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."
Ingenuity != Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now the US and Canadian economies are not focused on producing anything with the new ideas that come out. The startups get bought out by the existing big companies if they have any hope of success, who immediately commoditize technology and ship it overseas for manufacturing.
If you want to create jobs, do something about the whole concept of outsourcing. The richest nations on the planet will always find it cheaper to outsource and offshore, because they're also the most expensive labour markets. Until the inevitable collapse happens when there isn't the money being earned to pay for the shiny new gadgets.
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
On number 4, I don't see how someone earning $7.25 a hour is too much to be paying factory workers, especially when automation is lowering the amount of workers required to keep a factory running.
Assuming our current minimum wage and maximum part-time hours to avoid paying benefits, each worker will cost about $10000 a year. This worker probably won't have to pay any federal income taxes after deductions. This worker will be eligible for Medicaid. He won't be able to pay off the loans for his house and the car he'll need to drive out to the middle of nowhere where your factory is located because of cheap land prices and interstate access.
Now republicans and libertarians not only want to lower the amount this worker gets paid, they want to remove the government provided healthcare option that they themselves don't want to offer to workers.
I just can't see how the average American worker would be better off. I do understand how the top 1% will be better off from these ideas. At least until the bottom 99% decide to eliminate those who do so little yet take so much.
Mod Parent UP (Score:2, Interesting)
Taylor Mali, "What Teachers Make" [youtube.com]
Re:She's got it backwards. (Score:4, Interesting)
The stupidity of tax breaks to corps and the wealthy as job stimulus is that corps don't hire unless there is demand for their products. In a recession what you have as the prevailing economic environment is low demand and excess capacity.
BINGO!
What we should have done rather than the Economic Recovery Act would have been simple refund 100% of everyone's individual income tax on the earned portion of the their income and allow them to keep the earned income tax credit. That would have put heaps of money in the hands of the middle class and provided a nice pay day to the working poor as well.
That would have spread the money around and forced the corporations and banks to *DO* some economic activity to get hold of it. That would have created JOBS, and secured American house holds by reducing debts, might have lifted real estate prices a little, and replaced all kinds of durable goods.
By injecting the money at the top instead the bottom it just let the usual rent-seeking a-holes abuse their cozy relationships to snatch those government contracts, over charge, under deliver, pace the work slowly enough that they need not increase the size of their pay roles, and basically pocket the money.
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Interesting)
If you could educate people in that way it would be really nice. This is similar to the idea of sitting down and saying "I will think brilliant thoughts today". It doesn't work.
There are some people with the brain construction to manipulate abstract symbols and the rest can't. Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population can do it. This means they can do higher math, things like computer programming and pretty much anything where you are manipulating symbols instead of real objects.
The remainder of the population, which could be as high as 60%, can't do it and they cannot be trained to do it. No amount of education is going to make them be able to do it. It is like trying to get a colorblind person to recognize the color green. Their brain isn't wired that way.
What does that mean? Well, it means these people can be perfectly successful in doing plenty of things that need doing, such as most of the trades. They can work in a factory doing just about anything on the factory floor. But they cannot push figures around in a spreadsheet when the figures represent something else. As long as what they are manipulating is a concrete object or at least something they can see in front of them they can do it. Abstract symbols? Nope. If it involves moving an icon around which represents something else, they are going to have lots of trouble with it. It doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence" either, so you can't just say these people are stupid and pass them by that way.
Most educators have known this for maybe 60-70 years or so. Some of them have come out and said it but it is a dangerous thing to say in current educational circles.
What we are doing is attempting to remake society in a way that will exclude the portion of the population that can't manipulate abstract symbols. We want to remake the factory floor so it is controlled from a remote station where the user pushes around little icons. We want to have airplanes that are flown by moving little icons around from a remote location. We want everyone to be a "knowledge worker" and uses fancy 3D displays to control things in the real world. Well, we are setting ourselves up for a huge problem where as much as 60% of the population isn't going to be able to interact with things that way. There is no training, no education and no familiarization that will fix this problem. The only way to do it is to really have people interacting with real physical objects. If we do not have jobs like that, we are going to have a huge segment of the population that someone is just going to have to take care of. For their entire lives.
Do "something" (Score:4, Interesting)
"Do something about outsourcing."
Like what? Arrest people for outsourcing? Arrest people for buying non-American manufactured items? Arrest people for importing items? Tax or fine these people (because arresting people is too expensive, and sort-of a buzz kill)?
My suggestions are the same as the last time ths came up:
- Remove artificial government-imposed burdens and costs from producers.
- Radically reform education.
- Stop giving companies a huge tax incentive to invest outside the US.
- Stop giving productive individuals a huge incentive to retire or otherwise not work.
- Remove artificial government-imposed costs on individuals so we can get by on a salary that's a little more competitive with the non-US guy who does a similar job.
Note how no one gets arrested or taxed or fined in my suggestions.
Counter arguments were:
- No! Some company might make a profit
- No! Someone with money might make more money!
- No! Artificial costs are sweet when you're the one getting paid.
- No! That's a red team answer. Go blue team! Status quo! Status quo!
- No! Someone once said that a similar idea might not work.
- No! Spending one dollar less anywhere in government will be the end of civilization.
- No! We owe it to the plants and trees and birds and insects to maintain the status quo or retreat even further.
- No! Let's change the subject to defense spending or waterboarding or whatever. Those things are bad.
So that's why we won't be doing "something".
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Interesting)
The more that has already been done, the more expensive the next step is going to be. That's unavoidable*. Cheap innovation exists, but it's in less and less important areas of life and the avenues for it can only decrease with time as the gaps get filled in.
*Net cost includes the cost of educating people better, ensuring better access to materials, etc. The better trained you are, the more you can do with what you have. The better access to materials is really a part of education. Kids should learn how to work with highly dangerous materials safely and should learn how to operate highly dangerous equipment safely. But both the materials and the equipment should then be unrestricted to those with the education. We don't restrict the use of electricity, because we learn how to be safe with it. The same should be true of anything else.
(The "doing more with less" is also a stupid maxim as it ignores the fact that you've an absolute limit on what you can do given a certain level of education, plus diminishing returns as you approach that limit, plus diminishing returns on what education can buy you. The proof of this is that you can't do anything with nothing, no matter how highly educated you were. It is also very selective in what it counts, so you aren't comparing apples with apples when it supposedly works. When you are comparing apples with apples, it almost never works.)
Patent trolls are a big threat, yes, but by no means the only threat. The current patent system is understaffed and undermotivated, which means fraud is likely. Again, that means spending more, not less. Excessive individualism is another threat - the most important achievements in society are collaborative achievements. America is becoming a nation that hates collaboration and that certainly threatens innovation. To be fair, most nations now have that blinkered, greedy, self-centered hatred of working with others. Solving things together is seen as "evil". Most here, I suspect, have been brainwashed into believing that their achievements are the result of the sweat from their own brow. The 80/20 Rule says that's not gonna happen. The only way to circumvent the 80/20 rule is to have the base unit be something other than individuals.
Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.
What innovation? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Americans obtained half of the tech by strangle holding Britain while it funded the nazi's to an extra ordinary degree and obtained the other half by protecting nazi war criminals in exchange for tech. NASA would in any ethical world be covered in more shame then a swiss banker.
And if this upsets you, then you are doomed to keep wondering what the fact happened to the USA. You can only learn from history if you acknowledge the true history not some nursemaid fantasy designed to keep everyone happy.
The real history of the USA post WW2 is that due to all kind of less then ethical behavior the USA got their hands on far more tech and scientist then anyone else AND did rather poorly with it. Compare after all what the soviets achieved through simply killing of nazi scientists or improsing them with a bit of torture. They never had von Braun the killer of many American prisoner of wars among his many war crimes AND were the first in space. And the soviets had a huge war to recover from and had started far further back on the tech scale.
For that matter, Japan recovered far better, bombed out it was soon AHEAD of the USA in almost all fields. Cuba, sanctioned to hell and back, has better health care then the US for all this time.
What exactly did America once have that it is now supposed to have lost? From many posts on this subject I get the feeling some people claim the US went from fictional history to fictional presence from what we can determine a fictional future. Right, that is about useful as asking who would win in a fictional figure fight. An American thing if I am not mistaken.
If you still want my personal opinion? Then here it is, it is a bit more complex then most made up theories.
The USA profited from a post WW2 world in which all other countries had massive rebuilding effort while its own rebuilding has started ahead of the curve for the POST WW2 world. In the same way that the US had been way behind the curve for WW2 itself. When it started US military tech and civilian production capacity was hopelessly behind. But people US citizens forget that the MEANS to this build up were un-american. There was a LOT of government control over private industry. Not the same as in planned economies like the soviet union but far more then fits in the idea of the USA and far more then is now available in the USA. The only comparison is really the tiger economies. Japan, Korea, China. (and a few other asian nations I am to lazy to mention)
When the war ended, the US had a lot of power in the world and virtually nobody to oppose them. The south Americans were to backwards, so was China. Europe didn't need any more conflict and the soviets had more land then they ever would know what to do with. And its factories were booming who had conveniently switched ahead of the actual end of the war from war production to civilian production. A lot of the brightest people had either escaped the horrors of the nazi regime to the US or were being sheltered by the US from being prosecuted for the same horrors. The US was in a perfect position to make an economic boom and it did.
And yet, did it? How much of our knowledge of that era is movies and chosen images versus reality? To show how much movies lied, women of that post war era are often shown as helpless needing the hand of a man to guide them and do technical stuff. Really? Were these the same women that had been building bombers and putting war ships together? Did Rosie the Riveter unlearn all her skills in a flash once the boys came back home? Yes, many returned to their kitchens but the skills would have remained. So, you have a husband with no more tech skills then cocking a rifle and a woman who knows the ins and outs of a high performance engine, who would YOU let do the plumbing?
How much this of economic revival of the US and its position at the top was simply because that was what everyone reported and everybody refused to look at what was happening in the rest of the world. Easy to say you are number one when y
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me give you an example:
I have a client who has, with the help of some students, discovered an AMAZING way to coat ferrous materials with a thin diamond coating. It doesn't delaminate like other methods, and would be incredible for gaskets, car parts, missiles, anything with liquid flowing past at high speed.
It has been 7 years. He has lost venture capital twice (even though he has a major chemical company and an array of farms lined up to buy the first batch), and is working his ass into the ground. The expensive gaskets used for oil, milk, and other heavy fluids wear down really quickly, and they're expensive as hell to replace. His last 10x as long, and you can just take the current part and laminate it, no changes needed. Cheap as hell, huge net benefit to profit and productivity. It's just that it kind of goes against the grain of the industry right now, parts people sort of don't like him as I'm sure you can understand.
He has been assaulted on EVERY side, from the University where he used to teach to fellow employees in the field to venture capitalists all trying to screw him over for their fast buck on his work. This guy is one of the hardest working men I've ever met. Very bright, upbeat, a joy to talk to, he is a net benefit to mankind IMO. For these qualities, for trying to innovate, I have only seen him ground into the dust.
For years I figured it would all work out for him, but it isn't looking very good. It should have been a slam dunk ticket, but it feels like the climate needed to actually innovate and increase efficiency just isn't there, the protections or legal climate or something just isn't there. It's bizarre at first, then think about it:
You can try investing in new technology that may or may not work out. OR you could spend the same amount of money and get laws passed that will *guarantee* your revenue. Which would you choose? Venture capital is the same way the last 10 years. It's no longer Ventures, only capital. They want reward with no risk. They guarantee it with legislation instead of chancing it with innovation.
Re:Do more with less (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe he needs to go to a different country, such as Japan or even China, and try to get them to use his idea there. It's much like what happened to W. Edwards Deming; he had great ideas for improving industrial efficiency using statistical process control (and even successfully used them in WWII for manufacturing ammunition), but after the war the American industries didn't want to pay any attention to him, so he traveled to Japan, where they loved his ideas. After several decades, Japanese manufacturing kicked America's ass, going from a cheap, low-quality manufacturing location to one of the highest-quality manufacturing centers in the world , and Deming is now regarded as a hero there.
Your friend needs to go somewhere else. This country will never appreciate contributions like his. He should look at Germany and Japan first, then resort to China if that doesn't work out. While the Chinese obviously aren't very good about intellectual property protection, he doesn't really need that, he just needs to sell the idea (and process and all the critical ideas about it) to them for a giant lump-sum. They can certainly afford it.