Inspiring Innovation
My colleague Alex Tabarrok, has a new ebook Launching the Innovation Renaissance. It came out yesterday, and I immediately bought it and read it. Bryan loves it:
It … aims to reverse America’s Slight Stagnation with a handful of big evidence-based reforms. Especially:
1. Drastically narrow patent protection. …
2. Drastically increase (abolish?) high-skilled immigration quotas. …
3. Increase school choice, curtail the power of teachers’ unions, and stop pretending that non-STEM majors produce significant positive externalities.
I agree with most of Alex’s recommendations (which also include more prizes), and I think he focuses on our near-most-important policy question: how to promote long term growth and innovation. Alex is a good writer and knows his subjects well. He avoids academic lingo and his writing is accessible. But, alas, what struck me most reading Alex’s book are the natural limits to the emotional punch he can muster to his cause.
Following good academic norms, Alex mostly avoids blaming specific parties and being needlessly partisan, national, extreme, or overtly emotional. He appeals instead to the reader’s reasonableness and interest in the general good. And I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who is primarily motivated by such things. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that approach often falls flat emotionally.
I can feel the emotion more when Alex praises college sci/tech majors (I majored in physics), or favors positions that I’ve previously favored. And I can see the emotional potential if Alex had let himself cheerlead for technology, warn of foreign competition, or bemoan our “malise” or “stagnation.”
Alas, people don’t naturally care much about long term wide-spread growth and innovation. And the US just isn’t scared enough for its future for fear to motivate change. His title suggests he sought to pull on hope’s heartstrings, but Alex doesn’t really do much with that. So, while to his intellectual credit, Alex resists easy emotional appeals, the result is alas a well reasoned case that will probably be mostly ignored.
I don't know how many non academic organizations you are familiar with, but you will find that most, if not all, require the services of a substantial number of people with zero STEM skills and knowledgeThis isbecause people are human beings first, STEM secondAs to the idea that we should allow unlimited immigration of high skill workers, a, not to be rude, but soon as econ profs start loosing jobs to immigration (as opposed to now, when they get cheap gardeners and resturants) they will discover deep theoretical reasons why free trade is bad, and (b) isn't that stealing from the peopleof other countries - at a min, shouldn't we re imburse india or wherever for training costs ?Beyond that is the idea that progress is good. outside the narrow area of medicine (anesthetics are a good example) is anyone made happier, or have a better sex life, going from type writers with carbons to an cloud enabled computing ? Is anyone happeir that you can take a jet to tahiti instead of a 6 month sailing vessel ?aside from medicine and basic food, progress does little or nothing
Finally, this whole we are slowing down thing is based on what is, not to be coy, a racial myth: we are smarter or harder working then "the other" you could see this explicitly in the 70s, when honda and toyota started trashing detroit: it was common to see in the press the most amazing racist commentary that asians were good drones but not creative.
Today, the idea that we can out compete asia is just silly; on what planet is the avg american smarter,harder working or given better inputs (education, infrastructure,financial system...)ok, maybe our top research universitys (mit yalvard caltech) are tops, but anyone who is paying the slightest attention to STEM from china knows that they are catching up scarily fast.
Did we have lower standards in Sputnik era? No, we didn’t.
We did not have lower standards. What we did have were lots of smart young people who had the talent and inclination to do good scientific research, but were not going to go to college. Just by getting those kids into college we were able to significantly increase the number of STEM grads. Today almost all smart and motivated kids go to college, and lots of dumb and unmotivated ones beside. There are no untapped caches of intelligent, scientifically-minded kids left in this country. So as I said, educators have tried to make more kids smart enough get STEM degrees, and have tried to make practicing science cool or prestigious so that kids who are smart enough to do the work will study science instead of puppetry or whatever. On both counts, educators have failed.
At this point, our best bet for increasing the amount of STEM grads the U.S. produces without lower are standard is to continue poaching the brightest minds from around the world. I support this policy, despite being a lot less enthusiastic about the value (for society) of a scientist than most people are.
As for your other point, about pay, I don't know what numbers you are using or what your conception of a middle-class life is, but your theory doesn't square with my experience. I know quite a few engineers and scientists, and though you probably won't get rich doing these jobs, none of them are on food stamps.