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Is American Innovation Losing Its Shine?
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."
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.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/mobile-farm-robots/
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
started asking rhetorical questions just to start a discussion ?
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, assholes?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Want to know why small business is impossible in the US, three simple reasons: Patents, lawsuits, healthcare.
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).
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yeah, right. There's lots of "money floating around" in the U.S. right now. In other words, your argument is bullshit. Oh, to be sure, there's money out there, but the people (corporations) who have it are NOT spending it on anything, certainly not on innovation. And this despite government welfare programs aimed at the wealthy to "stimulate jobs and innovation". Try again.
"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."
Does not compute.
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?
The idea that you would pay an american to do what lots of people all over the world can do for a fraction of the cost is ludicrous, and that goes for "research" at universities as well... unless of course you are talking about stealth bombers or nuclear weapons research, which it is illegal to export. Now that they have the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, american research in physics, for example, is on its way to becoming second rate and other than Women's Studies and Business School, American universities have less and less to offer. The american university system is more about generating revenue through student loans than it is about actually producing first rate scholars. The student loan debt bubble, that has lasted for 30 years, is probably ending and with it you will see a dramatic decline in the international prestige of american universities. It was always about the money... and it was the money that attracted the foreign nationals to the united states to teach... and the foreign nationals who moved to america are the only reason american universities were ever all that good.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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% 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!
Diminishing returns on stolen German WW2 era technology, have to make your own now :(
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!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Last week on HDNet Dan Rather Reports did a special on Singapore schools, some of the best in the world. One thing that stuck out in my mind is that culturally the teaching profession is held in the highest esteem there. Here in America teaching has become a job of last resort where only the desperate or truely dedicated put up with the abuse and meager wages. 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. Now with avarice instead of virtue motivating our country teachers are restricted to simply programming automatons for a standardized test and are held in contempt for being in any way associated with the government. Respect and upraise our teachers; they are directly involved in defining our country's future.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
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.
Yes, don't insist on minimum wage laws in our trading partners, just lower the price of labor here, while the CEO's keep raking in huge obscene bonuses. Your solution is just cuts, cuts, cuts, and kiss the middle class goodbye.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Cry me a river! America's innovation lost its shine, because of outsourcing every single production bit overseas. Most innovation steps are incremental improvements, not radical. Therefore, feedback from the market (customers) and from the production line is absolutely necessary. By outsourcing production to an external contractor, companies will first loose the feedback from production. Once the outsourcing contractors know the products, they will get to know the sales channels, too. In time companies loose their market, their ability to produce products and finally the ability to improve their products. What we see today is the result of a short-sighted service-oriented economic principle. Wake up! Start "doing" things, again.
So you are for cutting regulation then? I'm currently working on an aviation product. The only way for me to get it to market is to go through FAA certification. That certification process is there to make sure the software and hardware are flight worthy given the potential loss of human lift, but if you look at the requirements, it's much more of a "pay us enough money to certify your stuff and we'll let you into the club" type regulation. The requirements do not, in themselves, make better software, I just saw a speech by the COO of iRobot where he listed all the certifications his company has received over the last 10 years so they can be a federal contractor. He calculated the cost to be over $40M and stated quite plainly "not one penny of that went to a better product, a cheaper product, or a more efficient process - it was merely the cost of access to the federal government". You want to help out workers? Cut regulatory requirements. The "CEOs are making too much money" tripe isn't typical of most small businesses. You are complaining about the actions of the fortune 500 companies who have spent a lot of money to create regulatory hurdles for the little guys. Cut regulatory requirements, and the big fish who are misbehaving will suddenly have competition from those who are willing to accept a leaner CEO compensation.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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"pay a kid for every A and B he gets in class" No, not this. Don't pay for results, pay for the behaviour that brings the results.
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.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.