it's about real competition, it's about our IQs against their IQs.
It's not about IQ. The smartest people in the world fail miserably to predict where technology will go next. China and the USSR had far more high IQs at their disposal than we did when counted in sheer numbers. Some very smart people sitting around trying very hard to plan where they should put their efforts. They failed miserably to compete with the unplanned system we had.
If you haven't noticed there are some incredibly successful companies in the US started by people with completely ordinary intelligence while some very smart people work for them. It's a matter of attracting brains, but brains alone don't make you successful. You are far more likely to be a poor PHD in this country than a rich one.
Drive and persistence are far more important and luck plays an incredibly big role. But the most important thing is that you live in a society that recognizes the importance of risk taking and failure. Behind every wild success there are hundreds, thousands of failures. For every EBAY there were a zillion dot bombs. If you live in a society where failure is punished too severely and risk taking isn't adequately rewarded then you reduce the chances that you will have that one "lucky" success. Also, if you start putting limits on the reward one can reap for taking risk, start attacking the wealth that comes from successful risk taking, you reduce the willingness to take risk. Reduce risk taking and innovation goes out the window along with the quantum leap that gives you that competitive advantage.
The biggest difference between a mature technology company and a smaller innovative one is that the smaller one is able to take more risk because they have no entrenched success to protect. The larger companies have dealt with their inability to innovate by letting the small firms be their R&D and then buying innovation. So the problem is resolved with capital. Needless to say, there is also a high failure rate in buying small companies.
India and China aren't taking jobs from the US because they are smarter, they are taking them because they are able and willing to work harder for less. The same reason the Americans were being replaced in their own countries with HB1s. I asked my brother-in-law what special skill his HB1 from Thailand had that couldn't be found here. He said, "I can't find an American who will work that hard for what I can pay for an IT guy."
For other lagging countries to compete for the innovative lead with the US they need to get away from government control of research dollars and attract private capital. In order to attract private capital you have to allow profits that are sufficient to cover the risk. It's pretty hard to allow for profits in a country which doesn't have an advanced set of laws governing private property but instead a long history of the state imposing limits on profit and private property. The Chinese still think that capitalism can be managed, furthermore they are convinced it needs to be (sound familiar?). The Indians still have a strongly socialist ideal that profit is evil, perhaps a necessary evil, but evil none-the-less. Expediency has made them relax these constraints but they are still very much there, hence we still have containers of Chinese landing on our shores and Chinese and Indian PHD students in the US refusing to go back home.
For the US to lose it's innovative lead they merely have to do the opposite of the relaxation we've seen in the formerly communist countries. Impose more government control on research, punish profit makers with high taxes and drag a few more companies through the courts for failing to live up to great expectations. We're well on our way. |
