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."
And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget that if you come up with a new idea, you'll almost certainly be sued.
If you really want to make money, you're better off getting into financial arbitrage (like high-frequency trading) then you are innovating or making something of value.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents have very little to do with America losing its edge. It has partly to do with outsourcing of tech jobs overseas. In essence, American companies have trained foreigners how to build a tech industry in their own country. Now we must compete against them.
It also has to do with US government policies that end up incentivizing the best and brightest going into finance and law, jobs that advance society very little. It is no coincidence that most politicians are lawyers and financiers.
The American people can fix it by voting in politicians who have the guts to make the necessary changes. But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again
Indeed. The Chinese and Indians laugh at us for spending so much time on such frivolous things and for even discussing these things in politics. Your abortion and gay marriage "rights" won't mean jack squat if in the meantime we stand by and watch as this once great nation circles the toilet bowl on its way down the tubes. In fact, I wish that people would just STFU about such things when discussing what sort of policies are best for the long term survival of our nation. People who make these things into voting issues are pissing away their futures while Rome burns.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again
Indeed. The Chinese and Indians laugh at us for spending so much time on such frivolous things and for even discussing these things in politics. Your abortion and gay marriage "rights" won't mean jack squat if in the meantime we stand by and watch as this once great nation circles the toilet bowl on its way down the tubes. In fact, I wish that people would just STFU about such things when discussing what sort of policies are best for the long term survival of our nation. People who make these things into voting issues are pissing away their futures while Rome burns.
Did you know one of the single biggest development indicators is women's rights?
For whatever reason, if you enforce gender equality and women's education, your country will be dramatically better then it's neighbors in the long term. Standards of living go up, crime goes, productivity booms.
Now, this doesn't really make immediate sense: without women's rights you've got an entire labor force who you don't have to pay. Surely, with all that free labor or low-cost labor, you'd expect an easy win over people who actually have to pay fair wages.
The reasons are complex, but the big one is this: cultural discrimination doesn't just effect the discriminated against group. It narrows the mindset and "acceptable" standard of behavior of the favored group as well. It leaks into science, business and the arts and closes up avenues of exploration because it effectively bans "types" of thinking. If you're a man, you're only favored provided you stay away from "feminine" things - which are implicitly not worthy of consideration. Your behavior must conform to whatever the expected norm is, lest you become a de facto member of the oppressed group.
Abortion is very much a women's rights issue in most respects, but it also has follow on consequences: if access to abortion services is easy for the poor (it's never a problem for the rich) then crime rates drop about 18 years after that happens [wikipedia.org]. Gay marriage means you're not only removing yet another disenfranchised class (and thus promoting tolerance and general consideration and empathy within your population - you know, attacking a whole bunch of harmful social issues at once) but you're also ultimately addressing wider issues such as the social acceptance of people in unusual living situations (i.e. those with divorced parents, unmarried parents, single-parents etc.).
I assume you don't actually oppose either of these measures, but it's straight up non-sensical to think social policy has nothing to do with economic policy. There's a reason socioeconomic status is how we judge an area and not just "economic" status.
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Now, this doesn't really make immediate sense: without women's rights you've got an entire labor force who you don't have to pay. Surely, with all that free labor or low-cost labor, you'd expect an easy win over people who actually have to pay fair wages.
The reasons are complex, but the big one is this: cultural discrimination doesn't just effect the discriminated against group.
You're wrong. The Women's got equal rights completely wrong. We still don't value good parents. If you're a good parent you're seen as doing something for yourself and your family rather than giving anything to society. When's the last time you heard of a housewife being paid for properly raising her children or looking after a home? They still do the majority of the unpaid work. As for a man being paid for these things, if you bring it up you'll be laughed out of the room. Mr Mom is still a TV sitcom or fi
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I didn't say we were done with that area, and we aren't by a long shot.
That's what the issue with paid-parental leave is
Have you ever looked after very young children? I love my kids, but I would not call looking after them leave. We've got the language all wrong. It's work, and a small mistake can have deadly consequences. It's worthwhile and important work that must be done. As they get older and more self sufficient that aspect fades but you still have to supplement their education if you want to be a good parent. You still have to cook and clean for them at least until they are teenagers (though they can progressively help with that).
But recognizing women as fully equal persons is a very important step to recognizing parenting as (1) something both sexes should be sharing in equally in a relationship and (2) as an important and worthy task.
This pretence that we have to be the same to be equal is a big part of the problem.
Have you ever spent 5 hours with a child under 2 years of age screaming for their mummy? Mum and dad can't always be equal. Not possible. You can change all the nappies you like. You can be the one who stays home and feeds and sings and plays with them. Society will for the most part shun you for it, but it can be done if the male really does want to be the stay at home parent. What can't be done is that you can never give birth or breast feed your child (yes you can feed breast milk but that's not exactly the same). You can't bond with a child as it's mother. Part of recognising women as equals has to include recognising their differences. Trying to force fathers into "equal" parenting when it's not supported by society or nature is ridiculous. It leads to severely depressed fathers that are more likely to disengage.
Nor is it always possible to be raising an infant while working a full time job. I don't want any airline pilot flying an aircraft I'm on half asleep at the controls because he was up all night tending to his infant so his wife could get sleep. Nor do I want a woman doing that job for equal pay. I want someone staying at home with the child who recognises their partner is doing a dangerous job that requires full concentration at work, who then gets up during the night and feeds the child instead of worrying about equality.
We get no where if it's "women's labor" since the entire issue was that "women's labor" wasn't recognized as important.
In other words we have not addressed the problem at all. All the work traditionally done by a woman is expected to be done in your "spare" time now. It is still unpaid and still devalued. No amount of pressing for equality while this is the case is going to work because all it does is work both parents into the grave early as they try to keep a paid full time job and a 24/7 childrearing one too.
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Clearly why China is a far more desirable country to live in the the United States.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions. It quickly became cheaper to order from Canada than buy local, and that just opened the gateways. It became obvious it was non-profitable to work with Americans, because we're greedy and vindictive.
And don't even get me started on the BS they pulled w.r.t. time spent on the job vs. actual contribution. They advanced people for time served, and punished up and comers.
Not this isn't to say there aren't other issues involved, but the core problem is we let a mafia-like set of players step in and control our strongest companies, and the folks with the money got sick of it. The unions trained businesses to avoid local production by pricing our workforce right out of the market.
You can sit and bitch all you want, but that is what killed it for American jobs. Everyone wanted the best health care, they wanted automatic advancement, and just made themselves unappealing to the businessmen. There is a breaking point. And one look over the history of Detroit (which is just a more obvious example than most) shows exactly what happens when you let the unions take over. If that doesn't explain it, look at GE.
Once you stop building the stuff, you stifle engineering and improvement, and at this point, I don't see America pulling it out of their ass for anything. We were on top, and we blew it. Case closed.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions.
Oh please. If you want to build stuff in America without paying union wages, it's easy: you build your factory in Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee. That's exactly what a bunch of foreign automakers have done, while American automakers have been building factories in Mexico. There's nothing forcing you to use union labor; this has only been a major factor in northeast states. There's a LOT more to the country than just the northeast.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions.
Low wages and fewer benefits are not the only way to make manufacturing work. Look at Germany and Japan - much stronger labour laws, more welfare and higher pensions, yet they are still able to manufacture and compete with the likes of China and India. In fact Germany exports more than China does.
All you have to do is stop participating in the race to the bottom. It turns out people will pay for quality and innovation, so even if your production costs are higher your good still sell. Germany in particular has performed an economic miracle - they just gave everyone a tax break worth â5 million because they are on target to take â14m more in tax revenue this year, and unemployment is at the lowest level for 20 years. In other words since the West and East merged they have brought half their country up to the level of the other and become the world's biggest exporters, and the global downturn that has decimated manufacturing in some countries hasn't affected them nearly as badly.
Making everyone suffer low pay and poor conditions is not necessary for an economy to prosper, and if you have good employment laws unions don't need to force the issues so much. Everybody wins, except perhaps for the executives who lose a million or two off their bonus to cover the higher costs.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
It also has to do with US government policies that end up incentivizing
How much US creativity is squandered on making up new jargon words like that, when perfectly cromulent words (e.g. motivate) exist already?
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to a system without patents, where your idea is quickly copied by anyone who already has the production facilities to do so [wikipedia.org] and you have no legal recourse.
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If your idea can quickly be copied then it's clearly not innovative enough to deserve a patent.
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Not all industries are as broken as the software industry.
However, suppose for the sake of argument somebody really did come up with a TRULY innovative software concept - one that everybody could actually agree should receive patent protection for a year or two (I think that patent terms should be industry-specific reflecting the pace of development). No matter how clever or innovative or complex the idea is, copying something implemented in software is just a matter of copying bytes. Doing the same in ha
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What's broken is the business model, not the software or drug industries. You can't own ideas. You can't control what others make of an idea. You can't peddle individual copies as if they were scarce. You can't even draw clear boundaries. Our whole treatment has been twisted towards the presumption that these things can be done, that we can treat an idea like a piece of land.
Do you think Einstein should have patented e=mc^2? If you think yes, you think wrong. That is a mathematical formula, and is
Re:And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask yourself what is more productive for the economy:
Case1: The inventor is sued out of existence and the invention never see the light of the day since it is disruptive to the current economic actors revenue steams.
Case2: The invention gets copied, however, if the inventor and his investors use reasonable marketing, they still have the first mover advantage.
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>Ask yourself what is more productive for the economy:
>Case1: The inventor is sued out of existence and the invention never see the light of the day since it is disruptive to the current economic actors revenue steams.
>Case2: The invention gets copied, however, if the inventor and his investors use reasonable marketing, they still have the first mover advantage.
You forget case 3:
The investors keep their work a tradesecret, and takes it with them to the grave
Case 3 is the entire reason the patent sy
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Now, go find a food recipe, and make it by just mixing all the ingredients together, ignoring all the process information. Let us know how it tastes.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, we've got the worst of both worlds.
If you come up with a good idea, it will be immediately copied by a number of large companies that figure they've got deeper pockets than you. They will complain you are trying to use patents instead of competition to win in the marketplace. And odds are, anything you make will infringe on one or more of THEIR patents, which they will use as a defense to stop you from using your patent against them.
At the same time, you will be sued by a non-practicing entity with no assets except the patent they're suing you with, and you can't even try to use other patents against them since they're not making anything.
Re:And patents, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and no. Patents are a problem -- you can NOT launch a small technology firm and make anything useful without violating patents. This is a barrier to US businesses and Europe, but not China as they will simply ignore patents (for their domestic market).
I'd say America lost because Wall Street *wanted* America to lose. Maybe not explicitly, but as a result of all those outsourcing tax credits Wall Street wanted.
Talk to a US based electronics manufacturer... all of them had NO CHOICE but to move their R&D to China, because that's where all the manufacturing is.
Often times, the latest and greatest micro chip thingy will be documented by a Data Sheet which is written in Chinese. Eventually it will be translated to English, but the part might be depricated by then if it is a short lived market item.
Linksys, D-Link, Buffalo etc. all of these router manufacturers have almost NO knowledge what is in "their" products. They simply say "I'll take one of those" from the ODM and slap their web GUI on the firmware.
Apple is the last remaining US manufacturer who -designs- in the US. They pay a high price in terms of cost of operating. And even then, all their manufacturing is outsourced, and they don't really R&D any of the low level stuff.
Back to my original point... even if you reformed patents, and even un-did the Bush era outsourcing credit, NONE of those R&D jobs would come back. You'd have to convince China and Japan to subsidize their businesses to move operations back to the USA. No other country is dumb enough to kill their manufacturing, deliberately.
But hey, Wall Street knows what it's doing... killing US manufacturing kills unions, and higher unemployment means workers will accept forced overtime and less safe working conditions. It's all pretty basic stuff, really.
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Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:4, Insightful)
this is not even the first step
blue collar labor in america by and large has no future. The government needs to change the economic model to start developing our children's mind from a young age. and i mean, like making educational material -- like chemistry sets, cheap enough so that it's almost free
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
So, buy giving every little kid a chemistry set (and thereby sending them to Harvard) we will think ourselves out of this mess?
No. Realize that very, very few people are ever going to be 'innovators' no matter how much government money we toss at the problem. It's not in their DNA, not in the upbringing, not in their heads. We have to come up with society that lets middle of the road people live a reasonable life, not expect everyone on the block to go off to work in a lab.
Not sure how to do that, but giving more money to the Education Industrial Complex in this country so far has yielded little fruit.
Re:not in the upbringing (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a way to make Nerds/Geeks Cool.
Being facetious, pay a kid for every A and B he gets in class (and make it go to the kid, like lunch money, not the parents!).
Sure then the jocks will be envious, but ... oh wait, I'm sorry, what was that?
I know, we'll raise a bunch of little tyrants, but wasn't the question on how to make our country really value education?
The other half is we need some kind of Angel Investor to slow down the corruption circle at the top levels. One of the mega billionaires who is fed up with it all, and just buys entire industries and voting blocs. Like the RIAA.
Just imagine - 1,000 top properties get an exemption, so Disney gets to keep their Mouse, the Beatles maybe, etc. But then that thundering second pantheon gets released as Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike. ("Just don't claim it is yours").
I hear the voices of 400 lobbyists crying out in anguish!
Re: (Score:3)
Find a way to make Nerds/Geeks Cool.
Federally fund free sex for Nerds/Geeks.
Re:not in the upbringing (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't that already happen when DARPA funded the Internet?
Re:not in the upbringing (Score:5, Insightful)
I recall a study a few year back where schools in several areas did pay students for achievements. One school paid 3rd graders money if they got A's and B's on their tests. Another school paid their 1st graders for every book that they read. The result: The 3rd graders showed no improvement in their scores, but the 1st graders did. Why? Because the 3rd graders didn't know how to get the A's and B's. However, the 1st graders had their education improved by reading the extra books, so they got better grades.
So the key is to reward the behavior that leads to success, not merely the success itself.
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Your are missing my point. Research, real research, is done by intelligent, motivated people with appropriate background and training. While we could be doing a better job of figuring out who that small percentage of the population is and supporting them correctly it cannot be done by everyone.
Remember, 50% of the population is of below average intelligence. I'm sorry you swallowed the nonsense about the 'information economy' but that is complete and utter bullshit. Information is part of an economy. I
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
The government needs to change the economic model
You've got it backwards, friend. The People need to change their government.
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
To what?
A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?
An oligarchy, where only well-respected scholars are granted the privilege of participating in government?
A dictatorship, where one person's guidance would lead the nation to either greatness or despair?
Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?
Every form of government is broken by the simple fact that there are humans involved. Humans are easily-corrupted creatures, and the system can only work around our failures.
Maybe a theocracy would work, where the guidance comes from a particular chosen deity, through the interpretation of its priests...
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?
A representative democracy is something I really believe would work, if that is what we had. But we don't. We have representatives on both sides of the isle that take their orders from lobbying groups and turn deaf and dumb to their constituents. Corporate puppets, all of them.
Get rid of special interests and maybe we can get to what this country was supposed to be. Notice I didn't say "get back to...". I have no idea what the beginnings of this country were like, but in my50 years, it's always been about the special interests.
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they have a word for "government by lobbyists?"
We have a representative democracy on paper, but when the rubber hits the road, how does congress vote on the really important matters? Most of the country wants better healthcare but congress won't vote on it. We need better gun laws but congress won't vote on it. Wall Street needs more oversight but... you get the idea.
There are two possibilities... one is that we have government by lobbyists.. or two.. what you say the majority of the country wants isn't what it wants. You say most of the country wants better healthcare, but what you seem to really mean is you think most of the country wants government run health care and I'm nearly certain that isn't true. You say we need better gun laws, but who is this we you're speaking of? Anti-rights people, that would be you it seems, have been losing that battle for a long time now with no end in sight. Apparently the majority of people don't want that either.
So, is the Congress merely acting at the behest of corporations, or maybe in some cases they really are voting what their constituents want. Since they vote, and corporations don't, who would you listen to?
Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor (Score:4, Insightful)
blue collar labor in america by and large has no future. The government needs to change the economic model to start developing our children's mind from a young age
The problem goes deeper than that: it's not only blue collar workers that have no future (and not only in America). White collar workers are also being replaced by machines; the process has just started, but I believe will accelerate. Assuming scientific progress continues at more or less the current pace, I can't think of any existing job humans do now that couldn't in the future be done cheaper by a machine (at least theoretically).
There are two typical answers: one is that new technologies will replace some jobs, but create enough other jobs to compensate. However, that is not proven, and may not be the case; when a factory is automated, thousands of workers are replaced with a few dozen highly qualified engineers that command and maintain the machines. And when the machine maintenance is itself automated, the few dozen may be replaced by just a few people that can manage the whole thing. What happens to the thousands of workers that got replaced?
The second usual answer is that people can study and qualify for more technical jobs, which can not be automated. This is the solution governments usually try to push, by creating job training programs, providing student loans, and so on. While this works on the short term, I don't think it will forever: first, some people simply don't have the time/resources/innate capability to qualify for too complex jobs; as technology and science advances, more and more people will not be able to keep pace. The other issue is that even highly technical jobs will probably be automated sooner or later, as technology advances. Where then will everybody work? I think this process will sooner or later clash with the current basic society structure (in particular with the ownership and property rules), and cause radical changes. Should be interesting!
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.
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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.
Every person capable of speaking or understanding human language has “the brain construction to manipulate abstract symbols”.
What the hell are you talking about?
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This is similar to the idea of sitting down and saying "I will think brilliant thoughts today". It doesn't work.
It works for me. The problem is that no one will hire me to "think brilliant thoughts" for them. So how do I get paid for thinking brilliant thoughts?
Has Slashdot ... (Score:5, Insightful)
started asking rhetorical questions just to start a discussion ?
Re:Has Slashdot ... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you even know what a rhetorical question is?
Joking, joking...
Whatever would we do... (Score:5, Funny)
What would we do without rhetorical questions?
American Ingenuity ? You mean immigrant ingenuity. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing is very ingenious about US itself - other than that the brightest come here. Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world.
For the past 50 yrs, US had the money - and the know how to cultivate innovation. Now both of these are well known to a lot of countries - and the US now has less money to spend on Defence & Space (the primary source of innovation).
Time we got used to making $30K for web development jobs, and time the anthropology, english & history majors.. end up flipping burgers.
Re:American Ingenuity ? You mean immigrant ingenui (Score:5, Insightful)
"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."
Does not compute.
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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.
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"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."
Does not compute.
This is innovative foreign percentages; they go up to 100.9%.
It's true in a way, though; America reached the peak of its power because it encouraged the 'best and brightest' from all over the world to move there by providing them with the best environment to bring their ideas to fruition. That's no longer the case, so we shouldn't be surprised that America is in decline now it's become a nation of rent-seekers.
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:Ingenuity != Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
False. The richest nations on the planet will *sometimes* find it cheaper to outsource and offshore, because they're also the most expensive labour markets. Lack of capital, lack of accessibility, lack of training, combined with the fact that often the labor costs are not a big chunk of the unit cost, can still make the rich nation the cheapest place.
Re:Ingenuity != Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The US & Canadian economies are intensely focused on producing based on new ideas: 1980 onwards was all about tech innovation. Sleepy companies got killed, we got a new tech startup culture, big companies bought little innovators (and made the little guys rich in a way only dreamed off in 1970.) AT&T would never have produced Google or Facebook.
In some ways, the massive tax changes of the 1980s were responsible for this (as well as general improvements in tech & manufacturing, of course.) Cutting top tax rates from 70%+ to 40% or so made the startup bet much more attractive. Of course, the downside of giving people a chance to be a billionaire by age 30 is that it makes the career engineer/scientist role (IBM research, AT&T labs, Xerox Parc) rather obsolete and a waste of money. So lots of innovation, but goodbye middle class.
What's sad is that by 1980 white collar folk realized blue collar jobs could be outsourced. Most of them didn't realize they were next on the chopping block. The early 1990s saw the big research career dead along with the useless middle manager role and the standard secretary role.
Goodbye middle class, at least you have an iPhone.
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If we really are so focused on producing things with the new ideas (tech innovation and such) then where are the things we produce? the iPhone? That's designed here but made in China. Everything I've got on my desk right now is made in Malaysia, China, or Japan. What we are producing here leads to real goods but it sure isn't us making the real goods. Maybe you would argue this doesn't matter, but I think it does. What good are new ideas and innovations if we eventually lose the skills and technologies
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:Ingenuity != Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
You first.
Also, just what kind of low cost labor are you thinking of, anyway? There's a constant push to eliminate as much of the lowest cost labor as possible. Where does your hypothetical uneducated worker go?
Well, they could go work at a warehouse. Except not for long. Now there is warehouse automation [youtube.com]. Yes, people are still needed there, but they need much fewer people, and the people needed are completely disposable. There's zero chances for advancement. If you don't go nuts from years of picking up a package from one robot, passing it through a scanner, and placing it in another, you'll probably be out of a job in 10 years anyway, as they'll figure out how to eliminate the remaining human labor eventually.
Or they could go work at a supermarket. Which also keep reducing worker count through tech like RFID and attempts at automatic checkout systems. They'll get there eventually.
Maybe they could go work in construction. Except the tech will get there as well. You can bet that the construction companies are salivating at the prospect of having machines that print walls, and they'll get made at some point.
My point is, what you're advocating is increasing the amount of people in a segment of the population that's quickly becoming obsolete. A lot of those people will find out that they can't get a job because nobody needs a brainless drone anymore. That's not good for the economy (because unemployed people don't buy much), and not good for political stability either.
You're blaming government spending cuts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, we've spent the last 30 years sending all as many science, technical and engineering jobs overseas that we can and shutting down commercial research labs. Now you're going to argue we're going to lose our science and technology advantage because government is cutting spending? If science and technology suffer in America's future it's because bean counters gave our edge to the rest of the world in exchange for 2% profits and million dollar bonuses.
This is just MIT selfishly bitching about losing funding. If you really care about barriers to education, how about you lower your goddamn tuition [fundmasteryblog.com], assholes?
Re: (Score:3)
actually, MIT forgoes tuition for students who can't afford it [mit.edu].
Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are granted too easily, cover too much, and cover it for far too long. What's worse is that the damages are absolutely insane and companies can literally have your product banned from the entire country simply because you for example used a "menu" to "navigate a complex system" or some nonsense.
Lawsuits are too easy to bring in the US, too costly to defend, and there is no punishments for bringing frivolous suits. For small businesses one or two of these suits no matter how much merit they have can sink the company. So big businesses just sue for nothing and bankrupt small businesses.
Healthcare, too expensive, significantly more expensive for small businesses than big, and it discourages the best employees from working at smaller firms because they literally will have to pay 100% more per year for basic healthcare.
And while I have the soup box let's talk about political corruption allowing monopolies or duopolies to control the market and make it literally impossible via regulation or market manipulation for competitors to form (e.g. Cable, Internet, 3G, Cellular Services, Health Insurance, Health Providers, Drugs Producers, Children Toy Manufacturing, etc).
Re:Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare (Score:5, Insightful)
The present system means that corporations can attempt to prevent innovation in others while not having to do anything about it themselves. It is, in effect, like the medieval guild system that is hitting the economy of Italy, or indeed like the theocratic regimes in Iran or Sa'udi Arabia. It all went wrong when the USPTO ceased to be a cost center and become a profit center, and a whole new class of "IP lawyer" saw the opportunity. Not to mention the entire economy of parts of Texas.
Re: (Score:3)
Isn't it interesting that the "socialist" approach to healthcare of providing it via taxes is far better for capitalism than the current US approach of getting businesses to pay for it directly?
Hollywood make movies in places like Australia because they don't have to pay all of those extra employee costs for healthcare etc.
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.
No, it's losing its money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation needs to be rewarded. How many of you have signed contracts that give *any* invention you create to your employer as a condition of having a job? How may of you have the means to quit to pursue making a business out of your invention? (Hint: You ALL signed one, and you can't if you have a family). And if you did manage to start a business, would you have a legal fund to defend yourself from getting "wallet-whipped" form the inevitable lawsuits?
Patent law, labor law and contract law have all skewed the results of innovation so that corporations profit, while individuals make a few thousand dollars bonus and get a pat on the head from management. This soft corruption is ever so slowly strangling the geese that lay the golden eggs. There are a few Apples and Microsofts and a Facebook. And what would have become of these ideas had Jobs, Gates or Zuckerman been working for IBM at the time they had them?
If I had a million dollar idea tomorrow (and they're not that tough), I can't think of a reason in the world to bother with it while working for a company in the USA. You'd have to be in college, having never worked for a corporation, or offshore in a country that protects you from patent disputes or confiscatory contract provisions.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
A few points in no particular order:
1. Those automatic cuts are hardly automatic. They'll be repealed if legislators can't come up with a plan. These guys would rather preside over the disintegration of the union than cut their constituents' favorite federal programs.
2. Government does not create innovation. Examples like NASA are always trotted out, but I think if you total those successes with the failures, pork, and corruption, you'll find we could have gotten much more for less. Maybe not NASA and it's indirect benefits specifically, but something else.
3. What has the federal government ever done for education other than turn principals into truancy officers? Don't get me started on tuition cost increases due to the ease of getting federally backed student loans.
4. If you want to increase manufacturing: drop the minimum wage.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
"There was a time in America where learning was cherished as a virtuous means of self improvement for both private and public good as the ancient greek philosophers promoted. "
The Good Old Days Fallacy again.
In what magic time was this so and may we have citations?
Re:Catch 22. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that every time a teacher teaches sex-ed, or gay-lesbian stuff, or tells his / her class to read something through-provoking, the luddites and idiots on the school boards would fire them. So you would have teachers who are afraid to teach.
Tenure is important to shield teachers from the stupidity of the masses. It also has the unfortunate side effect of shielding bad teachers. If you get rid of it, you'll lose the good teachers.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
What you dont understand is that the only real affect of the minimum wage is to eliminate low-paying jobs. Well, it also affects the wages of certain union members who have that written into their contracts, of course. But other than that, it does nothing but prevent people (primarily young, unskilled, and minority people) from getting work, period. People whose market wages are higher than the minimum are completely unaffected by it in any direct sense (excepting those few under contracts already mentioned
Re: (Score:3)
Minimum wages says: "If you can't do $7.25 worth of work in an hour, you are prohibited from having a job."
Sadly, some people can't do $7.25 worth of work. Maybe they could do $6 worth of work in an hour to start, and then learn on the job, and eventually be able to do $8, then $10, then a lot more. But the minimum wage effectively prohibits this.
Done on purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
We've done everything possible to stifle innovation over the past 20 years.
Innovation: Patent trolls, nuclear patent portfolios, submarine patents, generic and inscrutable patents, court district shopping, DMCA, ACTA, losing tech to other countries, H1B visas.
Infrastructure: Rationed internet(data caps), net neutrality, spotty cell coverage, polluted water supply, inscrutable laws, discretionary enforcement, tax complexity, offshoring
Growth: Tax breaks to rich companies (if GE pays no taxes, it's hard to make a competing product), regulatory failure (example: deepwater horizon), tax incentives for companies to move from state-to-state, profligate wasteful spending.
Is it any wonder that American innovation has lost its shine?
Learn to play guitar (Score:4, Insightful)
A long time ago.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates was once quoted as saying he doesn't fear other companies; He fears the guy working out of his garage who's busy producing the next big thing. Naturally, legislation has since been passed so Bill and the other billionaires of the tech world can sleep easy knowing he'll never get through the red tape to bring his product to market. There's patent law, copyright law, tort law, contract law, EULAs, and a plethora of other things making damn sure he'll get bought out or buried in debt and legal proceedings.
Has America lost it's luster? Yes. Quite awhile ago. You don't have to spend anything on education or science anymore... it's really quite pointless... nobody can benefit from it in this country anymore.
It lost its shine long ago! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why:
Take a look around your house and count the items that were manufactured in the USA. In mine, it's the toilet! Imagine, the toilet bowl. Everything else was manufactured in Mexico, Taiwan, Canada or China.
Now, there will be those who say: "Well, but that stuff was designed in the USA." To them I say, "nonsense."
Being designed in the USA is almost irrelevant if we spend all our cash abroad, servicing our debt. Banks are able to make profits because they 'enslave" us in debts and fees. That's how they make money. With our spending getting out of hand, foreign powers will only have to sit back and live on the interest we as a nation pay them while servicing our debt. It's insane.
That's how American academics dismissed the Japanese in the 70s and guess what, in a few years, you could not find an American (100%) made product.
We were a once proud nation with corporations like Zenith. It was the inventor of subscription TV and the remote control in addition to being one of the first to develop HDTV in USA. Where is it now? History.
Our car brands are non sellers abroad. Talk of GM and Asians will laugh at you. That's where the market is at the moment.
The latest frontier in electronics in the OLED with the AMOLED variation. No American patent is relied on in OLED technology. It's all Korean. How did it start? Yes, factories moved abroad...then the cash followed.
It's bad folks. When it comes to airplanes, an increasing percentage of these are foreign made. The new Boeing 787 Dream-liner has at least 30% [latimes.com] foreign components. These will increase and when they get to more than 48% all manufacturing followed by research will be abroad.
I am waiting to see where America still shines. Worst of all, we're broke!
Re: (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.
Awww (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
There's a reason Werner von Braun referred to his group as "prisoners of peace".
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: (Score:3)
That sad thing is that when a "reformer" tries to do something, the reformer is labeled a socialist/communist...as if we cannot have anything somewhere in between.
Stop outsourcing production, first (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's just (Score:3)
"Is American Innovation Losing Its Shine?"
No, it's just that everything these days is patented, copyrighted, intellectually-protected and DMCA'd with legions of lawyers, patent trolls and marketing leeches, that hardly anybody in their right innovative mind wants to swim in such submarine shark infested waters. If Alexander Graham Bell or Charles Babbage were alive today, they'd both have been eaten by preemptive litigation and opportunistic legislation long before they'd have had a chance to innovate. In fact, about the only person I can think of who might have been stood a chance, even today, would be Nikola Tesla, as nobody could be really certain as to whether or not he was able to retaliate with long-distance death-ray beams...
Re: (Score:3)
"If Alexander Graham Bell or Charles Babbage were alive today, they'd both have been eaten by preemptive litigation and opportunistic legislation long before they'd have had a chance to innovate. "
Bell had a corporate patent lawyer, Anthony Pollok, even then, provided to him by one of his financial Backers Gardiner Hubbard. So nothing has really changed.
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
Yikes. (Score:3)
If innovation in the US depends on the Federal Government, we're hosed.
Re:She's got it backwards. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not in every field (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
If it's not going to be profitable for twenty years, why not wait twenty years and develop it then?
Sorry, perhaps I should be more clear: some technologies require twenty years of development before they become profitable. If nobody is working on those technologies, they will never become profitable at all.
Gene sequencing systems come to mind, which is why I had mentioned them in my original post. The first small-scale gene sequencing technology only became feasible in 1979, and sequencing complete gnomes only became possible in 1995. Now it is 2011, and gene sequencing is only somewhat profitab
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, at the expense of the workers. The reason why we're losing our competitive edge in innovation is primarily the extraordinary costs that it requires these days to take even a simple idea to market. Patenting is expensive enough that individuals can't afford it and yet cheap enough that Amazon can manage to patent all manner of obvious thing hoping that a few will stick.
If we really want to go back to innovating we need to cut the crap with the bullshit software and biological patents. Not to mention preventing the use of patents as gatekeepers to entire branches of research.
And, we need to ensure that workers have enough money that they don't need to work two jobs so that they have time to innovate on their own time.
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
No, regulation is definitely required, what I'm for is cutting away at ridiculous fees the patent office charges. The fees are large enough to discourage small time inventors and yet don't inhibit the folks like Amazon, Apple, MS, MPEG LA and various others that are abusing the system.
Personally, I wouldn't want to fly in a plane that hadn't been certified by the FAA.
There's absolutely no evidence to support the notion that the Fortune 500 companies would be harmed more than helped by cutting regulations. I
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't even make sense. Patents are one, very specific, form of "regulation". And software patents in particular are a very, very, very specific form of "regulation".
Yet you immediately went with the general category of "regulation".
Why?
Certification is NOT the same as patents.
Why are you trying to associate the two different concepts?
First, make that a period rather than a comma.
Second, again, you're trying to associate two different concepts.
Requirements are not patents.
Certifications are not patents.
Regulations (in general) are not patents.
I'd disagree with that. The "regulatory requirements" (in what appears to the case you're describing) are there to check that the systems meet the safety requirements of the FAA.
I'm okay with the FAA having requirements on software/hardware when the risk is something falling out of the sky.
I don't see that.
I do see the Fortune 500 abusing the patent system to create hurdles for the small businesses.
But getting FAA approval ... no, I don't see that as a hurdle from the Fortune 500 put up that needs to be reduced.
Particularly when you confuse regulations, requirements and certifications with patents.
I don't see that as an improvement. (Score:3)
Somehow, that doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
"Yeah, we got rid of some regulations and some planes crashed but that's okay because those airlines went out of businesses and the executives got jobs with other airlines."
Strange. Because wouldn't the existing airlines be happy to buy the new company and then use the "new, cheaper, more innovativ
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Insightful)
The private sector will strive to find new ways to make money.
That's not the point. The notion that private industry is going to stop making money is a straw man. Nobody thinks that. Money *will* be made, but money doesn't care *where*. As an investor, the next quarter matters far more to you than the state of a company five years in the future. You're almost certain to have adjusted your stock positions by then. You certainly don't care *where* a company you own stock in will be making its widgets, or whether America makes widgets at all.
But most people aren't planning on changing their national residency every couple of years, if ever. It makes a difference to a citizen whether his country still makes computers or cars, or still has jobs for engineers in ten years' time.
A rational, self-interested investor just isn't concerned with the future of American competitiveness. He doesn't even care if American society goes to hell in ten or twenty years, so long as he's made enough money to insulate himself from that. Most of the country can become an impoverished, polluted dystopia so far as he's concerned, but if he can afford to move to a clean, orderly, wealthy enclave it's not a problem for him.
Money not only doesn't care where it's made, it doesn't care *how* it is made. No business innovates if it can make more money by doing the same old thing. It is competition that forces a business to innovate -- albeit only over the short term -- but no company *likes* having competition. So do you think businesses hire lobbyists to *promote* competition? Of course not. Innovation is risky and expensive. Buying politicians to protect you from competition is cheap and predictable. A society organized solely for the good of business interests is one where those interests don't innovate much because they are protected from competition.
Suppose the country had taken a "private enterprise first and only" course at the end of WW2. There's no question that businesses would have made money, maybe even more money in the short term. They'd certainly keep a lot more of their earnings because tax rates during the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s were high, much higher than today. But without the public investment in research and technology funded by those high taxes we'd still be living in a world of largely 1950 technology. Entire industries would not exist. There would be no computers, no satellite communications or GPS, no Internet, and much less biotechnology. The payback times of these investments are far longer than the planning horizons of any rational private investor. Only someone who is interested in the good of society, and the good of the nation would make those investments.
A society organized solely for the good of private enterprises would be no different from any other society organized for the benefit of a few. It would be aversive to innovation, focusing most of its energy and resources on the maintenance of the status quo. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to be able to envision any kind of world but one organized solely for the benefit of business, or one that is irrationally and implacably hostile to private enterprise. It's like they've thrown out history, even the living memory of the success of moderate, pragmatic economic policy, because the story that tells isn't tidy and simple. People seem to prefer a simpler, more radical world view, and there are plenty on both ends of the political spectrum who are happy to peddle it to them.
Re:Do more with less (Score:5, Insightful)
Just glancing at the headline I thought this might be an interesting article and discussion. But just the first sentence shows it for what it is, yet another "Sky is Falling if our funding is cut" article.
Re: (Score:3)
And the reality is that innovation is done even with limited funding.
The big problem is that today when you have innovation in the US there's always a risk of encountering one or more patent trolls which costs a lot of energy to fight.
Sometimes one might wonder if the cheapest alternative is to hire Hells Angels or a similar organization to take care of any patent trolls on the way.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
A good chunk of what America has been providing to the world is banking -- our economic instability has damaged our reputation.
It would help if the knee jerk reaction to banking regulations wasn't to launch scathing attacks on the person suggesting it. You only have to look at the Canadian banking sector and their banking regulations to realise its the way to a stable economy. Sure it's not sexy, or extremely profitable - but it is profitable and the Canadian economy has benefited greatly in the current climate.
The other thing most Americans don't seem to realise is many outside of America are angry with Americans because they have
Re: (Score:3)
You say this as if it is gospel, despite the fact that LESS money is going into public education than ever before.
It's almost as if you have an ideological axe to grind, and don't give a ripe shit about the facts.
Re:How much more proof is needed ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The sad thing is seeing people, even here in this thread, arguing in favor of reducing the middle class down to third world levels.
Well of course they will argue that! Everyone assumes that they will be personally spared when "necessary" changes are made. It's human nature. It's both sad and funny