a road map for americans prosperity and to work very closely with our government policymakers to implement that agenda. Our anniversary of course is a time of celebration, but very importantly today were going to focus on the future. We have some outstanding, exciting innovators who are going to be with us and were going to again look at what will be the path forward to enhanced growth, productivity and prosperity. We will shortly release the councils flagship clarion call for competitiveness with our recommendation. Which constitutes our strategy to the new president elect of america and the new congress that will take office in january. Were going to hear as i said from some top line innovators but were also going to have some very important discussions on new thought leadership from the council on competitiveness. Were going to hear from jim clifton the ceo of gallup about the new report that gallup and the council released earlier this week. No recovery, an analysis of the long term decline in u. S. Productivetive. Well have a fabulous luncheon talk from brand farren of the fabulous Applied Minds center in los angeles. If any of you have been there, its really a journey into the future. And then later in the day were going to talk about entrepreneurship and have a great discussion with steve case who i believe you have the book, the third wave hes given us today. I want to thank all of the members of the council for their tremendous support and participation with us on our journey. I want to thank and recognize our very generous sponsors who made last night and today possible. Lockheed martin, pepsico, united association, deere and company, deloitte, fedex, snap on, Arizona State university, the bank of america, ucla, uc san diego, whirlpool, white cap investments. I want to thank sara eisen who will join us shortly and her great team at cnbc for being our media partner today for the forum and finally thank the board and the executive committee of the council on competitiveness for all of their time and stewardship and being the host of this forum. So welcome, and we look forward to a fabulous day. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, joining ms. Wincesmith on stage to release the clarion call, competitiveness to the 45th president of the United States of america, please welcome the chairman and ceo of deere and company, and chairman of the u. S. Council on competitiveness, mr. Samuel allen. The vice chairman and chief scientific officer for Global Research and development of pepsico and u. S. Council on competitiveness vice chairman for industry, dr. Mehmood khan. The president of Arizona State university and u. S. Council on competitiveness University Vice charge, dr. Michael m. Crow. And coanchor of squawk on the street on cnbc, ms. Sara eisen. Hi, welcome, everyone. And thank you to our distinguished panel and im very pleased and honored to be here to kick off this exciting day. And to introduce the councils clarion call which is great way to frame the day and the conversation and is going to be their mission that will be sent directly to president elect donald trump. Here to discuss whats going to go inside, sam, if you would, as the chairman, please kick it off as far as the key priorities that you would like to mention in this clarion call. Well, i started off by saying that the president elect probably wont like his report card, so theres a lot of fs and ds. Not too many as on there. I think the important thing that were trying to highlight in the clarion call, there is a way forward, that there when you look at where the economy has been and this is really about accelerating gdp growth and that gets down into two components. That is how many workers are participating and whats the productivity that were deriving out of that . A number of the areas that were looking at in the clarion call whether it be education, which gets into really developing the workforce of the future. Whether it gets into assuring that we do start handling the debt which makes it sustainable. Whether its continuing to invest in basic r d which is important to the innovation set of this, which also drives the productivity piece. There are a number of areas there that we think are very, very important that we set a direction Going Forward. You can prioritize which ones you work on first. But all these areas are important to assure that the country is growing at a sustainable rate over a long period of time. What i love about the council in general and this panel is we have so many different backgrounds in academia represented. Mehmood, what are you looking to accomplish on behalf of the council and the clarion call . Well, you know, as im sure you see it in the clarion call, when we think about opportunity for growth theres still a lot of exciting opportunity out there. And let me just take sort of a Technology Perspective for a second. Lets start with the productivity we have had and we think about what everybody talks about as the moores law where the competitional power of microprocessors has gone to be doubling every two years or so. Its been an amazing few decades. That slowed down. One way of looking at it, the growth has been done and yet, there are exciting technologies coming around the corner that can jump start again and give us another scurve. Thats exciting because its another wave of growth. Its not just exciting from the economic point of view, but also its important from a defense point of view. As many people in this room know, the our military needs secure state of the art microelectronics. In fact, the last defense bill required the secretary of defense to make that available by 2020. So its a whole cluster of capabilities there. If we look beyond there in the more consumer industry, engineering in general, we have got the internet of things. Everybodys talking about it. Everybody is talking to experience it. If you think of the capability of sensors, Big Data Analytics and the ability for communications between devices, we are living that only at the surface right now. It will change the way that businesses operate, businesses use their labor force. The way that Companies Like mine at pepsico engage with the consumer. We have an exciting wave of this coming, this link between individuals and machines and machines with other machines. Now, another area that has generated from this as we now take internet of things, Artificial Intelligence and now link that to robotirobotics, li whats happening in manufacturing. We have seen a wave of that in manufacturing. But driverless vehicles are another example. Not only cars and automotives, but even the potential around the airplanes. Having said that, ill touch on it at the end, we have to be conscious that that means a change in our workforce. We have a very large workforce that is part of transportation. What are we going to do with that as that technology and that growth comes . And the last piece i have left to the end because thats my background and i have a lot of passion for it. Is the opportunity coming into biotechnology. If you really think about what biotechnology has done, it took 13 years and 3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Now you can do it in 24 hours, literally for about 1,000 bucks. Its going to get faster and cheaper. Whats the implications of this . Take a Technology Like crisper where scientists can go in and precisely edit a gene sequence in an organism. It has profound implications when used for good. Lets take an example. Somebody born with an inherited disorder, the ability to go into the bone marrow and change their stem cells or to go in and identify a plant variant that is more drought resistant, is pest resistant because we can select certain genes that is revolutionary. Remember we have to feed 2. 5 billion more people on this planet in the next 25 years. In closing on that part, i would say, look these are just examples but one thing we have to do. When were talking about technology, we cannot leave large parts of the population behind. Technology has to lift everybody. And as multiple stakeholders, we have got to engage people. Talk. Discuss. Agree on whats good for society. And then invest behind. But im very excited about the technology and thats what our clairian call is calling out. So from your perspective, what are your hoping to accomplish this year . I think the first thing to point out is that, you know, this is a tremendous country, we have been tremendously competitive for decade after decade. We have done things that are unbelievable. When you look at the annals of human history. But what we have come to is a point where were having difficulty right now managing the forces that are required to be as competitive as possible. So theres really three things at work. One is the overwhelming force of destruction, every system replaces a previous configuration or system and in that if the citizenry is not capable of making those adjustments, then more and more of them will fall back and while well have fantastic achievements in some sectors well have generally weakening Competitive Position in our overall economy which is the case now versus the previous decades. And well have a very negative set of impacts in terms of people being left behind. So whats happening now is that we havent matured enough our eye is not on the ball. Whats happened is these rates have changed as we just heard. Theyre so fast that rather taking three generations for a change to be implemented, theres five major changes in a single persons life. Five transformative things that would affect the single individual. What that means then is that we need to dramatically enhance our focus on the ball. The focus for competitiveness needs to be on the continued development of ideas, were underfunding fundamental research, were underfunding from which the ideas can emerge. Other people are stepping up, other parts of the world. We have been stagnanted a not moving at the speed we should be moving. I place that as a secondary issue to the really principal issue of people and people development. We have a poorly articulated, poorly developed and very weak immigration policy on every front. The countrys been built on the notion of driving ideas forward. Driving the forces of Creative Destruction forward and the education and training of new immigrants and citizens and thats something that needs to be worked on in our report, and it gives a very poor grade for our policy and all that. And i think the thing that were not doing that we havent figured out is were arguing about super silly things right now. Were arguing about whats the role of the government in this, and whats the role of the government in that . The government has always played a role in the preparation of the workforce. By investing in the next generation through schools and through universities and so forth. We have literally literally were so far off the mark right now. Were so far off having our eye on the ball, not from the resources that are being allocated but through the mindset. We dont realize that everyone has to graduate from high school. If youre not graduating everyone the entire system is failure. Because those people will not be employable. They will become wards of the state. They will be concentrated in nothing but income tax transfers to the individuals so we need new schools, new ways of thinking, new ways of moving forward and new ways of organizing universities, et cetera so that we can find a way to actually produce individuals who have the capability of being competitive themselves. Competitiveness is not only a function of the national net competitive outcome. It is a function of the derivative of the individuals competitiveness. So we have far too little focus on the individual and preparing the individual to be competitive. I passed the uber test vehicle in phoenix the other day. There was no one in the first in the front seat. It was driving. There were people in the car. No one was in the front seat. I was at a meeting in morocco a couple of weeks ago that a guy stood up from a Major Technology company in the United States, he says we need to replace between 3 and 10 million jobs of the people that will be displaced by the Artificial Intelligence and the Decision Making systems. Are we prepared to do that . No, we just need a tax system to give them money so they can eat. Well, thats nuts. Need competitive individuals, clustered together and advanced through life long education who can continue to be competitive at higher and higher and faster and faster rates of change. And thats the algorithm we need to figure out. We havent figured it out. Deborah, how do you tackle the challenges and the goals and turn them into reality . I think one of the most important things about the councils clarion call and we have been issuing this for a number of years is that we recognized theres not one silver bullet. This is an integrated system. If we can really make progress in partnership with our Public Policy leaders, with congress, but really with the leaders in this room from all of these sectors, we can begin to tackle some of these. But we have to look at this and Going Forward on all fronts. Yes, we can get, you know, our Corporate Tax rate down to a level comparable with our competitors. I think finally a recommendation we have been calling for many, many years is get the 2. 6 trillion thats overseas back into the u. S. With an appropriate tax level. We can make progress also on some of the issues around our regulatory burdens. But the things my colleagues have been talking about, these are our competitive advantages. So i think the message i really want to convey is, lets get our house in order on the things we could do that put us right now at a disadvantage to our global competitors around tax and the debt and regulation. And just turbo charge on these competitive advantages around the technology transformation, and the people in america. I wonder, sam, if the improved Growth Outlook that deborah was referring to and some of the progrowth policies, the stock market at a record high, helps to tackle the more structural issues. If the growth is the medicine thats been missing, is what makes it so hard to prioritize some of the issues youre talking about. I think that it certainly is it will be an enabler of bringing people together. I think some of the stimulus that sustainable growth. What it certainly does is turbo charges in the shortterm. And when growth is stimulated in the shortterm, that makes it a little easier for everybody to come together and say, okay, how do we Work Together on this longterm problem, ones weve been talking about. I think the important thing for people to recognize, though, is, i mean, you can change the tax rates, do all those things, that will drive a spurt in the economy but you have to change productivity equation longterm if you want longterm sustainable growth. So it will be very important, and thats where the council can help, i think, in making sure everyone is focused, okay, how do we tackle the big problems, things like what michael has talked about while we are experiencing this near term stimulus thats brought about by the changes that are sure to come with the next administration. I was just going to emphasize, look, i touched and talked about the exciting opportunities of technology. I want to come back to what i ended with. If we dont deploy all of this exciting opportunity in a manner that lifts everybody, then were going to have a worsening of where we are today. Looking at it purely from Food Industry perspective, 50 to 60 million americans today that live on subsidized food, food stamps one way or the other. Thats about one in five americans today. If that part of the population is not given not just financial means and subsidies but meaningful work, people dont just want to be given a hand out. I dont care if its government or private sector they want to be engaged in society, parping in society, having a voice but also contributing. Thats part of what we are as human beings in any society. I dont care where you are. That needs to be focused on. It cant be done by any one sector alone. What the council is doing is pointing out gaps and proposing real pathways forward of how multiple stakeholders, everyone in the room working together. To change that. I do hav

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