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."

Comments

And patents, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And patents, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents have very little to do with America losing its edge. It has partly to do with outsourcing of tech jobs overseas. In essence, American companies have trained foreigners how to build a tech industry in their own country. Now we must compete against them.

It also has to do with US government policies that end up incentivizing the best and brightest going into finance and law, jobs that advance society very little. It is no coincidence that most politicians are lawyers and financiers.

The American people can fix it by voting in politicians who have the guts to make the necessary changes. But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again.

Re:And patents, of course

[Sarten-X]

As opposed to a system without patents, where your idea is quickly copied by anyone who already has the production facilities to do so and you have no legal recourse.

Re:And patents, of course

[Alan Shutko]

Right now, we've got the worst of both worlds.

If you come up with a good idea, it will be immediately copied by a number of large companies that figure they've got deeper pockets than you. They will complain you are trying to use patents instead of competition to win in the marketplace. And odds are, anything you make will infringe on one or more of THEIR patents, which they will use as a defense to stop you from using your patent against them.

At the same time, you will be sued by a non-practicing entity with no assets except the patent they're suing you with, and you can't even try to use other patents against them since they're not making anything.

Re:And patents, of course

[Electricity Likes Me]

But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again

Indeed. The Chinese and Indians laugh at us for spending so much time on such frivolous things and for even discussing these things in politics. Your abortion and gay marriage "rights" won't mean jack squat if in the meantime we stand by and watch as this once great nation circles the toilet bowl on its way down the tubes. In fact, I wish that people would just STFU about such things when discussing what sort of policies are best for the long term survival of our nation. People who make these things into voting issues are pissing away their futures while Rome burns.

Did you know one of the single biggest development indicators is women's rights?

For whatever reason, if you enforce gender equality and women's education, your country will be dramatically better then it's neighbors in the long term. Standards of living go up, crime goes, productivity booms.

Now, this doesn't really make immediate sense: without women's rights you've got an entire labor force who you don't have to pay. Surely, with all that free labor or low-cost labor, you'd expect an easy win over people who actually have to pay fair wages.

The reasons are complex, but the big one is this: cultural discrimination doesn't just effect the discriminated against group. It narrows the mindset and "acceptable" standard of behavior of the favored group as well. It leaks into science, business and the arts and closes up avenues of exploration because it effectively bans "types" of thinking. If you're a man, you're only favored provided you stay away from "feminine" things - which are implicitly not worthy of consideration. Your behavior must conform to whatever the expected norm is, lest you become a de facto member of the oppressed group.

Abortion is very much a women's rights issue in most respects, but it also has follow on consequences: if access to abortion services is easy for the poor (it's never a problem for the rich) then crime rates drop about 18 years after that happens. Gay marriage means you're not only removing yet another disenfranchised class (and thus promoting tolerance and general consideration and empathy within your population - you know, attacking a whole bunch of harmful social issues at once) but you're also ultimately addressing wider issues such as the social acceptance of people in unusual living situations (i.e. those with divorced parents, unmarried parents, single-parents etc.).

I assume you don't actually oppose either of these measures, but it's straight up non-sensical to think social policy has nothing to do with economic policy. There's a reason socioeconomic status is how we judge an area and not just "economic" status.

Re:And patents, of course

[jcoy42]

Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions. It quickly became cheaper to order from Canada than buy local, and that just opened the gateways. It became obvious it was non-profitable to work with Americans, because we're greedy and vindictive.

And don't even get me started on the BS they pulled w.r.t. time spent on the job vs. actual contribution. They advanced people for time served, and punished up and comers.

Not this isn't to say there aren't other issues involved, but the core problem is we let a mafia-like set of players step in and control our strongest companies, and the folks with the money got sick of it. The unions trained businesses to avoid local production by pricing our workforce right out of the market.

You can sit and bitch all you want, but that is what killed it for American jobs. Everyone wanted the best health care, they wanted automatic advancement, and just made themselves unappealing to the businessmen. There is a breaking point. And one look over the history of Detroit (which is just a more obvious example than most) shows exactly what happens when you let the unions take over. If that doesn't explain it, look at GE.

Once you stop building the stuff, you stifle engineering and improvement, and at this point, I don't see America pulling it out of their ass for anything. We were on top, and we blew it. Case closed.

Re:And patents, of course

[Grishnakh]

Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions.

Oh please. If you want to build stuff in America without paying union wages, it's easy: you build your factory in Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee. That's exactly what a bunch of foreign automakers have done, while American automakers have been building factories in Mexico. There's nothing forcing you to use union labor; this has only been a major factor in northeast states. There's a LOT more to the country than just the northeast.

Re:And patents, of course

[syousef]

Well I didn't say we were done with that area, and we aren't by a long shot.

That's what the issue with paid-parental leave is

Have you ever looked after very young children? I love my kids, but I would not call looking after them leave. We've got the language all wrong. It's work, and a small mistake can have deadly consequences. It's worthwhile and important work that must be done. As they get older and more self sufficient that aspect fades but you still have to supplement their education if you want to be a good parent. You still have to cook and clean for them at least until they are teenagers (though they can progressively help with that).

But recognizing women as fully equal persons is a very important step to recognizing parenting as (1) something both sexes should be sharing in equally in a relationship and (2) as an important and worthy task.

This pretence that we have to be the same to be equal is a big part of the problem.

Have you ever spent 5 hours with a child under 2 years of age screaming for their mummy? Mum and dad can't always be equal. Not possible. You can change all the nappies you like. You can be the one who stays home and feeds and sings and plays with them. Society will for the most part shun you for it, but it can be done if the male really does want to be the stay at home parent. What can't be done is that you can never give birth or breast feed your child (yes you can feed breast milk but that's not exactly the same). You can't bond with a child as it's mother. Part of recognising women as equals has to include recognising their differences. Trying to force fathers into "equal" parenting when it's not supported by society or nature is ridiculous. It leads to severely depressed fathers that are more likely to disengage.

Nor is it always possible to be raising an infant while working a full time job. I don't want any airline pilot flying an aircraft I'm on half asleep at the controls because he was up all night tending to his infant so his wife could get sleep. Nor do I want a woman doing that job for equal pay. I want someone staying at home with the child who recognises their partner is doing a dangerous job that requires full concentration at work, who then gets up during the night and feeds the child instead of worrying about equality.

We get no where if it's "women's labor" since the entire issue was that "women's labor" wasn't recognized as important.

In other words we have not addressed the problem at all. All the work traditionally done by a woman is expected to be done in your "spare" time now. It is still unpaid and still devalued. No amount of pressing for equality while this is the case is going to work because all it does is work both parents into the grave early as they try to keep a paid full time job and a 24/7 childrearing one too.

Re:And patents, of course

[AmiMoJo]

Bullshit. Let's place blame where blame is due. What screwed America is the unions.

Low wages and fewer benefits are not the only way to make manufacturing work. Look at Germany and Japan - much stronger labour laws, more welfare and higher pensions, yet they are still able to manufacture and compete with the likes of China and India. In fact Germany exports more than China does.

All you have to do is stop participating in the race to the bottom. It turns out people will pay for quality and innovation, so even if your production costs are higher your good still sell. Germany in particular has performed an economic miracle - they just gave everyone a tax break worth â5 million because they are on target to take â14m more in tax revenue this year, and unemployment is at the lowest level for 20 years. In other words since the West and East merged they have brought half their country up to the level of the other and become the world's biggest exporters, and the global downturn that has decimated manufacturing in some countries hasn't affected them nearly as badly.

Making everyone suffer low pay and poor conditions is not necessary for an economy to prosper, and if you have good employment laws unions don't need to force the issues so much. Everybody wins, except perhaps for the executives who lose a million or two off their bonus to cover the higher costs.

Robots will replace blue collar labor

[meow27]

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

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[ColdWetDog]

So, buy giving every little kid a chemistry set (and thereby sending them to Harvard) we will think ourselves out of this mess?

No. Realize that very, very few people are ever going to be 'innovators' no matter how much government money we toss at the problem. It's not in their DNA, not in the upbringing, not in their heads. We have to come up with society that lets middle of the road people live a reasonable life, not expect everyone on the block to go off to work in a lab.

Not sure how to do that, but giving more money to the Education Industrial Complex in this country so far has yielded little fruit.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[Pete Venkman]

I would agree with you, but American government probably wouldn't want chemistry sets to wind up into more people's hands. Think of how many potential terrorists we would have! Joking aside, I am an industrial chemist and I truly support more science education. But as we have all seen in the aftermath of Fukushima, politicos do not understand science. They think it is something that is democratically worked on, but science isn't democratic...nature is nature. Now vetting of scientific theories is somewhat scientific in terms of peer review and replication, but understanding that would require actual work and research on the part of our representatives. I wouldn't count on public school teachers to understand science enough to be able to teach it well to future generations. I think we, as nerds/scientists, should do more to educate young'uns to become our replacements.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[ATMAvatar]

A mass of educated voters would be a huge threat to the existing power base. Good luck with that.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[flaming error]

The government needs to change the economic model

You've got it backwards, friend. The People need to change their government.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[Sarten-X]

To what?

A direct democracy, swayed easily by the latest celebrity gossip and completely ignoring the general consensus of the relevant scientific communities?

An oligarchy, where only well-respected scholars are granted the privilege of participating in government?

A dictatorship, where one person's guidance would lead the nation to either greatness or despair?

Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?

Every form of government is broken by the simple fact that there are humans involved. Humans are easily-corrupted creatures, and the system can only work around our failures.

Maybe a theocracy would work, where the guidance comes from a particular chosen deity, through the interpretation of its priests...

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[IANAAC]

Or how about a representative democracy, where the decisions are made by people who can judge whether their constituents' recommendations are being made from reason or reaction, and can choose to follow or reject those recommendations appropriately?

A representative democracy is something I really believe would work, if that is what we had. But we don't. We have representatives on both sides of the isle that take their orders from lobbying groups and turn deaf and dumb to their constituents. Corporate puppets, all of them.

Get rid of special interests and maybe we can get to what this country was supposed to be. Notice I didn't say "get back to...". I have no idea what the beginnings of this country were like, but in my50 years, it's always been about the special interests.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[cdrguru]

If you could educate people in that way it would be really nice. This is similar to the idea of sitting down and saying "I will think brilliant thoughts today". It doesn't work.

There are some people with the brain construction to manipulate abstract symbols and the rest can't. Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population can do it. This means they can do higher math, things like computer programming and pretty much anything where you are manipulating symbols instead of real objects.

The remainder of the population, which could be as high as 60%, can't do it and they cannot be trained to do it. No amount of education is going to make them be able to do it. It is like trying to get a colorblind person to recognize the color green. Their brain isn't wired that way.

What does that mean? Well, it means these people can be perfectly successful in doing plenty of things that need doing, such as most of the trades. They can work in a factory doing just about anything on the factory floor. But they cannot push figures around in a spreadsheet when the figures represent something else. As long as what they are manipulating is a concrete object or at least something they can see in front of them they can do it. Abstract symbols? Nope. If it involves moving an icon around which represents something else, they are going to have lots of trouble with it. It doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence" either, so you can't just say these people are stupid and pass them by that way.

Most educators have known this for maybe 60-70 years or so. Some of them have come out and said it but it is a dangerous thing to say in current educational circles.

What we are doing is attempting to remake society in a way that will exclude the portion of the population that can't manipulate abstract symbols. We want to remake the factory floor so it is controlled from a remote station where the user pushes around little icons. We want to have airplanes that are flown by moving little icons around from a remote location. We want everyone to be a "knowledge worker" and uses fancy 3D displays to control things in the real world. Well, we are setting ourselves up for a huge problem where as much as 60% of the population isn't going to be able to interact with things that way. There is no training, no education and no familiarization that will fix this problem. The only way to do it is to really have people interacting with real physical objects. If we do not have jobs like that, we are going to have a huge segment of the population that someone is just going to have to take care of. For their entire lives.

Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor

[atriusofbricia]

Do they have a word for "government by lobbyists?"

We have a representative democracy on paper, but when the rubber hits the road, how does congress vote on the really important matters? Most of the country wants better healthcare but congress won't vote on it. We need better gun laws but congress won't vote on it. Wall Street needs more oversight but... you get the idea.

There are two possibilities... one is that we have government by lobbyists.. or two.. what you say the majority of the country wants isn't what it wants. You say most of the country wants better healthcare, but what you seem to really mean is you think most of the country wants government run health care and I'm nearly certain that isn't true. You say we need better gun laws, but who is this we you're speaking of? Anti-rights people, that would be you it seems, have been losing that battle for a long time now with no end in sight. Apparently the majority of people don't want that either.

So, is the Congress merely acting at the behest of corporations, or maybe in some cases they really are voting what their constituents want. Since they vote, and corporations don't, who would you listen to?

Has Slashdot ...

[BlindRobin]

started asking rhetorical questions just to start a discussion ?

Re:Has Slashdot ...

[obarel]

Do you even know what a rhetorical question is?

Joking, joking...

Ingenuity != Jobs

[msobkow]

"Don't just create ideas, also make products here," she [Hockfield] said. "Buying back technologies that we invented changed our surplus into deficit. We need to have a substantial fraction of technologies that are made in America."

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.

If you want to create jobs, do something about the whole concept of outsourcing. The richest nations on the planet will always find it cheaper to outsource and offshore, because they're also the most expensive labour markets. Until the inevitable collapse happens when there isn't the money being earned to pay for the shiny new gadgets.

Re:Ingenuity != Jobs

[vadim_t]

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.

Re:Ingenuity != Jobs

[Gorobei]

"Don't just create ideas, also make products here," she [Hockfield] said. "Buying back technologies that we invented changed our surplus into deficit. We need to have a substantial fraction of technologies that are made in America."

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.

You're blaming government spending cuts?

[Bacon Bits]

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?

Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare

[Manip]

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).

Re:Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare

[Kupfernigk]

Actually, I think that "IP" is now the number one problem. What's more, as the USA tries to expand its IP empire abroad, a backlash is inevitable.

The present system means that corporations can attempt to prevent innovation in others while not having to do anything about it themselves. It is, in effect, like the medieval guild system that is hitting the economy of Italy, or indeed like the theocratic regimes in Iran or Sa'udi Arabia. It all went wrong when the USPTO ceased to be a cost center and become a profit center, and a whole new class of "IP lawyer" saw the opportunity. Not to mention the entire economy of parts of Texas.

Re:Patents, lawsuits, and healthcare

[cptdondo]

This is either hyperbole, or wrong. Health insurance is expensive, but the cost is rarely more than a few hundreds bucks a month per person, significantly less than minimum wage.

Maybe your contribution.... Or maybe you're living in the past, or maybe you're 22. The employer pays well over $1K/mo per employee for insurance. I shut my business down in large part because we could no longer afford health insurance, and thus could not compete with the big outfits for talent.

We were paying roughly $14k/year for catastrophic care - no doctor visits, no well-baby care, no prescription coverage, and a deductible of well over $3K/year. When the insurance company told me that would go up 30%, and the nearest "competitive bid" was well over 50% higher, we closed our doors.

The small firms simply cannot compete with the big firms because they don't have the purchasing power. So there went 8 well paid professional jobs.

No, it's losing its money.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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.

Re:She's got it backwards.

[Jawnn]

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.

Re:American Ingenuity ? You mean immigrant ingenui

[kwark]

"Most Americans are basically the 99.9% - the non-innovators. The 1% comes from all over the world."

Does not compute.

Done on purpose

[Okian Warrior]

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?

Learn to play guitar

[qualityassurancedept]

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.

A long time ago....

[girlintraining]

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.

It lost its shine long ago!

[bogaboga]

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!

Awww

[Anonymous Coward]

Diminishing returns on stolen German WW2 era technology, have to make your own now :(

Re:not in the upbringing

[TaoPhoenix]

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!

Well no wonder

[Anti Cheat]

With the US business greed focused on making the fastest profit possible still in full swing, and this also true in other western countries. I'm not surprised innovation and ingenuity is faltering. Why would industry focused only as far as the next quarters profit see any benefit on long term investment.

For sometime now Companies have massively laid off it's historical knowledge held by what it considers costly western labour and researchers. Add to that the offshoring momentum and it set the stage for a 20 year decline in the skilled research and workforce.
We could make a long list of where all the short sighted decisions that all compile to spell out the US decline

So just a few examples of a long list that has lead to the US and other western countries slow and steady downfall.
a) Attraction of cheap offshore manufacturing jobs as 2nd world nation's labour forces gain education/training. Of note is that significant costs of that were paid for by Western companies as cheaper alternative to western training costs..
b) The rising costs of basic education and there being no desire to spend taxes on it in the west. In some cases a disproportionate shift to who shares in payment.
c) The secondary level education rising costs of a degree/diploma without the job that could pay it back in reasonable time.
d) Bleeding out the existing wealth of the middle class over to the so called 1%,Why destroy the middle class? Long term short sighted?
e) Traditionally in the last 50 years it had become the middle class that supported innovation and ingenuity through support of education as less and less was supported by industry.
f) Companies will follow the wealth. They have no loyalty to any nation or people. It's only to those people that control those companies. Rarely does a Corp have a sense of morality. Only what the laws allow is it's morality and that is not morality at all..
g) Corporate influence in making laws that benefit not the country or it's people, but rather only for its profits. Even if its convenient to the detriment of the country and its people.
etc etc etc. A sad comedy off errors.

Re:No

[nickmalthus]

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.

Whatever would we do...

[sconeu]

What would we do without rhetorical questions?

Re:Do more with less

[hedwards]

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.

Re:No

[Beelzebud]

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.

Re:No

[Xenkar]

On number 4, I don't see how someone earning $7.25 a hour is too much to be paying factory workers, especially when automation is lowering the amount of workers required to keep a factory running.

Assuming our current minimum wage and maximum part-time hours to avoid paying benefits, each worker will cost about $10000 a year. This worker probably won't have to pay any federal income taxes after deductions. This worker will be eligible for Medicaid. He won't be able to pay off the loans for his house and the car he'll need to drive out to the middle of nowhere where your factory is located because of cheap land prices and interstate access.

Now republicans and libertarians not only want to lower the amount this worker gets paid, they want to remove the government provided healthcare option that they themselves don't want to offer to workers.

I just can't see how the average American worker would be better off. I do understand how the top 1% will be better off from these ideas. At least until the bottom 99% decide to eliminate those who do so little yet take so much.

Re:Do more with less

[sycodon]

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.

Stop outsourcing production, first

[Krachmanikov]

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.

Re:Do more with less

[deapbluesea]

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.

Re:Do more with less

[hey!]

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.

Re:Do more with less

[jd]

The more that has already been done, the more expensive the next step is going to be. That's unavoidable*. Cheap innovation exists, but it's in less and less important areas of life and the avenues for it can only decrease with time as the gaps get filled in.

*Net cost includes the cost of educating people better, ensuring better access to materials, etc. The better trained you are, the more you can do with what you have. The better access to materials is really a part of education. Kids should learn how to work with highly dangerous materials safely and should learn how to operate highly dangerous equipment safely. But both the materials and the equipment should then be unrestricted to those with the education. We don't restrict the use of electricity, because we learn how to be safe with it. The same should be true of anything else.

(The "doing more with less" is also a stupid maxim as it ignores the fact that you've an absolute limit on what you can do given a certain level of education, plus diminishing returns as you approach that limit, plus diminishing returns on what education can buy you. The proof of this is that you can't do anything with nothing, no matter how highly educated you were. It is also very selective in what it counts, so you aren't comparing apples with apples when it supposedly works. When you are comparing apples with apples, it almost never works.)

Patent trolls are a big threat, yes, but by no means the only threat. The current patent system is understaffed and undermotivated, which means fraud is likely. Again, that means spending more, not less. Excessive individualism is another threat - the most important achievements in society are collaborative achievements. America is becoming a nation that hates collaboration and that certainly threatens innovation. To be fair, most nations now have that blinkered, greedy, self-centered hatred of working with others. Solving things together is seen as "evil". Most here, I suspect, have been brainwashed into believing that their achievements are the result of the sweat from their own brow. The 80/20 Rule says that's not gonna happen. The only way to circumvent the 80/20 rule is to have the base unit be something other than individuals.

Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.

What innovation?

[SmallFurryCreature]

The Americans obtained half of the tech by strangle holding Britain while it funded the nazi's to an extra ordinary degree and obtained the other half by protecting nazi war criminals in exchange for tech. NASA would in any ethical world be covered in more shame then a swiss banker.

And if this upsets you, then you are doomed to keep wondering what the fact happened to the USA. You can only learn from history if you acknowledge the true history not some nursemaid fantasy designed to keep everyone happy.

The real history of the USA post WW2 is that due to all kind of less then ethical behavior the USA got their hands on far more tech and scientist then anyone else AND did rather poorly with it. Compare after all what the soviets achieved through simply killing of nazi scientists or improsing them with a bit of torture. They never had von Braun the killer of many American prisoner of wars among his many war crimes AND were the first in space. And the soviets had a huge war to recover from and had started far further back on the tech scale.

For that matter, Japan recovered far better, bombed out it was soon AHEAD of the USA in almost all fields. Cuba, sanctioned to hell and back, has better health care then the US for all this time.

What exactly did America once have that it is now supposed to have lost? From many posts on this subject I get the feeling some people claim the US went from fictional history to fictional presence from what we can determine a fictional future. Right, that is about useful as asking who would win in a fictional figure fight. An American thing if I am not mistaken.

If you still want my personal opinion? Then here it is, it is a bit more complex then most made up theories.

The USA profited from a post WW2 world in which all other countries had massive rebuilding effort while its own rebuilding has started ahead of the curve for the POST WW2 world. In the same way that the US had been way behind the curve for WW2 itself. When it started US military tech and civilian production capacity was hopelessly behind. But people US citizens forget that the MEANS to this build up were un-american. There was a LOT of government control over private industry. Not the same as in planned economies like the soviet union but far more then fits in the idea of the USA and far more then is now available in the USA. The only comparison is really the tiger economies. Japan, Korea, China. (and a few other asian nations I am to lazy to mention)

When the war ended, the US had a lot of power in the world and virtually nobody to oppose them. The south Americans were to backwards, so was China. Europe didn't need any more conflict and the soviets had more land then they ever would know what to do with. And its factories were booming who had conveniently switched ahead of the actual end of the war from war production to civilian production. A lot of the brightest people had either escaped the horrors of the nazi regime to the US or were being sheltered by the US from being prosecuted for the same horrors. The US was in a perfect position to make an economic boom and it did.

And yet, did it? How much of our knowledge of that era is movies and chosen images versus reality? To show how much movies lied, women of that post war era are often shown as helpless needing the hand of a man to guide them and do technical stuff. Really? Were these the same women that had been building bombers and putting war ships together? Did Rosie the Riveter unlearn all her skills in a flash once the boys came back home? Yes, many returned to their kitchens but the skills would have remained. So, you have a husband with no more tech skills then cocking a rifle and a woman who knows the ins and outs of a high performance engine, who would YOU let do the plumbing?

How much this of economic revival of the US and its position at the top was simply because that was what everyone reported and everybody refused to look at what was happening in the rest of the world. Easy to say you are number one when y

Re:not in the upbringing

[RubberChainsaw]

"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.

Re:Do more with less

[Dripdry]

Let me give you an example:

I have a client who has, with the help of some students, discovered an AMAZING way to coat ferrous materials with a thin diamond coating. It doesn't delaminate like other methods, and would be incredible for gaskets, car parts, missiles, anything with liquid flowing past at high speed.

It has been 7 years. He has lost venture capital twice (even though he has a major chemical company and an array of farms lined up to buy the first batch), and is working his ass into the ground. The expensive gaskets used for oil, milk, and other heavy fluids wear down really quickly, and they're expensive as hell to replace. His last 10x as long, and you can just take the current part and laminate it, no changes needed. Cheap as hell, huge net benefit to profit and productivity. It's just that it kind of goes against the grain of the industry right now, parts people sort of don't like him as I'm sure you can understand.

He has been assaulted on EVERY side, from the University where he used to teach to fellow employees in the field to venture capitalists all trying to screw him over for their fast buck on his work. This guy is one of the hardest working men I've ever met. Very bright, upbeat, a joy to talk to, he is a net benefit to mankind IMO. For these qualities, for trying to innovate, I have only seen him ground into the dust.

For years I figured it would all work out for him, but it isn't looking very good. It should have been a slam dunk ticket, but it feels like the climate needed to actually innovate and increase efficiency just isn't there, the protections or legal climate or something just isn't there. It's bizarre at first, then think about it:

You can try investing in new technology that may or may not work out. OR you could spend the same amount of money and get laws passed that will *guarantee* your revenue. Which would you choose? Venture capital is the same way the last 10 years. It's no longer Ventures, only capital. They want reward with no risk. They guarantee it with legislation instead of chancing it with innovation.