There's a long, admiring story in today's Washington Post extolling Finland as a possible model for European development.
Finland has invested heavily in scientific research, especially since it backed a big winner during the early 1990s in Nokia. Nokia stock held by the government is one source of funds, but overall the country puts a whopping 3.6% of its income into research, well ahead of the U.S., and nearly twice as much as the European average.
The result is that, while Finland does have substantial unemployment, and the problems of an aging population threatening its ample social safety net, the 5.5 million people there are nearly as happy as those in the Monty Python song. (All together, Finnophiles!)
One respondent at the Dave Farber list expressed the view that the U.S. actually does better than the figures indicate, and that government is mostly out of the picture.
He's half-right.
The U.S. government has heavily funded this nation's research effort ever since World War II. The great mega-versities whose football teams dominate the NCAA rankings are mainly state institutions, and even private universities are directly funded by the federal government in many ways.
That's far from all. There are many government agencies devoted nearly entirely to funding research, including DARPA and NASA. The Internet itself is the direct result of these efforts. So are most of the Nobel prizes won by American scientists in these last 60 years. So, of course, are Velcro and Tang.
However, this leadership is threatened today as never before. The current U.S. government has been cutting back its direct research funding, and politicizing its indirect funding. Agencies like DARPA have been told to shorten their time horizons, just as private corporations did 20-30 years ago (Xerox was once a technology leader).
The results take a long time to filter down. American innovation continues thanks in part to Moore's Law, partly due to the "long tail" of scientists living out their careers, partly due to the sheer size of the past U.S. effort.
But we are in the process of being overtaken, by Japan, by China, by India. Once our research lead is gone, it will take enormous effort to reclaim it, if that is even possible.
This is just another example of Bush people eating the seed corn that Clinton people planted. They're the duck, the chicken, and the dog in the Little Red Hen story.
And when there's no more bread to be had, they'll be completely surprised, then they'll blame "liberals" for it all.
They will, as in all things, be lying.
What we have in this country is a Stalinist political organization that stands for the worst excesses of the 19th Century robber barons combined with those of the 15th Century's Inquisition leaders. Just as the Stalinists did, they dress it up in rhetoric, but Mencken is right -- fascism in America is called Americanism.
What it will take to turn this around is, first, the realization by Americans of just how much evil is being done in their name and, second, the willingness of Americans to sacrifice in ending it.
Failure to do so will turn us into Argentina within a decade.
We're already behind Finland.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jim A. on July 14, 2005 05:11 PM writes...
I think you miss the point when you use Xerox as an example. Yes they were were an technology leader, and yes they poured a large chunk of their profits back into a world-class research facility...But their shortening of their time horizon wasn't what did them in. In fact it was their last attempt to save themselves. For all their research, they were unable to stay significantly ahead of much smaller, more nimble, and cheaper competitors. First, at the low end of the market, Savin, Ricoh, and others, closed the technology gap with quality products at much lower price points. Then then the sea change pushed their higher end market space into that occupied by HP and others. And the company couldn't afford to research items that were more than a few years away from being products.
Besides, the world has changed. A 30 year time horizon thirty years ago is about the same as a fifteen year time horizon now....time horizons of investments should shorten. This isn't a bad thing.
I have no problem if you want to claim this country should be investing more in higher education and research...great. But implying that it is "Stalinist" because its time horizons have shortened is very crazy. The free market caused Xerox to become more short-term focused...as it should...the free market...not Stalinist, which is just the opposite...some centralized entity overriding the free market to determine where resources should be employed.
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on July 14, 2005 05:31 PM writes...
Dana, I always agree with your criticism of Bush, but never your praise of Clinton. The 90s were hardly the golden age of government sponsored research. If anything they were the golden age of corporate and government fraud. Bush does a good enough job of making himself look bad that you do not need to heap false praise on his predecessor.
Permalink to Comment3. Sérgio Carvalho on July 15, 2005 09:00 AM writes...
Jesse, I do not know if Clinton was personally involved or responsible for corporate fraud. However, when viewed from the other side of the pond, the Clinton-lead America looked like the undisputed world leader. Now, the Bush era USA looks rather steamless and self-centered.
If you like to put some numbers to the feeling, look at the currency markets as a measure of confidence in the economy. Euro-dollar conversion rates were at 0.7 dollars per euro during Clinton, and were recently (~1 month) at 1.3 USD per EUR. And Europe isn't much of a promising economy either.
Permalink to Comment4. Jesse Kopelman on July 15, 2005 12:43 PM writes...
Well, I'm not saying Clinton was personally responsible for corporate fraud. What I am saying is that the "internet bubble" that recked the US economy under Bush began under Clinton. Also, The current climate of allowing megamergers in telecom and elsewhere began under Clinton. The FCC's obsession with trying to make money off of licensing spectrum, as oppossed to protecting the public interest, began under Clinton. The massive corporte fraud that has been discovered in the last few years might have begun even before Clinton, but it was certainly going on during his administration. Bush did not squander the gifts left by Clinton, because those gifts were really a pile of crap in a shiny wrapper.
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