his week, the New York Times ran a story titled, "U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High." The article explained that "American appetites for all things foreign, from oil to cars to clothing, pushed the trade deficit to yet another record in 2005." This article concerned me and sparked me to do a bit more research on the topic. What I discovered has some powerful implications for how this country invests in gifted education.

"Dark Matter"--America's Unrecognized Export

Recently, two Harvard professors, Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, offered a new perspective on the trade deficit issue in their published paper, "U.S. And Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent A Big Bang?" In his December 28, 2005, BusinessWeek blog article, "Dark Matter," Michael Mandel summarizes the paper's findings:

• The international trade statistics are great at tracking flows of goods, and OK at tracking flows of services.
• The trade statistics are terrible at tracking cross-border flows of intellectual property. For example, when Intel sets up a chip fabrication plant in Ireland, that country reaps the benefit of Intel's designs, and all of Intel's accumulated wisdom about how to run a fab successfully. In effect, a massive amount of intellectual property has been exported to Ireland, without showing up in the trade statistics at all.
• These massive and unobserved exports of intellectual property--"dark matter"--imply that the U.S. is actually running a much smaller current account deficit than the official data shows.
• In addition, U.S. assets abroad are really worth a lot more than we thought, because the official calculation doesn't include the value of the intellectual property.

Hausmann and Sturzenegger write:

In a nutshell, our story is very simple. The income generated by a country’s financial position is a good measure of the true value of its assets. Once assets are valued accordingly, the US appears to be a net creditor, not a net debtor and its net foreign asset position appears to have been fairly stable over the last 20 years. The bulk of the difference with the official story comes from the unaccounted export of knowhow ...

We Are Underinvesting in Gifted Education

The point of this paper is quite clear. In the new global economy, America's most powerful advantage is our intellectual property--what Hausmann and Sturzenegger call "dark matter."

If "dark matter"--intellectual knowhow, innovation, and talent--is America's most important asset in the new global economy, why isn't gifted education--the education of our most intellectually able, innovative, and talented children--this nation's top priority?

Why is our only national education mandate, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), void of even a reference (much less financial investment) to gifted children and their education?

Personally, I support gifted education on more humanistic grounds--every child deserves an appropriate education. However, if an economic reason is required, we certainly have one in Hausmann and Sturzenegger's paper. As a nation increasingly immersed in a global economy, our political leaders need to begin tending to this country's most important economic asset by properly investing in gifted education.