Global Strategies: On Making Portland a "Crossroad" City

I have a placard, which I am currently using, that say “Sending High School Students Abroad Creates More Jobs Here.” I’m often out on the streets with this placard and others promoting my “Go Global High School Study Abroad Program” (for examples, see here and here) As yet another of my placards states, we should “Make A Year Study Abroad An Option for High School.”

David Brooks has an op-ed column “The Crossroad Nation” in today’s NY Times that expresses similar ideas for similar reasons. Brooks is looking for America’s economic future. He writes (here):

From this story you can see that economic power in the 21st century is not going to look like economic power in the 20th century. The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.

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.”

Slaughter’s essay was titled “America’s Edge.” That is apt. Americans are now in a depressed state of mind. As China and India rise, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe their nation is in decline.

In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

The nation with the thickest and most expansive networks will define the age. There’s no reason to be pessimistic about that.

Note that “make study abroad a rite of passage for college students” is among Brooks’ prescription. Moving that prescription to high school, and paying for it publically because we can afford it through shifting funding, makes sense to me. We could, with just a little vision, make Portland (and Oregon) a “center of global networks” and a “crossroad” city. It would be so easy!