Is American Innovation Losing Its Shine? 625
kenekaplan writes "American ingenuity and innovation, the twin engine of the country's economy since World War II, is in danger of losing steam and job growth potential if federal legislators allow 'automatic' spending cuts to kick in next year rather than earmarking federal funds to advance education, research and manufacturing, according Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield."
Re:American Ingenuity ? You mean immigrant ingenui (Score:3, Informative)
like the post-war innovation - the stuff the British and Germans invented that the Americans happily took on as their own.
It's not much different from Kinect, everyone says how wonderful this Microsoft innovation was, yet they just bought it from Primesense, no innovation whatsoever happened at Microsoft.
Well no wonder (Score:5, Informative)
With the US business greed focused on making the fastest profit possible still in full swing, and this also true in other western countries. I'm not surprised innovation and ingenuity is faltering. Why would industry focused only as far as the next quarters profit see any benefit on long term investment.
For sometime now Companies have massively laid off it's historical knowledge held by what it considers costly western labour and researchers. Add to that the offshoring momentum and it set the stage for a 20 year decline in the skilled research and workforce.
We could make a long list of where all the short sighted decisions that all compile to spell out the US decline
So just a few examples of a long list that has lead to the US and other western countries slow and steady downfall.
a) Attraction of cheap offshore manufacturing jobs as 2nd world nation's labour forces gain education/training. Of note is that significant costs of that were paid for by Western companies as cheaper alternative to western training costs..
b) The rising costs of basic education and there being no desire to spend taxes on it in the west. In some cases a disproportionate shift to who shares in payment.
c) The secondary level education rising costs of a degree/diploma without the job that could pay it back in reasonable time.
d) Bleeding out the existing wealth of the middle class over to the so called 1%,Why destroy the middle class? Long term short sighted?
e) Traditionally in the last 50 years it had become the middle class that supported innovation and ingenuity through support of education as less and less was supported by industry.
f) Companies will follow the wealth. They have no loyalty to any nation or people. It's only to those people that control those companies. Rarely does a Corp have a sense of morality. Only what the laws allow is it's morality and that is not morality at all..
g) Corporate influence in making laws that benefit not the country or it's people, but rather only for its profits. Even if its convenient to the detriment of the country and its people.
etc etc etc. A sad comedy off errors.
Re:Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare (Score:5, Informative)
This is either hyperbole, or wrong. Health insurance is expensive, but the cost is rarely more than a few hundreds bucks a month per person, significantly less than minimum wage.
Maybe your contribution.... Or maybe you're living in the past, or maybe you're 22. The employer pays well over $1K/mo per employee for insurance. I shut my business down in large part because we could no longer afford health insurance, and thus could not compete with the big outfits for talent.
We were paying roughly $14k/year for catastrophic care - no doctor visits, no well-baby care, no prescription coverage, and a deductible of well over $3K/year. When the insurance company told me that would go up 30%, and the nearest "competitive bid" was well over 50% higher, we closed our doors.
The small firms simply cannot compete with the big firms because they don't have the purchasing power. So there went 8 well paid professional jobs.
Re:Do more with less (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It lost its shine long ago! (Score:3, Informative)
Our car brands are non sellers abroad. Talk of GM and Asians will laugh at you
Unless you count china. Of all things, BUICK sells almost half a million cars a year there. Then there is the plethora of ford foci, fiestas, mondeos that you'll find all across Europe. Holden is Australian for GM. Just cause chysler made the sebring for so long doesn't mean the US can't make a world class car. Didn't pay much attention to the rest of your rant but that line was flat out wrong.
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:2, Informative)
"What the hell are you talking about?"
See here, you suffer from the enlightenment's false view of reason.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc [bit.ly]