Barack Obama Quotes

Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

Learning from the American experience, governments around the world have developed national innovation policies and programs to accelerate their economic prosperity and to help their citizens and companies compete globally.

Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

It seems pretty clear that the Internet has an important economic role to play for China as it reaches out to the rest of the world.

Cheap labor is not going to be the way we compete in the United States. It's going to be brain power.

We're not necessarily the ski boat, we're the skier. There are countries like Japan and Korea and others who are the ski boat at this point, but we're getting pulled right behind them.

… post-industrial society

I'm not happy exporting jobs but we must move ahead in technology and patents. I don't like losing any jobs but we'll see new opportunities created selling products there. We'll have a net increase in economic activity, just as we did with free trade. It's tempting to want to protect our markets and stay closed. But at some point it all comes crashing down and you're hopelessly left behind. Then you are Russia.

Our future progress and prosperity depend upon our ability to equal, if not surpass, other nations in the enlargement and advance of science, industry and commerce.

Unlike the 19th century, when real estate and government bonds were the primary form of capital, it is riskier assets that generate most of the wealth in the modern global economy — assets that can more quickly lose value as a result of changes in technology or global competition.

Thanks to globalization and the technology revolution, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from that work, and maybe even the economic cycle itself are being transformed.

Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.

In a world of global competition and new technology, I think competition is coming from new places.

In an era of ever-increasing globalization, what it takes to become and remain a science superpower has fundamentally changed.

Physical infrastructure remains important (particularly in developing nations), but concurrently investing in the development of a knowledge-based economy is essential to sustaining healthy economic growth and creating well-paying jobs in a highly competitive, ideas-driven global economy.

If we don't concentrate on resurrecting science, we're not going to be able to compete in a global economy.

Firms gain comparative advantage from how good their people are. Retaining and attracting talent is a key point of competitive advantage in the global economy. We are seeing that play out, and there are implications for Australia, too. The idea that companies now compete on who can pay their workers the lowest - that's all changing.

But today, just a few years into the twenty-first century, we already find ourselves in a different and precarious position. As revolutions in communications and technology have broken down barriers across the world, it has given more power to both our competitors and our enemies.

When I was playing, we didn't have to compete against everybody in the world. Now it's a truly global sport, so the competition's much greater, just like it is for our children in every other area, whether it be in science or technology or whatever you talk about.

When you innovate, the jobs can't go overseas because other countries haven't figured out how to do it yet.

We know that education is everything to our children's future. We know that they will no longer just compete for good jobs with children from Indiana, but children from India and China and all over the world.

Rarely have Americans lived through so much change, in so many ways, in so short a time. Quietly, but with gathering force, the ground has shifted beneath our feet as we have moved into an Information Age, a global economy, a truly new world.

Whether or not [the company] maximizes resources, that's the job of the leader. How do I get greater results using less resources? That requires an enormous psychology when the economy is changing, the technology is changing, and the competition is worldwide.

I would say ... that moving jobs overseas is a reality of global competition, ... If you come from Pennsylvania, we've lost a lot of jobs from global competition. I think that's just a truth, if you will.