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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."
started asking rhetorical questions just to start a discussion ?
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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).
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
"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?
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 :(
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
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.
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)
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
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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.
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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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer