Research is a pipeline, and there are three distinct stages in the pipe:
(Mikenola)And yet all the really cool stuff still seems to come from this country , doesn't it?
No. You need to get out more.
The Soviet Union produced many more highly skilled engineers, and PhDs per capita than America, yet not one significant techological advance came from them.
They (now Russia) the world leader right now in supercapacitors, which are already replacing batteries for large industrial applications, including hybrid vehicles. The Russians have great mathematicians and engineers -- and now that the government is no longer standing on their throats, they're innovating beautifully.
America's strength is our creativity and dynamism. It's not about who manufactures the microchips anymore. It's about who makes those microchips do new and interesting things.
None of America's apparent competitors can even come close to us in the rate of new ideas. That's something that's difficult to quantify in things like the number of engineering students, etc.
All past tense. What made that creativity and dynamism possible was a full research pipeline. The first two stages of the pipeline are now nearly empty from years of lack of investment.
Let the Chinas and Taiwans mass produce the small electronics; we don't need to.
I guess we don't need jobs for Joe Average who only finished high school then, correct? A healthy economy needs jobs for all skill levels, not just the top.
Their cultures are just not conducive to coming up with ideas like Google, Ebay, Dell, Microsoft, Walmart, Yahoo, etc.
Every single company on your list is the product of research that happened during the Reagan research boom years of the 1980s. None of them do basic science, only Microsoft does applied research (and then only a small amount), and that's it. You're looking at the past.
As long as America has the lions share of new ideas, our economy will still be on top.
This is true, but so is the converse: If we do not innovate, we're sunk. And that's what's been happening since 2001. What passes for "innovation" these days is pitiful in comparison to the technical innovation in the 1980s and 1990s, which was in turn fed by a 3-5 year long pipeline of basic, applied and engineering research. Even if we start funding things today, it will be at least a half decade before US technology innovation will be strong enough to expand the US economy again. And, to wrap it back to the thread, the current generation of non-investing CEOs are directly to blame.
I suppose you and I have different frames of reference. I agree supercapacitors are important, but they are low on the totem pole considering the cutting edge info managment Google, Ebay and Amazon are doing. I don't mean to sound pompous but that's the stuff that's going to alter people's daily lives (with the possible help of supercapacitors of course!)
I suppose there's a tangential argument to be made that Google began from the research dept. at Stanford, but in my view the impetus behind their innovation was a couple of smart kids acting independently with a great idea (with help from Sand Hill Rd. of course). Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo don't have any connection with govt or corporate R&D that i know about.
I guess that was the point I was trying to make: don't assume all good ideas have to come from the R&D labs. Google and Yahoo are coming up with cutting-edge stuff everyday (not past tense) , and they do it by virtue of their own means.
many of us have tried to explain to the freeper free trade contingent these same basic points again and again. its hopeless. once the US loses an industry to offshoring, they also lose any future innovations and economic growth that would have come from it. innovations take place where engineers are employed, and investments are made. if china and india are those places, then that's where its going to happen. who do people think are going to come up with these technology innications in the US - all the lawyers and public school teachers and finance majors the colleges are turning out?