Dans ses multiples interviews à la suite de la parution de son livre « La troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé » (on devra parler de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale et non plus la Seconde Guerre Mondiale !), Emmanuel Todd met en doute la pertinence du PIB comme mesure de la puissance économique d’un pays et compare, à l’occasion de la guerre en Ukraine, les puissances respectives des Etats-Unis et de la Russie en matière scientifique.
« Le PIB est une mesure fictive de la production » ou encore « une part importante de ce PIB (américain) est de la vapeur d’eau » explique l’anthropologue historien. Ce n’est sans doute pas complètement faux mais de là à expliquer que la Russie pourrait faire jeu égal en matière scientifique et technique avec les Etats-Unis, le pari est un peu osé. Cette quasi-parité entre les deux puissances pourrait expliquer la résistance de la Russie face aux mesures d’embargo et aux sanctions imposées par les pays occidentaux depuis 2014, date de l’annexion de la Crimée et l’entrée des troupes russes dans les territoires du Donbass. La Russie a des capacités de production qui auraient totalement sous-estimées. Elle a quand même été obligé de se fournir en drones iraniens ou turques ou en munitions nord-coréennes.
Les Etats-Unis sont plus de deux fois plus peuplés que la Russie, rappelle Emmanuel Todd. Aux Etats-Unis, 7 % des jeunes font des études d’ingénieurs contre 25 % aux Etats-Unis. Les Russes formeraient ainsi 30 % de plus d’ingénieurs que les Etats-Unis. Les Etats-Unis compensent ce déficit de matière grise par l’afflux d’étudiants étrangers, notamment indiens et chinois. « Mais cette ressource de substitution n’est pas sûre et diminue déjà » poursuit-il.
Il est vrai que les vocations scientifiques aux Etats-Unis se font de plus en plus rares (tout comme en France d’ailleurs). George W. Bush avait lancé une initiative (President Bush Signs Competitiveness Bill) pour promouvoir les formations dans les disciplines STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
Néanmoins, la prééminence dans les domaines scientifiques, techniques et numériques est toujours d’actualité, il est vrai avec l’aide de l’immigration hautement qualifiée.
« On peut dire que l’Amérique est le pays de la science autant que la technologie. La réputation des centres de recherche, les succès de la recherche fondamentale, le nombre de prix Nobel travaillant dans les universités, tout cela est connu ».
Jacques Mistral – La troisième révolution américaine
L’analyse des prix Nobel confirme cette hypothèse. Dans les domaines scientifiques (physique, chimie, médecine ; on exclut ici l’économie), les chercheurs américains dominent largement. Mais cette supériorité se construit en partie grâce des scientifiques étrangers arrivés aux Etats-Unis pour de multiples raisons : meilleures conditions de recherche, écosystème plus favorable, meilleurs salaires… L’attribution des prix Nobel 2009 confirmait cette idée (Les prix Nobel 2009 : l’ultra domination américaine). L’édition 2009 du Rapport mondial sur le développement humain qui se penche sur le sujet de la mobilité note que « les politiques favorisent généralement l’entrée des migrants plus instruits, par exemple en autorisant les étudiants à rester après l’obtention de leur diplôme et en invitant les travailleurs qualifiés à s’installer avec leur famille ». Et 2009 ne constitue pas une exception.
L’analyse des entreprises technologiques (informatique logiciel et matériel, télécoms, numérique…) montre aussi cette très forte présence des présidents (CEO) nés hors du territoire américain. Une situation dans laquelle l’Inde joue un rôle particulièrement important.
| Entreprise | Nom | Description | Pays de naissance |
| Adobe | Shantanu Narayen | Shantanu Narayen (born May 27, 1963) is an Indian-American business executive. He has been the chairman, president, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Adobe Inc. since December 2007. Before this, he was the company’s president and chief operating officer since 2005. | Inde |
| Alphabet | Sundar Pichai | Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar, is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google. | Inde |
| AMD | Lisa Su | Lisa Su (born 7 November 1969) is a Taiwanese-American business executive and electrical engineer, who is the president, chief executive officer and chair of AMD. Early in her career, Su worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions. She is known for her work developing silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing technologies and more efficient semiconductor chips during her time as vice president of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center. | Taïwan |
| Arista | Jayshree Ullal | Jayshree V. Ullal is an Indian-American billionaire businesswoman, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company responsible for the deployment of 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the data center. | Née en Angleterre, élevée en Inde |
| Broadcom | Tan Hock Eng | Tan Hock Eng is a Malaysian Chinese business executive and philanthropist. He is the CEO of Broadcom Inc. | Malaisie |
| Cadence | Anirudh Devgan | Devgan currently serves as President and CEO of Cadence Design Systems and member of the board of directors. He also serves on the boards of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and the ESD Alliance. | Inde |
| HP | Enrique Lores | Enrique Lores is a Spanish business executive, and the CEO of HP Inc. since November 2019. | Espagne |
| HPE | Antonio Neri | Antonio Neri (born May 10, 1967) is an Argentinian-Italian-American businessman who currently serves as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Born in Argentina, he studied engineering at National Technological University and started working for Hewlett-Packard in 1995. Neri joined HPE’s board of directors upon his promotion to the president and CEO position in 2018. | Argentine |
| IBM | Arvind Krishna | Arvind Krishna is an Indian-American business executive serving as the Chairman and CEO of IBM. He has been the CEO of IBM since April 2020 and took on the role of Chairman in January 2021. Krishna began his career at IBM in 1990, at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center,[5] and was promoted to Senior Vice President in 2015, managing IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software and IBM Research divisions. He was a principal architect of the acquisition of Red Hat, the largest acquisition in the company’s history. | Inde |
| Intuit | Sasan Goodarzi | Born in Tehran on July 7, 1968, Goodarzi came to the United States as a child and grew up in Orlando, Florida. Sasan Goodarzi is CEO of Intuit since Jan. 1, 2019. | Iran |
| Microsoft | Satya Nadella | Satya Narayana Nadella (born 19 August 1967) is an Indian-American business executive. He is the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman. Before becoming CEO, he was the executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, responsible for building and running the company’s computing platforms. | Inde |
| Micron Technology | Sanjay Mehrotra | Sanjay Mehrotra is an Indian-American business executive and the CEO of Micron Technology. He was a co-founder of SanDisk, where he served as president and CEO until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016.[1] | Inde |
| Nutanix | Rajiv Ramaswami | Rajiv is the President and CEO of Nutanix. He joined in December, 2020 from VMware, where he served as Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services. | Inde |
| Nvidia | Jensen Huang | Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang is a Taiwanese American billionaire business magnate, electrical engineer, and the co-founder, current president and CEO of Nvidia Corporation.[1 | Taiwan |
| Oracle | Safra Ada Catz | Safra Ada Catz (born December 1, 1961) is an American billionaire banker and technology executive. She is the CEO of Oracle Corporation. She has been an executive at Oracle since April 1999, and a board member since 2001. In April 2011, she was named co-president and chief financial officer (CFO), reporting to founder Larry Ellison.[1] In September 2014, Oracle announced that Ellison would step down as CEO and that Mark Hurd and Catz had been named as joint CEOs. In September 2019, Catz became the sole CEO after Hurd resigned due to health issues. | Israël |
| Palo Alto | Nikesh Arora | Nikesh Arora is an Indian-American business executive. Arora was formerly a senior executive at Google. He served as the president of SoftBank Group from October 2014 to June 2016. On June 1, 2018, Arora took on the role of CEO and chairman at Palo Alto Networks. | Inde |
| Qualcomm | Cristiano Amon | Cristiano R. Amon (born 1970) is a Brazilian electronics engineer and the CEO of Qualcomm in San Diego. | Brésil |
| Snowflake | Frank Slootman | Frank Slootman currently serves as Chairman and CEO at Snowflake. Frank has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise | Pays-Bas |
| Uber | Dara Khosrowshahi | Dara Khosrowshahi is an Iranian-American businessman and the chief executive officer of Uber. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. He is also a member of the board of directors of BET.com and Hotels.com,[1] and previously served on the board of The New York Times Company. | Iran |
| Tesla et Twitter | Elon Musk | Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, was born and raised in South Africa. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 1989 and briefly attended college at Queen’s University in Ontario. He transferred to University of Pennsylvania, in part because such a move would allow him to get an H-1B visa and stay in the U.S. after college. | Afrique du Sud |
| Verizon | Hans Vestberg | Hans Vestberg (born 23 June 1965) is a Swedish businessman and CEO of Verizon Communications, where he has worked as executive vice president of the company’s network and technology team, and as chief technology officer. Vestberg was previously the CEO of telecommunications company Ericsson, president of the Swedish Olympic Committee, and chairman of the Swedish Handball Federation. | Suède |
| VMware | Rangarajan Raghuram | Raghu Raghuram, is 57, born in India, graduated from IIT Bombay, moved to USA for further studies. He joined VMware’s Server Business unit in the year 2003 when the company was a 5 year old startup. Became CEO of VMware on 12th May, 2021. | Inde |
| Zoom | Eric S. Yuan | Eric S. Yuan (born 20 February 1970) is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman, engineer, and the chief executive officer and founder of Zoom Video Communications, of which he owns 22%. | Chine |