The network center in international knowledge trade

David brooks provides good editorial called Crossroads Nation

In 2009, Anne-Marie Slaughter, now director of policy planning at the State Department, wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs in which she laid out the logic of this new situation: “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”

Networking may save the US. We are less dependent on traditional trade through manufacturing, but through trade in ideas and intellectual capital. The transfer of creation of wealth is through the networking of innovation. This networking occurs through the educational system and the free flow of people nd ideas within a common system. In the US this is our graduate university system and the english language. Both allow the free transfer of ideas. Our natins is the crossroads for India, China, and the rest of the emerging markets.

We have to move beyond the manufacturing sector mindset of trade and think more about how to exploit the US as a crossroads nation.