How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back

jfruhlinger writes "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"

Comments

Re:Democrat Debt Default Plan

[Immostlyharmless]

http://factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms

Have a nice day you AC puss.

Do we want to though?

[Kohath]

It doesn't seem like we want to get it back. I hear people want things like:

- More pay for less work. Less work is going to lead to progress?
- Green tech. Because regular tech never got anyone anywhere.
- Coding for a cause. Feel good about going through the motions. Produce nothing of any particular value.
- Hacking. I made this cool bot that does XYZ-super-geeky thing. For hacker cred. What does "productivity" mean?
- Envy. I want that thing the other guy has, but I don't want to earn it. Can't we just take it from him?
- Lazyness. "I was going to go to school to design games. But it was hard, so I decided to be a games journalist instead."

It takes people of a certain character to do great work in any field. America increasingly lacks those people -- at least among the native-born American population.

We also have problems with misguided elitism based on credentials, too much risk aversion, a culture that doesn't value achievement, too many licensed "professions", too many lawsuits, too much government regulation, an entitlement mentality, and too many opportunities to exploit societal systems for unearned gains.

Re:American Education

[gweihir]

Having seen some of this so-called "higher education" in the US as a guest, I have to say it cannot be the envy of anyone knowing the US system. What I saw was rather pathetic, both on master level and on PhD level. Sure, there are a few good universities, but the rest of the world has them too. And, at least in the systems I know (Germany, Switzerland), the average University, is much, much better than the average in the US.