As we give away what we know and then borrow money to buy back what we have given away in the form of manufactured products we should not be surprised at the state of the Anerican economy.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington, D.C., really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
(read the whole thing, please, here: Business & Technology | We must rebuild structure to create U.S. jobs | Seattle Times Newspaper
Jeremy posted this on Facebook, I am pushing it along.
