Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Why not just buy off the World Economic Forum and force them to publish more favorable results? That's right...we're America! That's how we roll!
Despite the negative financial impact regulation in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. I don't want to say drop the heavy metal regulations on toys just so I spend $50 rather than $100 on my child's next birthday. I think in many cases the populations of these growing nations will impose stricter regulations on their industries as they begin to approach our level of wealth. Not that all regulation benefits the consumer but things like public health, enviromental stewardship, and anti-trust protections are handled poorly by the free market.
Innovation and discovery comes from people with inquisitive minds - minds that have been nurtured by a well rounded education system; one that encourages critical thinking, experimentation, and a good understanding of what scientific knowledge we have already. Now look at what is happening in the US - a drastic cutback in public education, "teaching to the test", and in many areas, official dismissal of science and scientific discoveries. Quite a few school districts are actively pushing creationism against evolution, dismissing global climate change, and many "non-essential" curriculum activities.
I was once told "If you think the cost of education is expensive, consider the cost of ignorance."
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.
"Wrote Grove: "You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?""
Nailed it. Offshoring makes companies and their management richer. It saves a little for consumers of the relevant product, if the savings are passed on to them rather than simply taken as profits ... but those consumers have fewer and fewer jobs from which to get income to buy the products.
The endgame here is for the local market for consumer goods to dwindle, and then for the company to move it's main office to a tax haven and/or somewhere with a population that still has money to spend. They've basically mined the consumer market until it's depleted, and then they move on. This is what happens when you consistently underpay your regular workers and/or ship their jobs elsewhere: you undermine the entire economy. Apparently modern industries have forgotten basic lessons from way back in the days of Henry Ford: pay your workers reasonably well, and they will ultimately help your community and business thrive.
to think of all of this as, the world is catching up with the US (and in general, the rest of the world is catching up to Western Civilization). Yeah the US certainly has its problems, but like the article stated, comparing it to four countries who added together don't have half the population of the US, let alone the land area, is no different than having your answer before your facts to support it.
Saying the China is moving to a digital economy faster than the US is odd, but then again the favorite thing to do among such people is to ignore all those China doesn't count when it wants to look good, who happen to be the same people it counts when it wants to look good in other areas. Let alone, moving from where they were to anywhere would show more progress than most countries can make. After seeing the real estate situation in China I figure it is just a few years before they have similar problems. They are just better at hiding the problems they have, from practice and intimidation.
The only problem the US faces that is has not tried to fix is Washington DC. Entitlement spending will cripple this country. The discretionary spending (where those mythical 39 billion dollars from recent cuts came out of) is less than a third of the budget. The rest is guaranteed spending. Meaning we could cut everything but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense, and still be spending negatively.
So, the threat is real, but it is from the leadership of the country, not some foreign bogeyman. As with all power structures that have crumbling support they need external bogeymen. Hence through their sycophants in the media they create them on demand.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
How dare you assert that any of our resources be directed by the government into research and development for the greater good of the nation? When CEO's could instead have the total freedom to take the money and run? As Reagan's assistant secretary for productivity & technology said in 1984, outlining a plan to restructure all of higher education, "Accountability and expertise must come from the private sector where the user needs are best identified. This is our intent." Thank god that has been so successful!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
If you want to help it return, kill all patent trolls.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers. I'm a great example of why they should be broken up. My math education was so bad in "good public schools" that I am now staring down the prospects of having to go to a community college to make sure I have all of the foundations plus engineering calculus down pat before I can apply for a M.S. in any respectable subject.
How about the fact that we throw kids of wildly different abilities into the same class and teach to the lowest common denominator? This means that most classes are incredibly slow for the students who can perform. Heck, this applied even to the AP classes I took in high school.
But oh yeah, it's teaching creationism that's destroying kids' ability to do Math, Physics, etc. A few minor points of contention between religion and science are to blame for why kids are completely turned off.
Maybe. The space program might be a counter-example. When the USSR was in the lead, America pushed hard to keep up and "win the race". These are two very different strategies. The USSR was much more into conquering and exploiting the new frontier and had developed technology with that in mind. Arguably it's a damn good thing they didn't win (from any kind of ethical standpoint) for that very reason. The US got bored silly after "winning" and essentially dismantled all of NASA's projects on getting people to Mars (which they actually could have done by the mid 80s). They won the race, they got the prize, contest over. And when a contest is over, the normal thing is to go home and that is exactly what happened.
It has been argued that had Russia actually got men on the moon first, both Russia and the US would have active space colonies by now, not just a crudely-assembled and much-reduced space station that's too damn small for the kind of science needed to continue justifying it.
I would alter the argument a little, as I don't think the Cold War in Space would have been pretty: I think the US is fundamentally incapable of generating momentum in and of itself but is extremely capable of very efficiently tapping into the momentum of others and developing it in new and highly creative ways. In other words, the highly compete-till-you-die aggression of the US is only good if there's a competitor to compete against, that the US has less of a "work ethic" and more of a "win ethic". That other nations have a responsibility, particularly supernations like the EU, to be that competition and not defer a damn thing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Aaaaand... the second result from a google search. By far? Look at more than the first google result and try again.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Right, but the problem has been recently that we've been suffering "stag-flation." Things that are important to living: shelter, transit, food, and medical care have had their prices rising above commodity inflation and wage inflation for approaching a decade now. This is unsustainable, and will result in the choking off of a middle class in the united states. The importance of a middle class is not just a consumer base(as we have been told), but the creation of a broad range of educated people capable of understanding the world well enough to make strides in innovation. We're not losing current GDP, we're losing the next generation's GDP.
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:
So -- all we need to do is break companies' addiction to short te