There have been articles published the past year or two pointing out that we are losing our lead in technology. This report offers both sides of the debate. Some of this was bound to happen as we developed the systems and others did not have to reinvent the wheel. Still, there are some concerns about why we may be lagging. One is regulation of information technology. I don’t understand all the provisions of recent regulatory and legislative actions on cable and telephone technology. What’s more, I don’t think anybody else does either. Uncertainty is the enemy of investment. It may bring opportunity to those who find the handle first but, as a rule, legal uncerainty is fatal to innovation. That is why third world economies usually lack a settled system of contract law. Billions of dollars have come to America fleeing the legal climate in other countries. Now, I wonder if the flow might reverse with some of the excesses like the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Some of the problem is with compliance and the costs of audits. Some venture capital companies are trying to change the law with lobbying. If Nancy Pelosi has trouble with foreign policy, at least she understands campaign fund raising. Still, there are warning signs that capital is fleeing.
The second concern I have is with education. The trend is not good. “if current trends continue, by 2010, only four years from now, more than 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will live in Asia.” Our science education curriculum is weak except at the graduate school level. At the high school level, the situation is a crisis. Organizations that should be working on merit pay for high school science teachers, spend their time worrying about evolution. I would not recommend a student for medical school who did not believe in evolution but a computer programmmer could believe in spontaneous generation of life, for all I care. That is not the first priority. I suspect high school science teachers spend more time on global warming and recycling than on math and physics. Some are Optimistic. I don’t know the answer but the question needs to be asked. In 1960, I was an engineer, working for Douglas Aircraft Company. Every engineer in my section was applying for graduate school in medicine, law or business. This is not a new problem. We have muddled through for decades with a culture that does not regard “geeks” as socially desirable. With technology becoming more and more essential, maybe it’s time for a change in our high school education culture. Pay science teachers more than Social Sciences teachers and see what happens.
American industry and commerce is on a leash held by govt bureaucracy and the legal industry. The initial rationale for creating order and stability in these enterprises although highly beneficial at the beginning, have been allowed to accrete and fester. For now the pile-on of taxes, fees, regulations, rapacious lawsuits, and foisting social welfare and healthcare funding upon them, has become an officious burden which I don’t see reversing as long as the leash holders control the fountains from whence all these burdens flow. The entire US bureaucracy has become a huge non-compete clause, made worse by govt entities directing tax monies and subsidies toward ‘favored’ industries and the panic-of-the-day causes.
The US still attracts a lot of brainpower from the rest of the world because this is still a great place to be an individual comparatively. That is a key factor in maintaining what position we still have in technology. The one hope I see is that each looming crisis will cause a clamor for greasing the commercial and industrial gears. I suppose it all comes down to how clamor polls.
And then there are things like this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aNmE.oybx0H0&refer=worldwide
Teach actual real world economics, unless people understand the way the system works and should work, understand that capitalism is a really good thing, and that free markets actually do good things, we will be stuck with this sort of nonsense.
After that, teach geography, then the sciences.
Chavez has his own problems. This article requires registration but the key graf is “President Hugo Chávez’s quest to nationalize the oil industry has resulted in the loss of technological expertise that foreign firms can bring to oil extraction. Chávez has already lost many of his homegrown managers. Jorge Piñon, an energy researcher at the University of Miami, estimates that Venezuela’s state oil company has lost 60 percent of its managerial expertise in the past five years. That could translate into an increase in industrial accidents. Chávez is also fond of using the country’s oil windfalls to finance social programs, which—intentionally or not—have come at the expense of oil field maintenance.”
The vast majority of those petroleum engineers are well ensconced in Alberta now, no doubt freezing their sub-tropical asses off. Heavy crude was their forte, so tar sands is not a big transition. And now Chavez has the problem of re-inviting the major oil service outfits to come to clean up his mess at some point. They’ll likely require some major assuaging in the form of upfront money and heavy backend loading to lure the techs who will have to live and work in that socialist paradise. Although that could be resolved by the thousands of new oil and mining specialists being trained right now in Chinese universities. I think I read the ratio is about 40 to 1 compared to the number of US students in those industries. Too bad he doesn’t need a bunch of lawyers.
I recall a joke from the ”80’s:
When Congress passes automotive legislation, Japanese car companies
hire 500 engineers, American car companies hire 500 lawyers.
It is worrisome that politics seems to trump economics/industry. I’m thinking of all the waste and loss fostered inside of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, two countries that had some claim to culture and enlightenment.
Now we may face the political troika of Pelosi, Reid, and Hillary Clinton. This inspires no confidence in me.