Archive Report
Archive Report
Status of U.S. Technology
Conflicting Evidence as to U.S. Decline
Leaders of business, industry and government are troubled these days by accumulating evidence that the nation's technological leadership is slipping. “There are trends that are worrisome….,” Frank Press, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said recently. “If we're losing our edge, we want to know where we're losing it and why we're losing it.”1 To help in this assessment, President Carter in May ordered a study of industrial innovation, the process by which scientific and technical advances are incorporated into the economy.2 The president ordered that the study be conducted as a “domestic policy review,” the highest kind of attention a problem can get in the executive branch. The study is ...