I'm an Aussie. What happened? The US was once in the forefront of everything...now, anything different or new is automatically derided and discarded out of hand. It's not an attitude that augers well for the US of A.
None of the corporate bureaucrat types I encountered was capable of thinking outside the box.
You don’t find much innovation in most large corporations. All decisions are made by committees so that nobody gets fingered when things go wrong. Just like government.
There’s plenty of innovative thinking around - just not in big bureaucracies.
The Liberals took over the skool system in 1978 with the creation of the Department of (mis)Education. It's been a downhill slide ever since.....quite apparent if you look at the test scores year to year, compared to other industrialized nations. Dramatic slide, despite the gubmint's best efforts to make the tests easier and to teach the test to the "students"....
There's a book out called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. It's a real eye opener. This book documents the slide in the American education system over decades and backs up the theory with lots of gubmint documents released through the FOIA.
I think this is the answer to your question of "what happened".....I know in my own area it explains why I run into so many young adults that have graduated high school, but are functionally illiterate....
The majority of Americans have embraced the socialist idea that we should live under strict government-mandated restrictions and the only issue is the "fair" redistribution of less and less wealth. Many people accept the zero-sum premise and will eagerly vote for any politician who promises to make it hard for anyone else to get one dollar more than what the voter has. This class warfare will someday erupt into real war. People are so illiterate that if they were told that capitalism causes sunspots, many would believe that.
“I’m an Aussie. What happened? The US was once in the forefront of everything...now, anything different or new is automatically derided and discarded out of hand”
Uh, try reading scientific journals once in a while, then get back to me on that. If you believe the U.S. dismisses anything new or different out of hand and isn’t still at the forefront if not in the lead in many high-knowledge and high-tech sectors based on press articles and threads on internet forums, I can’t help you.