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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!
"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.
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.
1960's: "Little Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?" "An engineer for NASA, helping build the craft that will take us to Mars!"
2010's: "Little Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?" "A rapper who brags about his bling and his bitches!"
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.
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)