Venture capitalist Juan Enriquez analyzes the divergent fates of China and Latin America and what lessons they hold for the rest of the world.

Question: What countries are thriving during the global recession?

Juan Enriquez: One of the most extraordinary trends in the world—you know, there’s a couple of people that, if I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution. We traditionally in this world didn’t have enough calories to feed all of us and had huge famines, not just in Africa, but had them across India, across Southeast Asia, and across China. Because of Borlaug’s work at Simit and because of this we have huge excess, until very recently, in agricultural produce and the prices went through the floor. But there was more than enough to feed everybody in the world, if we could distribute it right. So, Borlaug would be one figure that I think fundamentally changed India, China, all of Southeast Asia, and gave them the time to be able to build on other things.

The second person who I think one has to think about building a statue to is Deng Xiaoping, who took a country that had traditionally dominated the world economy, had traditionally dominated education in learning, exploration and science, and that country went into a 500-year sabbatical and it wasn’t pretty on the income per capita. The first time I went to China in 1977 was in the low 100’s, and everybody was wearing the same things, and the richest of the rich had bicycles, and you would walk in those streets and a thousand people would follow you because nobody had ever seen a westerner in some of these parts.

Compare that with China today. China has, all of a sudden, found a way of putting the best of the best to work to build an economy that is growing at 10% to 12% per year, and now India is following. And those changes and how quickly they’ve come out of this mess, how little debt they have, is really important. It doesn’t mean they have perfect governance; in fact, there is much to be improved upon. But it does mean that they are catching up very quickly, and it does mean that as you begin to think about the United States in the context and Europe in the context of the world economy, it’s going to be a very different ballgame 10 years out and 20 years out.

Question: How can your native Mexico end its economic struggles?

Juan Enriquez: So one of the things that really worries me, in part about Mexico, in part about Latin America, and in part about the Hispanic population in the U.S. and Canada. It’s this lack of awareness of this whole science world.

When I grew up, I simply didn’t have mentors that said, “Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful.” And that’s such a simple thought, but when you think about what’s powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge. In part it’s this wonderful culture and architecture and food and art, and everything else. But the gasoline for all that stuff is startup companies in science.

To use the latest figures in the U.S., venture capital is about .02% of the U.S. economy invested, and it accounts for 11% of total U.S. jobs and 21% of U.S. economic output. And the reason why is because these companies can get very big, very quickly.

Now, if you don’t have that science and technology and brains as an input, as you don’t have in large parts of Latin America, if you don’t focus your education on that, if you don’t find your 10,000 best scientists, but you do find your 10,000 best soccer players, the consequences are, you become a World Cup Champion in Soccer, like Brazil, but you don’t become Korea, which earned 1/5 of what a Mexican did in 1975 and today earns five times more.

Within the United States, there is a real division between the PhDs given in science and math to the Asian community, to the traditional white community, and then to African-Americans and Hispanics. And until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they’re not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.

Recorded on November 9, 2009
Interviewed by Austin Allen