Fortune Archives: America isn’t ready

Should the U.S. impose heavier tariffs on Chinese imports, as President-elect Donald Trump plans to do? Is America’s H-1B visa program letting highly educated foreign workers steal jobs from Americans, as some in the MAGA movement argue? Will today’s young adults face a poorer standard of living than their parents?

Such issues are white-hot now, but they’re far from new in American society. They’re the latest manifestations of a historic shift in the global economy that has rattled U.S. workers, business executives, policymakers, and others for decades, as my 2005 Fortune cover story explains. That monumental shift, frightening to many, was the rise of so-called “globalization” and the first broad global market in labor. As I wrote then, “The fast-changing economy is exposing vast numbers of [American workers] to global labor competition, and it’s a contest millions of them can’t win right now.”

U.S. media focused largely on factory workers losing their jobs to Chinese manufacturers. Then as now, some U.S. politicians called for tariffs. But unlike now, that view was bipartisan. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer had introduced a bill to impose a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports, I reported in 2005, “and five Republican Senators signed on as co-sponsors.”

But the larger issue went beyond factories. It was the world economy’s shift toward information rather than goods, and the rapid rise of highly educated workers in China, India, and other low-cost countries. Today many of those countries are turning out info-era workers who are not just less expensive than Americans; some of them are also better. Vivek Ramaswamy, cochief of Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” said recently the U.S. does “not produce the best engineers.” Ramaswamy frames this as a problem in American culture: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a post on X.

Culture is indeed a part of it, as I wrote in 2005, as is the need to rededicate ourselves to education and invest in innovation, research, and development. “No one is saying that Americans can’t adapt and win once more,” I wrote. “But look at our preparedness today for the emerging global economy, and the conclusion seems unavoidable: We’re not ready.”

Ultimately, I concluded, “optimism has always been the best guide to predicting the U.S. economy”—and on the whole, the U.S. has done well since 2005. But the troubling economic and social pressures of 20 years ago are with us still, and arguably even more intense than they were.