Media Stupidities. I. The 'Innovation Tax!'

The other day I was watching the program Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN. Now generally Mr Zakaria doesn't say incredibly stupid things; in fact, he readily admitted the old traditional jobs are not coming back to America, as opposed to those mouthing idiocies like "American workers are best"; "American companies are going to hire soon" - yes, but in India, China & Mexico. That was fine. But it was the solutions he proposed that amazed me. They were not only ineffective, but seemed Mr Zakaria was clueless about some realities.
So his first solution was learn a new language, like Chinese. Now apart from the fact that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn & master (I've heard even for the Chinese!)- I doubt very much there is a huge need for Chinese-speaking people in America. For one thing, international commerce is pretty complex, someone with say 1 year of beginning Chinese will hardly qualify to act as a language specialist. Secondly, many business processes have become so computerized that language issues are not that relevant anymore. And finally, there are enough Chinese who know reasonable English, since English nowadays is taught at high school level in most countries. So whom would you hire if you are doing business in China - someone who is a native Chinese speaker, knows Chinese culture & has learnt English at the high school level (& is cheaper to hire), or somebody who decided to learn Chinese just last year & may have never even set foor in China?
But the most bizarre of his suggestion was an 'Innovation Tax' to promote innovation in America! Now that would be popular, a new tax! It would have been hilarious except he was dead serious. Now as far as I know the Industrial Revolution didn't need an innovation tax. Nor did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or the explosion of software development in India. Innovators are a special breed. They don't need government inducements.
And how exactly will this Innovation tax work? Ah, more money for research & development. After all, so much of innovation came from DARPA, from NASA, from Government-funded research during World War II, & so on.
It would be a convincing argument except there is plenty of research money given out, the problem is how much of it will result in innovation. Undoubtedly, more research money helps unearth more knowledge, but in most cases doesn't result in commercial products. And R & D funding goes largely into academia, where university professors are more ineterested in expanding pure human knowledge & can't care less whether it would ave any commercial value. In fact, some university researchers regard only basic research as befitting academia & consider technologically-oriented research as glorified assembly-line work. On top of that, if research money is increased, most of the times the experienced professors who are already well-funded & their minions get most of the money, while new researchers, especially those into new ways of thinking get nothing - they don't have enough preliminary data, or they are not well-connected, or their project is a 'fishing expedition' (a favorite phrase of review committees), meaning the outcome is too uncertain. Hmmm, I wonder where innovative ideas will end up. Undoubtedly, some of the early research was critical in understanding molecular mechanisms & developing genetic technologies; but even then only a small percentage of government-funded reesearch has resulted in actual product development. Like, the mainstay of cancer treatment (despite all the publicity of wonder drugs, most of which actually have pretty modest benefits) is still traditional chemotherpay & radiotherapy. At this point we have enough knowledge for innovation, more research money would only have researchers figuring out rat psychology or zebrafish development which won't have anything to do with human disease & development of innovative medical products. World War II was a very different situation. There was a confluence of superb scientists, an overwhelming urgency to develop better war technolgies, & of course government funding.(The only similar situation was AIDS research, which thanks to the AIDS activists was focused on drug development rather than too much basic research. But there aren't that many situations with such urgency).
I guess Mr Zakaria thinks you can engineer innovation through funding. Maybe he believes every piece of research results in some wonder drug or better machine, therefore putting more research money will guarantee commercial benefits (again, I have no doubt more research money will result in more information, the point is how much if that is useful in the market place & how much is pointless pile of data). In all likelihood, though, an innovation tax will enrage Americans, spend most of the money in administrative costs, & provide more money to aging but influential professors. The innovators of the world will innovate no matter what & maybe, the best way of promoting that is for the government to step aside, to reduce red tape & regulations, rather than tryin to induce it.

Ask What the Country can do for You!

It has been nearly 50 years since President Kennedy enunciated the famous words "Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for the country." Kennedy was outdated & nostalgic for an America that no longer was. Indeed, within 10 years of that famous speech minorities & women demanded the country do more for them! The counterculturists demanded the country change. So much for what you can do for the country.
Historically, modern United States surely was formed by people who were fleeing their own country, due to reasons ranging from political or religious persecution to famines & poverty for a second chance, a better life. All they could ask for was an opportunity; America owed them nothing more. They worked hard, the country needed to be built - roads, factories, houses, an army (& to some extent that is the basis for America's anti-academic & anti-intellectual orientation; unlike the established civilizations of Europe & Asia wih a privileged educated class, America couldn't be built by discussing Shakespearian drama or the Periodic Table but by people who built, invented, repaired, grew crops, hunted or fought. But that's the subject for another blog).
By the 1960s, however, that had changed. The younger generation had grown up in the prosperity of the postwar era. They couldn't care less how their parents or grandparents suffered in the Old Country. They were born & brought up in America, this was their country, and they had expectations from it.
And so America matured. And the population of America is no longer a selective group of entrepreneurial, adventurous, industrious immigrants glad to get a second chance, but rather similar to populations of other countries, most people are average. And in the age of globalization, the average American will lose when it comes to employability not only compared to the above average from say most other countries, but even to the average, since it is cheaper to hire an employee in India, Phillipines or Malaysia than in America. The average citizen of most other countries are less threatened because outsourcing in not that common & there are legal restrictions as well. While American companies definitely benefit from being able to hire the best &/or cheapest around the world, the loser in this equation is the American Middle Class. Money trickles down from profit-making American companies to China & India. The benefit to multinational corporate America is now divorced from benefit to the American Middle Class.
For a long time & even now it is very unfashionable for Americans to ask the Government for economic protection. That is socialism, isn't it!? In addition, the corporate-media complex colluded to propagate this idea that one should be happy & thankful to be American, no complaints entertained. Here, see these hellish pictures from Indian slums! Read these reports of the horrors of Chinese Communism! And if that didn't work, just Do Not Think. Here's the show for that:-A Show About Nothing! Yadda Yadda Yadda. The perfect formula to keep the population empty-brained! Doesn't woek anymore. To the New Generation, India & China are the countries their jobs are going to. It may be time to ask what the country can do to protect Americans from the onslaught of globalization & outsourcing/importing of jobs. Maybe, the time has come to recognize no country is the land of unlimited opportunity, and the rules of the 18th, 19th & even 20th Century don't apply to the 21st century anymore.

What Happened to America?

Throughout the last century, we were the envy of the rest of the world. The place everyone around the world wantedto be. And we deserved it. We work harder than people in most countries. We have less vacation time than other countries; we are deep in debt; education and healthcare is very expensive in our country; and we have to compete for jobs with people from all over the world, through outsourcing and insourcing. And after all that it seems our economy is in deep trouble.
Our productivity is great, yes, and we are a great country. People from all over the world still want to come to America. At least that's what we hear.
And yet what is the price we pay for this productivity, and really who is benefitting from it. We are stressed out all the time. Pretty much every person I know is on sleeping pills, anxiety medications, pain medications, blood pressure medications, antidepressants, you name it. No other country in my knowledge uses drugs on a daily basis as we do. We have little or no job security, we move more than people in other countries for jobs, creating disruptions in our family lives, losing any sense of neighborhoods, and sadly, we are hardly the ones gaining from it - the income of most of us, the middle class, is stagnant, while the rich have gotten fabulously rich.
I often watch these TV programs where they show poor people living in India, in Africa, on the streets, with nothing to look forward to beyond mere survival, their children malnourished and often begging, or children working in dangerous jobs just to make their families make ends meet, & I've heard people say "aren't we lucky we were born in America!" And I wonder, why are people with a college education, with skills, born in a stable society so insecure that they have feel lucky they are not at the level of the poorest and most unskilled people of Third World countries. However it is a subliminal way by which the system says to the hapless worker "do not complain, be happy you are working here, otherwise you'll be like those people in Africa, so if you need to work 70 hr week with no vacations, have to come in when you're sick, move from city to city to get a job, miss your family, tough. Oh & you American worker, you have such a great work ethic!" Which is another way to say "OK, here's something to feel good, sucker!"
And the media rarely shows an typical middle class family in say, India, or Brazil, how their lives have improved tremendously over the last few years, they enjoy cheaper but very high quality education, cheaper healthcare, 5-6 weeks vacation time per year, a solid middle class lifestyle, and still have a pretty good productivity. And they are now getting ousourced jobs from US companies! But I've rarely heard people say "Gee, we are so unlucky, look at all these nice things people in many other countries are enjoying" - that would be like being unpatriotic. That would be having bad work ethic. Can't ask those questions!!
What happened to America? We were a nation caring about our people, our neighbors, now we are a market, giving jobs to people in other countries because it is more profitable, who cares what happens to our own countrymen. We at least could say we have the strongest economy in the world, well that hardly the case any more, we just heard if we don't bail out failing banks our economy may collapse. More of our youth are in jail than any other developed & even developing countries. We have college and high school shootings rarely seen in other countries. Our marriages break up at a higher rate than any other country. We are nervous about criticizing even the most atrocious behavior lest we be accused of racism or sexism. And we go to China, a country that was hard-core communist till the 1970s, to borrow money.
I believe in capitalism but with humanity. A theory becoming more important than human reality, than compassion, than empathy is a recipe for disaster. There was a time capitalism had a human face. Employers cared about their workers rather than regarding them as expense or potential lawsuits. Then came the professors & theorists with their free-market thoeries and got a bunch of pathetic politicians (including unfortunately some really powerful ones) under their control. And America suffered.