America's Tech Decline: a Reading Guide

ErichTheRed writes "Computerworld has put together an interesting collection of links to various sources detailing the decline of US R&D/innovation in technology. The cross section of sources is interesting — everything from government to private industry. It's interesting to see that some people are actually concerned about this...even though all the US does is argue internally while rewarding the behaviour that hastens the decline."

Comments

is it just me?

[corbettw]

Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately? Not that I'm judging it, I feel the same way much of the time. But it seems more and more that this attitude is coming to the forefront of our national consciousness and yet none of our leaders have done anything to address it.

Sad times. Guess I should go check out Mandarin for Dummies from the library.

Re:is it just me?

[Hatta]

There's a growing realization that those who run the US have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Re:is it just me?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately?

That's because unemployment has gone up a lot, almost everyone has less money, we've shifted from having a great industrial base to having a service-based economy, and our last two wars have been expensive asymmetric wars where there are non-state actors on the other side. Also, those wars combined with different economic and social policies have made us politically unpopular.

But it certainly isn't *over* yet--it's just not the rising star these days. It still has the most effective military on the planet. But those expenses are being curtailed while China's are increasing. I suspect we'll have a pre-WWI England/Germany type race, where the US outspends china for a long time to the great expense of both nations, but the US retains superiority in a number of fields for so long as it can afford to do so.

China is greatly increasing the number of patents it issues--that will be good for us the day they actually support patents for extraterritorial inventors. They'll do that when they have enough IP and we refuse to honor their patents because they don't honor ours. There will be political games, but long-term it may be good for us. (Although we do need better science and math education--and more importantly, better cultural education on the value of science and math).

Re:is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is another option.

Post World War II there were basically two countries that either weren't former colonies or bombed back decades in development. The US and USSR. The Cold War pretty much was the two big boys fighting and keeping everyone else down.

USSR fell. The wounded are healing, near healed. The former colonies are following the path of the former colonies turned super power.

The US may not be over, but having to admit the playing field is quickly becoming more "fair".

Re:is it just me?

[budcub]

I grew up in the 1970's and had to listen to my parents complain about how great things used to be and how they sucked now (then). Didn't hear it so much in the late 1980's. When the recession hit in the early 1990's it was in all the newspaper editorials that the US was a fading empire like the Greeks, Romans, and British before us. Basically everything we're hearing now. Once we bounced back and had a big economic boom in the late 90's it wasn't the case anymore. Then the recession of the early 2000s hit and it was the same thing all over again. Our empire such as it is may be fading but whenever there is a economic downturn, we hear the same complaints.

Re:is it just me?

[cobrausn]

Arguably, the 70s is probably when the US decline started. It's just a slow decline, so you're going to keep hearing it. What is interesting to me is despite the obvious loss of US influence and relevance in industry / education / R&D, technology has enabled an (arguably) higher quality of life for most in the US. Of course it is doing the same for other countries as well.

Re:is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

The soviet command economy collapsed rather spectacularly, and wasn't that wonderful for the comrades (slave laborers) who had to live and die with it.

Europe and Japan rebuilt with a hell of a lot of help from the US, not only in the Marshall plan, but our subsidizing their national defense for the last 60+ years.

The real lesson here is "focused, directed work at the goal to get anything done" either needs to get it paid for by someone else like a welfare queen, or can get it done with the millions of its own dead.

Re:is it just me?

[Antisyzygy]

Interesting thing about that that refutes your point : http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich

Re:is it just me?

[dohnut]

While I have no love for the wealthy (they do just fine without it), it is not they (directly) who have killed off the middle class. Globalization (which I'm also not against) has killed off the middle class. And it is killing off the middle class (in America) because the middle class let it.

Everyone who, when presented with multiple products to purchase to fulfill a specific need or desire, will usually pick the cheapest one (everything else being equal). Well, guess what? The cheapest one is not made in America. So every time you do this you send jobs overseas. It's a vote that tells corporations that if they want your business then they have to use cheap foreign labor to get it.

So cry me a river middle class America -- for once you got what you voted for. Why shouldn't tech (and pretty much everything else) leave America? We obviously won't pay for it anyway. I sure as hell do not want to invest in a company that is going to employ Americans (I'm an American btw). You're paying a premium for nothing. Simply wasting money to sustain a way of life that is rapidly losing momentum as it further enters the atmosphere of global reality (excuse the poor analogy).

Re:is it just me?

[geekoid]

5) The sale of key technologies.

People seem to overlook that the key technologies, from wing design, to making steel, was sold from companies to foreign companies. THAT is what really killed the majority of manufacturing.

TFA is way off the mark

[jet_silver]

TFA lists as concerns the wrong ones. 1) STEM "education", which is really training. You don't train people to innovate, you train people to push buttons or flip burgers. Education begins with independent, critical thinking and that is less and less fostered by the educational system. 2) Why would a smart student do STEM when the money is in pie-dividing, not pie creation? Besides, B-school is about parties and sex, not cracking books all night and all weekend. 3) The progress toward a knowledge-based economy -should- be slowest for the early adopters, then people can copy it and learn from those mistakes. 4) The benchmark of "green energy" is wrong, it is now viable only because governments mandate it. From TFA: "Clean energy is an industry the government has cited as important to future growth." And the government will piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining. Government initiatives are playgrounds for rent-seekers, perpetual-motion nuts, and con men.

America's tech decline is fostered by a government in thrall to companies that ship profits to Jersey, Bermuda and Monaco; jobs to China and Vietnam; and toxic waste to Africa. Simplification of the tax code, taxing companies and individuals on parity (after all, companies are people) and letting the bastards walk if they don't like it, and a serious crackdown on malfeasance under color of authority are what the government should be doing.

Re:Second Wind

[redemtionboy]

Rome over expanded and destroyed it's currency. It wasn't that it stopped growing. It's that it grew unsustainably. There was no way that it could possibly control all that it did for too long.

Short Attention Spans

[chill]

The problem is short attention spans, and a difficulty in communicating the benefits of long-term, fundamental research combined with a political, financial and popular culture obsessed with a "that was yesterday, what have you done for me lately" mentality.

A perfect illustration is shortly after the "merger" of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent Technologies was the virtual kneecapping of Bell Labs.

Then CEO Patricia Russo announced that long-term, fundamental research would no longer be performed at Bell Labs as that wasn't the culture of Alcatel. If a project couldn't be productized in 7 years, it would be shelved.

To me that was a "break out the shovels" moment. As in, "It has been a long, hard decline but we can see the bottom. Break out the shovels, we're going to dig this hole deeper."

The same thing goes on with Congress and funding basic scientific research at placed like NASA, the various National Labs (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Fermi, Oak Ridge, etc.). Just look at what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider.

The problem is you can't always predict what benefits will come from fundamental research, thus you can't give the bean counters a predicted return on investment number. When is an even harder number.

The only real time the United States as a government priority has pumped money into research is if that research could be used to blow shit up. Actually, this is probably true of Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan and China as well.

We need to be able to clearly articulate the benefits to society and the economy as a whole that fundamental research brings. If we want to drive forward into the future imagined by the visionaries, and not end up in the one envisioned by the dystopians (no Mad Max, please), this and education need to be our top priorities as a nation. Which nation? Any and every nation.

Pessimism.

[MaWeiTao]

My impression has been that those with money and those looking to acquire it are trying to do it the easy way. The challenging ways of building wealth have been abandoned in America. This is why we don't make much of anything. And when we do, it's often crap where someone in some other country is building it for cheap.

I've also come to the conclusion that the reason there is such an obsession with intellectual property is because people subconsciously know that nobody needs us. We're not much more than middlemen, still resting on the laurels of those who've come before who actually did innovate and build things. It's only a matter of time before the Chinese, like the Japanese, strike out on their own. This defense of IP is desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.

Although, admittedly, I'm not convinced that China has the culture and devotion that the Japanese have. From my experience Chinese entrepreneurs are primarily driven the same things as Americans, how to make the most money for the least amount of effort. I predict that eventually China will price itself out of cheap manufacturing and everyone will migrate to South East Asia and South America. I foresee a future where most manufacturing based in Africa; the Chinese interestingly are already moving in that direction.

Either way, I'm pessimistic on America's future. And while it's fun to blame someone else it's really everybody's fault; starting with the government, management and ending with the worker.

My take

[ErichTheRed]

I'm the submitter, so I figured I'd reserve my comments for here so this wasn't rejected with the comment "tl; dr". :-)

Here's how I feel -- I'm not 100% sold on the argument that everything is crashing down, but I do have some serious concerns for the future. Some of them could be easily fixable if people would just get on board, and others will take a long time and tons of investment to fix. Here's my list of issues:

• Lack of economic diversity -- We still lead the world in manufacturing output last time I checked, but one problem is that this is mainly due to the export of big-ticket items like airplanes. Boeing only has so many jobs available for a massive population. Previous generations had a large, decently-compensated middle class and a good chunk of those people worked in domestic factories. Now, your only hope seems to be to go to college, get a degree even if you don't need one, and hopefully get a white-collar service job. Sounds great, right? What if you can't handle college? Not everyone is brilliant, but a lot of non-brilliant people in the past had a good shot at a decent wage. Bottom line: We need more work for the other half of the population who isn't cut out for knowledge work, and that work needs to pay more than minimum wage like it used to.
• Lack of R&D spend -- The transistor and UNIX were invented at Bell Labs, AT&T's pure research arm. Larger companies may pay lip service to R&D now, but such spend rarely survives market downturns. Increasingly, even companies with large R&D operations are being pressured to focus on things that will immediately turn a profit or produce patents that the company can license. AT&T might be an outsized example -- for you kiddies, that rinky-dink cell phone provider used to have a monopoly on any kind of phone service, and set the world's telecom stanards. That gave them some serious money to play with. But companies of all sizes are cutting back funding for pure research in pursuit of short term profits.
• Focus on short term goals and profits -- The nature of the markets and individual compensation forces companies to focus on next quarter's profits instead of the future. Tell the average board that you might possibly produce a 5-fold ROI in 4 years vs. a 2-fold guaranteed ROI next quarter, and you know what wins. This kind of thinking leads to some of the dumber things companies do, like giving up control of proprietary processes to third parties for a one-time cash hit.
• Always-on stock markets -- Following on the last point, everyone's retirement is tied up in the markets either directly or indirectly through mutual funds. Because of this, investors demand constant rising stock prices and will not tolerate anything that could possibly impact profitability. IMO, if we returned control of the markets to companies and the ultra-rich, and had individuals a little more removed from it through pensions, annuities or other less volatile investments, companies might get slack they need to actually pour money into something that may pay off in the future. Equities markets should be reserved for billionaires to fund business ventures, not be a person's sole source of later-life income.
• Education -- Put the anti-intellectualism debate aside for a bit; one of the reasons it exists is the poor quality of education. Taxpayers refuse to fund it, only a lucky minority of students are in good schools, and the rest are stuck. Getting students interested in something other than business or the "soft squishy" stuff is difficult when (a) you don't have a good pre-college foundation to work off of, and (b) the payoff for business and soft-squishy stuff is astronomical compared to STEM fields. I know a few science Ph.D's who went into management consulting and crank out spreadsheets and PowerPoints all day because the compensation is so much higher than staying in their field.

So -- all we need to do is break companies' addiction to short te