Does America Need Geekonomics?

Tech fields are already plenty glutted. Growth guru Paul Romer must be one of them pointy-headed, ivory tower academicians to come up with something so out of touch with reality Bet he's never been in an industrial lab.

Fortunately I'm here to edumacate the clueless.

There are two basic reasons why the U.S. isn't the great industrial leader it used to be: 1. Hired-to-invent, and 2. immigration.

1. We already have a great commercial innovation policy. It is called the patent system. Unfortunately the patent system has been perverted to reward investors rather then inventors, and investors don't invent anything. How could this be more obvious? This peculiar state of affairs came about because modern R&D for the most part requires expensive labs and equipment, and most potential inventors doing R&D are required to sign contracts relinquishing any right to their inventions, thus depriving them of any financial incentive to invent anything. This partially explains why great independent inventors like Jerome Lemelson and Stanford Ovshinsky, who have financial incentives, often outperform corporate labs. Inventors are a small, powerless group, and without great minds like Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson in Congress making patent policy, greedy businessmen were able to grab not only the monopolistic profits which should rightly belong to business, but also any kind of a reward or royalty for inventors.

One might ask why we wouldn't want incentives for innovation? Isn't a great innovation like the transistor worth more than a dollar as a legal consideration for assigning patent rights? We are CEO crazy in this country, but I would suggest that inventors are often the leaders of an industrial economy, and a nation that has so little respect for their scientists, inventors, and engineers as the U.S. is in trouble. Paul Romer's grand notion of putting more Ph.D's into glutted fields is a fine example of treating techs like a cheap commodity.

2. The second problem has been immigration, Back in the 60's the U.S. was leading in most areas of technology, and the grads coming on were the best in the history of the U.S., being the highly disciplined and regimented Eisenhower 50's kids. There's much to be said about never changing a winning game, but starting about the early 70's Congress, probably acting in their capacity as business lackeys, had the brainstorm of letting in masses of foreign techs--a veritable tsunami. These people didn't even come close to the quality of the domestic techs they displaced, especially in innovation, which is highly cultural in nature. You don't get innovation out of third world hacks, or out of very rigid societies that do not approve of independence, creativity, and rebelliousness as a matter of culture. One Thomas Edison is worth 300 million Indians or Chinamen.

Luther of IL 8:45PM May 27, 2008