Now , with venture capital flows declining overall, cooler heads in the Valley are shifting bets to more business-oriented engineering and research-intensive fields more grounded in marketplace realities.

FORBES: The New Places Where America's Tech Future Is Taking Shape

As these and other policies boosted savings by constraining consumption, other policies, like those aimed at engineering massive loans to capital-intensive manufacturing at very low interest rates, forced rapid growth in domestic production.

WSJ: China's Consumption Conundrum

It is also the most engineer-intensive country, with 981 engineering degrees per million citizens, compared with 553 for China and 197 for India.

WSJ: Can U.S. Universities Stay on Top?

America's export boom is likely to be led by firms that are already global in scale and by sectors in which America has a clear competitive advantage: sophisticated, knowledge-intensive capital goods like microprocessors, and high-end services like engineering, oil-production services and even (witness KPF) architecture.

ECONOMIST: Export or die