IN THE February 2008 column, I devoted a couple of paragraphs to competitiveness. Because the subject is so misunderstood, I want to expand on those paragraphs and explain why the schools could not be the principal determiners of competitiveness. The short answer is: there are too many other factors involved. As this is written, the Super Bowl has just ended, the Oscars are just around the corner, and down the road is the quadrennial campaign to see who will be the next President. These are the kinds of events Americans associate with the idea of competitiveness: it's a binary, zero-sum, you-win-I-lose notion. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking also extends to notions of national economic competitiveness. was the prevailing sentiment in early December when a gaggle of people whose chief job description these days seems to be professional fearmonger gathered at the National Press Club to decry the results of the latest administration of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). Our students' performance today is the best indicator of our competitiveness tomorrow was how Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, put it. Former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise chimed in with This [PISA] is the academic Olympics. Others at the hand-wringing fest included Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel; Vivien Stewart, vice president of the Asia Society; John Castellani and Susan Traiman, president and education officer, respectively, of the Business Roundtable; and Roy Romer, former governor of Colorado, former superintendent of schools in Los Angeles, and currently head of ED in '08. But is it really a zero-sum, Olympic-style competition? We needn't see it that way. The computer chip, invented in the U.S., is one of the major tools enabling China and India to gradually morph into developed nations. The whole world uses the chip. Who cares if an AIDS vaccine is invented in Los Angeles or Lagos or Banja Luka? The world will benefit, and all countries will become more competitive. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg got it right in a recent essay in Newsweek (31 December 2007-7 January 2008): While we should recognize that China and the United States are competitors, we should also understand that geopolitics and global economics are not zero-sum games. Just as a growing American economy is good for China, a growing Chinese economy is good for America. That means we have a stake in working together to solve common problems, rather than trying to browbeat or intimidate the other into action. Bloomberg's perspective prevails in the annual Global Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF analyzes and ranks nations on global 131 of them in the 2007-08 report. Over the years, WEF has developed a ranking system that examines 12 pillars of competitiveness, including such things as infrastructure and institutions. The 12 are then combined into a single index. My discussion below omits one--market size--which the WEF admits is more controversial than the rest. The U.S. is number 1 and has been for most of the last decade, occasionally falling to number 2. Thus the WEF report gives the lie to Scheppach's contention above. The WEF's is an unapologetically materialist, capitalist, business-oriented world view, but it operates in terms of what countries do for their citizens to improve productivity and the standard of living. We can see this in the high rankings awarded to Denmark (3rd), Sweden (4th), Finland (6th), and Norway (16th) in spite of their tax burdens, which are widely perceived in the U.S. as so onerous as to depress business initiative. These four nations rank 110th, 126th, 115th, and 64th, respectively, in extent and effect of taxation. They also rank well below 100th place in the flexibility employers have to set wages. …