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Despite outsourcing, I strongly believe we have not lost our:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
as a country.
Let’s hope not, Bunsen.
Losing our inventiveness? Maybe in your neck of the woods, or the universities that you’re affiliated with. Otherwise, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Perhaps you are disturbed that much of the creativity happens while on a computer, instead of working with physical objects? I certainly witnessed extraordinary creativity at my older son’s school, Carnegie Mellon, that’s what it’s all about. I’ve seen it with my kids and their friends, schoolmates, even at a young age, they’re extremely smart and creative. I trust my future in the hands of this generation. I think people are so used to new and amazing things, they’ve become numb and are not paying attention to all that is going on around them. If you want to see the younger generation doing something creative, stop by a hackathon, and take a look.
So fill in the blank. The US is being far surpassed in creativity by___________.
On a population-adjusted basis it is hard to argue that the US is the most inventive or innovative country.
People have been saying the US has lost its edge for years, how we train a nation of lazy morons who want to sit around drinking and watching TV, all the usual stereotypes. If anyone grew up during the cold war,the claim was the USSR was going to ‘bury’ us, but the reality was that they weren’t, that the USSR had its own problems to contend with.
I agree with others, it is kind of ridiculous to point to a prior generation and use that as a model of things. I hear it with the old farts who I share a love of trains with (model and real), about how kids don’t have the patience, they have their apps and blah blah blah, they don’t tinker with cars, etc and it is 'what’s the matter with kids today?" IMO.
Creativity and innovation are going on at all levels, the real problem is that it often isn’t very visible, because it is hidden. More importantly, creativity and innovation is not necessarily about finished products, and some of what people point to about the lack of US dominance has little to do with creativity. Here are some thoughts about that, and why perceptions may not be reality:
1)Private industry was never the hotbed for R and D people claim it was. Private industry wants immediate ROI, and much of what people assume industry did did not come from them. Ask someone who paid for inventing the transistor, and if they know anything about it, they will say “Oh, it was ATT Bell Labs”…when the reality was it was paid for by Uncle Sam (it was never patented for that reason). The integrated circuit, fiber optics, the TCP/IP protocol, routers, the technology behind WiFi, carbon fiber, the laser,the integrated circuit, and numerous other things came out of government funding, corporate giants would never pay for that kind of discovery.
There are concerns about the lack of government spending on research, some of the attacks on the ‘wasteful’ spending on research concern me, because often that is on basic research that can fail as much or more then it succeeds. One of the few blessings IMO of defense spending is that a lot of the technology I mention above came out of defense, either directly or indirectly (DARPA is a gem, for something whose budget last I checked was a little less than a billion a year, it has paid off dividends handsomly).
2)It is true there are issues with folks born here and the sciences, but people have been complaining about that for years. The reality is that grad programs in the sciences, that turn out a lot of the new ideas, have been dominated by those born elsewhere (or the children of immigrants), earlier this century there were a flood of refugees from Europe, and in recent decades students and immigrants from Asia. The reality is a lot is still coming out of those programs, many of the advances in Apps and such, for example, depended on work that was done in places like MIT’s media lab.
3)One of the biggest misnomers about places like Korea, China and India (or to a certain extent, Japan) is that since the products are coming out of there, that that proves these are hotbeds of innovation. Someone pointed out Samsung’s dominance with LCD flat panels, but what they don’t know is Samsung basically licenses technology then packages it, which while they do a good job at it, is not innovation. The prime LCD patents were originally Siemens if I remember correctly, and the OLED technology they are now trumpeting came out of labs in Europe and the US (friend of mine was into VC, about 18 years ago he was part of funding a startup that basically was a couple of Princeton professors working on OLED technology. Packaging stuff and incremental improvements are not necessarily about innovation and creativity.
For example, for all the ballyhoo about China and its dominance, it has not shown itself in the areas people are talking about, most of what China is producing is either outsourced production from other countries, or if it is their own industries, is derivative of other people’s products. China’s hacking, for example, is not just military, a lot of it is industrial espionage, literally outright stealing the proprietary secrets of companies and then giving them to Chinese industry.When companies do joint ventures with Chinese companies (often required to get into the Chinese market), technology often is ‘transferred’ and ends up in the Chinese company’s product line.
With China, it isn’t just corruption that causes problems. Part of the problem is the culture, especially that which drives the government, the kind of control that they exert in China is the opposite of encouraging creativity and innovation. The government views change as dangerous and that kind of mentality is seen in things like blocking the internet and the other kind of control they impose. A lot of the Chinese students who go to grad school go home to China, then are frustrated when they find out the kind of limitations and controls the government places on them. Change is disruptive, and when you fear it, then that puts a blanket on creativity and innovation, pure and simple.
The other aspect is that creativity and innovation often come from the mavericks, those willing to stick their neck out, those willing to do something different, take a chance. Cultures that are risk averse are scared of people like that, and discourage that kind of thinking. The US doesn’t necessarily have a great relationship with mavericks, there is a love/hate relationship with them, but there is enough grudging respect for them that they can find a place where they can blossom. Entrepeneurs are risk takers, and taking risk, well, has risks. Traditional cultures tend to be risk averse (heck, lot of people anywhere can be) and it puts a crimp on things. Put it this way, India has the IIT schools, that are full of world class talent, yet when you compare what has come out of that program, versus programs like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Cal Tech and other great research universities in the US, there is no comparison (a lot of the kids who go to schools like IIT undergrad do grad work in Europe and the US for the very reason they feel they would be stymied if they stayed at home for grad school, have heard this right out of the horse’s mouth).
There are concerns, no doubt, but the kind of creativity and ingenuity and innovation we are talking about is still out there, and I would argue that even in the past, it represented a relatively small percent of the population. I think also we under-estimate the innovation and creativity of non scientists, at what ‘ordinary’ people can do given the right environment, there are companies in this country that have unique and innovative ways of doing things, and it often comes down to encouraging the people working for them to be creative and supporting that (as opposed to the many companies and idiot managements that says “Think outside the box”, then does everything in its power to stomp out any attempt to actually do so, because it scares them).
American invented CollegeConfidential, that’s not inventive enough?