Is America Losing It's Tech Edge??

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20041101facomment83601/adam-segal/is-america-losing-its-edge.html?mode=print

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Summary: For 50 years, the United States has maintained its economic edge by being better and faster than any other country at inventing and exploiting new technologies. Today, however, its dominance is starting to slip, as Asian countries pour resources into R&D and challenge America's traditional role in the global economy.
Adam Segal is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Digital Dragon: High Technology Enterprises in China.


The United States' global primacy depends in large part on its ability to develop new technologies and industries faster than anyone else. For the last five decades, U.S. scientific innovation and technological entrepreneurship have ensured the country's economic prosperity and military power. It was Americans who invented and commercialized the semiconductor, the personal computer, and the Internet; other countries merely followed the U.S. lead.

Today, however, this technological edge-so long taken for granted-may be slipping, and the most serious challenge is coming from Asia. Through competitive tax policies, increased investment in research and development (R&D), and preferential policies for science and technology (S&T) personnel, Asian governments are improving the quality of their science and ensuring the exploitation of future innovations. The percentage of patents issued to and science journal articles published by scientists in China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan is rising. Indian companies are quickly becoming the second-largest producers of application services in the world, developing, supplying, and managing database and other types of software for clients around the world. South Korea has rapidly eaten away at the U.S. advantage in the manufacture of computer chips and telecommunications software. And even China has made impressive gains in advanced technologies such as lasers, biotechnology, and advanced materials used in semiconductors, aerospace, and many other types of manufacturing.........
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That would imply that those who have it, got it without paying for it.

So, no, they're not losing it, they're selling it and us out as part of the deal.

www.amconmag.com/2004/2004_04_12/buchanan.html

I especially liked the last paragraph

"Indeed, if the issue is jobs, Republicans ought to be thrown out. For not only are they not creating them, they have no idea how to stop exporting them. In their hearts, some of them think it a good thing. They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them"

school when you already know you'll have to emigrate to find a job? Why bother to put that much time and effort into something that will never pay off in your own country? Why sacrifice and sweat when you know there won't be a reward? Why incur a student debt that will cripple you financially when you know the job you can get here won't pay enough to pay off the loan?

The biggest scam that's been pulled on this country is the dogma of free trade with countries that are intelligent enough to have protectionism for their own citizens.

And give immigrants priority for education and jobs at the same time requiring the US worker to train their replacements.

employees right now. His company is a high-tech computer company in Colorado and he's currently in the process of training his 'new employees' who are half a world away and working for a quarter of what he former American co-workers worked for.

in the computer software industry.

I recently started a new business in the construction trade, because I see nothing but declining prospects for the software business.

US and European businesses are exporting their engineering to third world countries, in a rush to get better returns on their investment in capital equipment and intellectual property. They are exporting themselves into oblivion, because a majority of the products around which a majority of innovation is centered is only marketable to countries with a middle class, and that middle class is disappearing.

4 years ago I got the slides of an executive presentation for a large multi-national company in the consumer electronics business. The slides were all about their programs to move engineering and manufacturing of large screen TV's to China. The slides had a section on market potential for their products in Asia, Europe, and the US.

There had been 5000 large screen TV's sold in China the previous year. 500,000 had been sold in the US. They were projecting flat to declining sales in the US because of "continuing systemic economic challenges".

One of the major "plusses" for firing all the engineers and production people in the US was to be closer to the emerging market in China. A market of 5000 TV's. And given that the workers in their Chinese factories make 35 cents per hour and spend all disposable income on food and clothing, how many TV's do you think they will be buying in the coming years?

And the executives on the board of this company thought that they weree positioning themselves for the long term. A year later they sold all of the TV business to a Chinese conglomerate, and exited the consumer electronics business. They are driving the shell of the company that is left on exactly the same path, and will be exiting the US within 3 years, and the business within 5.

Deer, meet headlights.

The rich will take care of us.

That had to go right behind our industrial base (see General motors).
But don't worry we can all work at Walmart.

Computers are too complex to have been designed by man anyways. An invisible being in the sky is giving them to us.
:sarcasm:

consistent basis?

Japan --Cars

Nokia cell phones

nm

There are long-term consequences to underfunding an education system. One of them being a population that is less capable of innovating and inventing new technology. That is the fear.

when business stops respecting it's employees. Tech has been laying off left and right, including Engineers. They've also been suing Engineers to force them to disclose their non-work related ideas that could be profitable. Both are bad news for encouraging innovation.

People don't go the extra mile when they're treated like garbage and tossed out the door at the first whim of the (overcompensated) CEO.

India and probably soon China will surpass the US in tech issues.

when the government started cutting funding for basic research in the sciences. The idea was that it was better to spend money on practical technology of immediate usefulness. What we are seeing now are the chickens of this policy coming home to roost. I wish I could say I have a quick and easy fix for this, but I do not.

We've already lost it.

That's why it's so important to teach our Kiddies Intelligent Design, because they need SOMETHING to fill the vacuum...

"So, how DOES your new X-Box work, anyway?"

"Uh, I dunno....Maybe there's Pixies or gaming Angels inside it?"