8 ms·

America has become too anti-innovation

99 points by Graham24 9y ago

WalterBright 9y ago
> the invention of the internet, [...] – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment Hardly. Anyone who has been in the industry for more than 30 years knows that anyone with 2 or more computers immediately desired to hook them together. All kinds of networks were developed, eventually all merging into the internet. BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, FidoNet, Compuserve, Novell, just to name a few off the top of my head, not to mention innumerable others people invented. The article is completely one sided, failing to mention such innovations as Ethernet, Xerography and, of course, the transistor itself. If a product consists of innovations A B C D and the government did C, it presumes that C would never otherwise have come about. It's classic selection bias.
- visvavasu 9y ago
  Truth
appleflaxen 9y ago
it's easy to agree with this analysis, scoff at the economy and its participants, and move on. But the reality is that the economy and the participants are reacting in sane ways to an insane regulatory environment. That sounds silly, because regulation has never been more unpopular, but it's stealth regulation in the form of patents, copyrights, and other "intellectual property" laws working hand in hand with licensing and scope-of-practice restrictions that incumbants use to stifle newcomers. Combine that with fallow enforcement of antitrust laws, and it is a disaster. We need to make the legal system more supportive of competition in all forms, and we should elect politicians who will make that happen. The catch-22 is the efficacy of lobbying money in preventing this change: incumbants have captured the legislature, and it will be very very difficult to fix.
WalterBright 9y ago
I challenge the author to drive a car built in 1930, 1960, 1990, and today, and say car companies do not innovate and that any improvements came from the government.
sharemywin 9y ago
I think there's others problems. Nobody wants to be the guy that climbs the corporate latter anymore. And what happened to respect for a guy/gal that puts in a hard days work for a good days pay. Entrepreneurs make poor employees, too. Always chasing the next thing.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  People keep down voting and up voting his like crazy. Just would be nice to know if you disagree with the statements or that the statements are problems. Or that I'm submitting an opinion at all.
  - nihonde 9y ago
    Are you asking for a critique? It's a facile analysis that borders on meaninglessly vague and unsupportable, and is riddled with spelling errors.
    - sharemywin 9y ago
      Some articles to back up my point on corporate ladder: Redefining Success: The Corporate Ladder No Longer Matters http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-rider/success_b_4952361.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-rider/success_b_4952... Opting Out of Climbing the Career Ladder http://kontrary.com/2013/06/17/opting-climbing-career-ladder/ http://kontrary.com/2013/06/17/opting-climbing-career-ladder...
    - sharemywin 9y ago
      https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/are-entrepreneurs-bad-employees/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/are-entrepreneurs-bad...
    - sharemywin 9y ago
      I'll admit the middle one doesn't have much support online.
muninn_ 9y ago
Are you serious? This quote is all you need to see: > Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, mythmaking aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for Meanwhile, America keeps on innovating despite being capitalist imperialist scum!!! What a terrible, blatantly biased article. I'm a big fan of public sector research and funding, but let's be real here. The person who wrote this article should go back to school.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  I don't agree with the article, but Mariana Mazzucato makes a strong argument in defense of the critical role government funding plays in entrepreneurial innovation [0]. She also did a talk at Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation a few years ago [1]. It's worth a listen. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State [1]http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial-state-debunking-private-vs-public-sector-myths/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial-sta...
- lawless123 9y ago
  Spot the Juicero owner..
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Never heard of it until I heard everybody else making fun of it. But yeah America can't innovate. Everything is doomed. Hide under your pillow. Google can't create a self-driving car! SpaceX can't land reusable rockets! America can't innovate guys!!!
    - lawless123 9y ago
      SpaceX benefits from some very patient Nasa contracts.
golergka 9y ago
I feel that this article tells much more about Guardian than America.
tanilama 9y ago
This is an example of an article that doesn't have substance with recycling ideas of old stories - Guardian just gets close to its quality suicide.
jp555 9y ago
"monopoly profits and tax evasion have enabled Apple to amass a cash pile of a quarter of a trillion dollars." Since when is ~15% market share a monopoly? Apple was the largest corporate tax payer in America last year (when were they convicted of tax evasion???). Maybe offering remarkable products is more why they have $250B?
- collyw 9y ago
  I wonder if they could also claim the title of largest tax avoider.
  - jp555 9y ago
    They paid an average of ~25% tax last year.
    - fivestar 9y ago
      I'd like to know more about this since the global companies I have been involved with are all sneakily hiding profits offshore, hiding them from US and UK taxes. They can't re-patriate that money, either, so innovation has slowed. This is one reason why Trump proposed a sort of tax amnesty to get that money back on shore.
    - RugnirViking 9y ago
      Where?
      - AlphaSite 9y ago
        In the countries where the products were sold?
        jp555 9y ago
        Imagine you pay income tax in your residence country, making web software for global clients. If you sell your product in another country, should you have to also pay income taxes in that country or just the VAT tax for the sale?
Ericson2314 9y ago
Lol the haters in this thread. Name me a wholely private sector invention.
- golergka 9y ago
  Name me a "wholely" anything. With this line of reasoning, you will go down the Hegelian "whole truth" path; there's nothing completely "private sector", as well as there's nothing completely "public sector".
  - Ericson2314 9y ago
    Ok sure I suppose my word chose left me exposed there. But there's still a pretty damn good correlation.
cjf4 9y ago
This article had one interesting idea: the role of government funding in innovation. But rather than explore and flesh it out, it settled for a series of overgeneralized and unsubstantiated polemics against capitalism, akin to a sophomore political science student who's just finished the manifesto for the first time.
- ygaf 9y ago
  I think that was fleshed out, but yeah, the article doesn't even need the word capitalist in it. ("capitalist firms" - as opposed to what?)
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  that's fairly common for Guardian opinion pieces these days. They used to be a great source for investigative journalism (and I'm sure they still have some great journalists on the payroll) but in the last couple years they've definitely been sliding further and further into far-left political opinion pieces.
- criddell 9y ago
  Isn't military spending a type of government funding of innovation?
  - fivestar 9y ago
    It is, but I am ethically bound to not work on any project that has military funding. In general, engineers and software developers need to make better ethical choices.
    - criddell 9y ago
      How much flexibility do you give yourself? For example, if a project uses a GPS receiver or GPS data, is that ok?
  - geogra4 9y ago
    limited in scope and application.
MichaelBurge 9y ago
> On the contrary: it’s yet another example of how profoundly anti-innovation America has become. You can ignore any article that uses popular recent news to indicate a trend. * Point out a recent popular item to ride on its success * Class-baiting against the capitalists: They don't innovate, and they dodge taxes. * Frame it as something Trump is working against It looks like there's an argument like "The government should raise taxes on incompetent capitalists and fund basic research, since the money would otherwise go to juice machines", but I'm skeptical he's actually making an argument: It's more likely he's just telling people what they want to hear so they share his article. If he was making a serious argument, he would've at least ran it by an economist or two so the reader would have something to follow up on.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  I don't see any in-principle problem with using a recent example to illustrate a trend, as long as they back it up with other examples, statistics, research or whatever.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jonstokes 9y ago
Hate on this guy all you want, but there's a lot right with this article. I covered this same set of issues at Ars way back in the day: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-national-security-vs-tech-innovation/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-... What passes for "innovation" nowadays, especially in the world of software startups that HN tends to venerate, is typically nothing of the sort. It's actually just gambling. https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-right-way-to-think-about-whatsapps-massive-engineering-team https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-righ... To do real innovation of the kind that got us where we are, today, you need to fund lots and lots of basic research on multi-decade time horizons. (Here's a rule-of-thumb test: if you and about 20 hotshot engineers could clone the product in a year, then it's not innovation, at least not in any worthwhile sense of the term that the generation that gave us the Internet and the transistor would recognize.) The stock market's quarterly focus, which incentivizes base hits and accounting tricks and punishes real risk-taking, makes the public sector a terrible place to do this kind of long-term, blue-sky work. Anyway, this is one of those sad, stupid stories like electronic voting -- a few people who are paying close attention write about it for a decade and bang the drum, and nobody really listens, and then when it's way too late people start to wake up to the problem. If you hated this article and came here to bash it, you'll have plenty more opportunities to trash this same argument, because it's one that way more people will be making as this freak-show drags on. That's because it's basically right.
- wwkeyboard 9y ago
  > if you and about 20 hotshot engineers could clone the product in a year, then it's not innovation I think this statement runs against the argument these OP is trying to make. It's the massive number of failures that occur on the way to finding the innovation that important but don't show up when duplicating the end product. It's not hard to make a lightbulb if you have a good vacuum pump and know what filament to use, but trying thousands of different metals while inventing new vacuum techniques is expensive and hard. (I appreciate your core argument, I just think this particular statement runs against it)
grecy 9y ago
I would broaden the statement and say "America has become anti-change, and it's suicide". For decades Americans were convinced they were the best country in the world, with the best Democracy, working conditions, quality of life, health care, education, infrastructure, etc. etc. Probably, most of it was true. Unfortunately, for the last 10-20 years America has fallen behind the world leaders in these key areas, but the chant of "We are the best" still rings loudly. By continuing to think they are the best, Americas have stopped trying to improve, and attempting to improve anything is now seen as "Anti-American". A country that does not try to improve itself does not have a bright future, and nobody should stop improving even if they are number one (that applies to a lot more than just countries)
- fivestar 9y ago
  Ours is a nation of rent-seekers. It is largely due to the Boomer demographic shift where so many people are headed for or are in retirement.
  - grecy 9y ago
    > so many people are headed for or are in retirement. I believe that to be true of most OECD countries, though that doesn't make improving things unpatriotic in those countries...
- squozzer 9y ago
  I don't think it's a uniquely American problem. Most government activities everywhere are designed to prevent or mitigate change - because the "changes" within the scope of a typical government agency's purview are usually bad, e.g. FAA "changes" = plane crashes. So a lot of habit against change is built into our society. But I think before we decide to raise taxes and dole out lots of cash to basic research projects, we should at least examine HOW projects are funded, especially who decides and what criteria are used. Based on my limited experience in this area -- i.e. looking at grant proposals on various physics professor's desks, and listening to their fund-raising "war stories", it's not the most meritocratic system - it's very connection-driven.
apeace 9y ago
> ...the economy that produced Juicero is the same one that’s creating opioid addicts in Ohio... These phenomena might seem worlds apart, but they’re intimately connected. I don't think so. I'm from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a place that has had such a sudden and dramatic onset of opioid use it was the subject of an HBO documentary[0]. I know many people who have been affected by it. Cape Cod was never going to get tech jobs. It's a beach town fueled by tourism. Sure, we got a few hundred Uber driving jobs from the tech boom over the last decade, but not much else. While the author makes some good points about funding scientific research, tax cuts, and so on, I think there are many other important factors that outweigh the performance of the tech industry or "innovation". [0] http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa
- mikebelanger 9y ago
  I thought the same thing about that quote. What's fueling the opioid epidemic is a combination of cheap, easy-to-prescribe drugs, doctors who are unwilling to treat chronic pain cases with more diverse methods, and depression. Of course, there's the precipitating factors too: auto-accidents, sedentary lifestyles which make the body more vulnerable to chronic pain, and economic stagnation.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
This is a terrible article that nonetheless brings up an important point. Silicon Valley doesn't do itself any favors by abusing the term innovation by applying it to companies that sell juicer machines. The original iPhone with the app store was an innovation. It changed the world. Each new model is not. It's time for a new word. Does evovative work?
- TimJYoung 9y ago
  How about just "iterative" ? Capitalism is particularly good at iteration and driving something basic into something more appealing to actual customers.
abhv 9y ago
As another example of the author's premise, Snap spent 800m in R&D in order to make their app more addictive to 18-34. I cannot see how their investments lead to higher societal productivity and thus more societal wealth. It seems more like a wealth transfer (of advertising dollars), and overall, a way to make society less productive (by wasting its time).
- skynode 9y ago
  The social responsibility of business is to increase profits - Milton Friedman [0] Let every entity play its role. For private enterprise, their selfish pursuit of profits under a regulatory atmosphere actually helps society improve on so many levels as a net effect. That said, issues like this cannot be rigorously analyzed while ignoring the different contexts, changes in costs/benefits and the different periods in the historical development of the country. Thinking these background issues have remained constant will invariably lead to fallacies. Finally, we may need to think about these matters differently; it's 2017, there are many ways of being innovative without restricting it to your national boundaries or geography. One could easily be accused of tunneling if she thinks that all American exploits of science and technology must happen within the boundaries of United States in this century to qualify as an improvement of American society. The stage is bigger and the system has become orders of magnitude more complex. [0] http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/fr...
apatters 9y ago
Even though I'm a small government, pro-markets kind of guy, one point this article touched on which I find quite interesting is that so much of the good stuff on the Internet (TCP/IP, the WWW, NCSA Mosaic, the Linux kernel, the IRC protocol, etc.) was basically publicly funded--if not directly then it was usually a guy at a university somewhere. Whereas the bad stuff (AOL, Internet Explorer, spam, the scammy digital ads industry, Orwellian Google, Orwellian Facebook, mandatory DRM) has generally come from the private sector. (And VC, dear Hacker News, bears its share of responsibility.) My only takeaway from this, and it is admittedly milquetoast, is we should take a little more of that public money we spend on war and instead spend it on general science and technology research.
- fivestar 9y ago
  Google came out of Stanford--there was a lot of academic involvement in search engine research, competitions, and so on at the time. I went to some of the conferences where it all took place. I was startled by how quickly Google rose, though. I hear you about the "Orwellian" part--this isn't the Internet that I imagined, the one with RFCs and protocols. The worst offender is Facebook. I will never have anything to do with Facebook. I really wish there were more search engine competitors, too. It's important to not have monopolies on information seeking.
  - apatters 9y ago
    This only underscores the point. "Do no evil" Google originated with academics who had figured out some neat tricks for improving search relevance. It was only later when they started investing huge amounts in ad tech that Orwellian Google emerged and they created something nefarious.
- vtange 9y ago
  It's funny you end your comment with that remark on war... The Internet you mentioned at the top of your comment saw its roots as a DARPA project called "ARPANET". That's right, it was a Department of Defense project. During the Cold War and the Space Race, the military was heavily tied with "general science and technology research". Aerospace, materials, you name it, if it had some sort of military application it was looked into. So yeah, war sucks and the military might waste money in some projects but it's unwise the look at military and science in black-and-white, this-or-the-other terms.
thr0waway1239 9y ago
America is the most anti-innovation country except for all those other countries that have failed at innovation time and time again...
mrfusion 9y ago
Yep you can see it right here on hacker news. Check out the top comment on any innovative idea. It's always some esoteric environmental concern or reasons it can't be done.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Because the announcement posts for these 'innovative' ideas are basically wish lists that rely on fixing some currently unsolved problem, have no plan for funding or deployment, require society to reorganize itself, or would require everyone to take a quality of life hit.
BEEdwards 9y ago
>Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, mythmaking aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for. My key takeaway from the article. When you research things, it's not like Sid Meier’s Civilization, you don't get a tech tree. You might spend years looking and find nothing or you might make the internet. Corporations won't invest that way, it would kill them.
- mcphage 9y ago
  > Corporations won't invest that way, it would kill them. It probably wouldn't, but their stockholders would.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Stockholders have massively rewarded AMZN for inventing and investing heavily in cloud computing. Me, I'd be buying lots of shares in SpaceX if it were publicly traded. I had to settle for buying TSLA shares (up about 50% from where I bought it).
    - mcphage 9y ago
      > Stockholders have massively rewarded AMZN for inventing and investing heavily in cloud computing. Yes, but AMZN is pretty unique in that regard. I don't know why, but AMZN shareholders have put up with things that I don't see any other shareholders putting up with. And it's gone well for them, so I'm definitely not saying it's a bad decision for their shareholders, just that... it's not the norm.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        Lots of companies have high P/E ratios, meaning the investors believe in the future of the company rather than next quarter.
thatwebdude 9y ago
America has become too ______________. (fill-in-the-blank)
tmaly 9y ago
This really comes back to economics if you think about it. The ZIRP ( zero interest rate policy ) has caused a miss-allocation of capital. There are large pensions and funds that are jumping into investing in startups where in the past it has only been primarily VC firms. All of these companies are looking for yield because they have to provide a certain return to their clients. Investing in companies like Juicero is just the natural consequence of this.
davidf18 9y ago
The government funded a tremendous amount of innovation while there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets launched a satellite before the US, that launched "The Space Race" where the government put an enormous amount of money into NASA, semiconductor development (for satellites originally?), science education. Also with the Cold War there was a tremendous amount of weapons development including nuclear weapons and ICBM systems. Supercomputers were needed for nuclear simulations and code breaking etc. The Internet is an outgrowth of military (DARPA) funding. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, there was no longer the political push to fund science. Israel is an example of a tremendous amount of innovation for a country about the size and population of New Jersey (8 million). They are surrounded by enemies and have been since even before the creation of the state. They have many military advances for such a tiny country. 3 different antimissile systems (Iron Dome -- short range, David's Sling - Medium, Arrow long range) sometimes co-developed with American firms. Israel was the beginning of the Drone industry and today is #2 after the US. Also #2 after US for cybersecurity. Your Intel processors are designed there and some are fabricated there (the 22nm node plant has been upgraded to 10 nm). Apple has a design group there that designs much of the ARM processors for the iPhone. Besides military, Israel has since biblical days water shortages. They innovated so that up to 1/3 of their water needs can be satisfied by very large desalinization plants. Unless the US wakes up about issues with China, we may not be investing as we should. Imagine if the US had the same motivation as Israel for development. For me, someone who is familiar both with Israeli and US innovation (per capita), it is very frustrating to see the government spend so very little on science compared with The Cold War/Space Race, especially today with advances in computing, biology, ....
notadoc 9y ago
I find this is an interesting premise and at least I know I'm not the only one that sees some of the "ideas" out there and remains baffled why they exist at all. There are so many big issues and tough problems that could be greatly improved or resolved by innovation, yet very few seem to be tackled or addressed. Perhaps because they are hard?
garyfirestorm 9y ago
'That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product.' This is a very inaccurate statement.

99 points by Graham24 9y ago

> the invention of the internet, [...] – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment Hardly. Anyone who has been in the industry for more than 30 years knows that anyone with 2 or more computers immediately desired to hook them together. All kinds of networks were developed, eventually all merging into the internet. BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, FidoNet, Compuserve, Novell, just to name a few off the top of my head, not to mention innumerable others people invented. The article is completely one sided, failing to mention such innovations as Ethernet, Xerography and, of course, the transistor itself. If a product consists of innovations A B C D and the government did C, it presumes that C would never otherwise have come about. It's classic selection bias.

visvavasu 9y ago
Truth

appleflaxen 9y ago

it's easy to agree with this analysis, scoff at the economy and its participants, and move on. But the reality is that the economy and the participants are reacting in sane ways to an insane regulatory environment. That sounds silly, because regulation has never been more unpopular, but it's stealth regulation in the form of patents, copyrights, and other "intellectual property" laws working hand in hand with licensing and scope-of-practice restrictions that incumbants use to stifle newcomers. Combine that with fallow enforcement of antitrust laws, and it is a disaster. We need to make the legal system more supportive of competition in all forms, and we should elect politicians who will make that happen. The catch-22 is the efficacy of lobbying money in preventing this change: incumbants have captured the legislature, and it will be very very difficult to fix.

WalterBright 9y ago

I challenge the author to drive a car built in 1930, 1960, 1990, and today, and say car companies do not innovate and that any improvements came from the government.

sharemywin 9y ago

I think there's others problems. Nobody wants to be the guy that climbs the corporate latter anymore. And what happened to respect for a guy/gal that puts in a hard days work for a good days pay. Entrepreneurs make poor employees, too. Always chasing the next thing.

sharemywin 9y ago
People keep down voting and up voting his like crazy. Just would be nice to know if you disagree with the statements or that the statements are problems. Or that I'm submitting an opinion at all.
- nihonde 9y ago
  Are you asking for a critique? It's a facile analysis that borders on meaninglessly vague and unsupportable, and is riddled with spelling errors.
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    Some articles to back up my point on corporate ladder: Redefining Success: The Corporate Ladder No Longer Matters http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-rider/success_b_4952361.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-rider/success_b_4952... Opting Out of Climbing the Career Ladder http://kontrary.com/2013/06/17/opting-climbing-career-ladder/ http://kontrary.com/2013/06/17/opting-climbing-career-ladder...
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/are-entrepreneurs-bad-employees/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/are-entrepreneurs-bad...
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    I'll admit the middle one doesn't have much support online.

muninn_ 9y ago

Are you serious? This quote is all you need to see: > Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, mythmaking aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for Meanwhile, America keeps on innovating despite being capitalist imperialist scum!!! What a terrible, blatantly biased article. I'm a big fan of public sector research and funding, but let's be real here. The person who wrote this article should go back to school.

germinalphrase 9y ago
I don't agree with the article, but Mariana Mazzucato makes a strong argument in defense of the critical role government funding plays in entrepreneurial innovation [0]. She also did a talk at Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation a few years ago [1]. It's worth a listen. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State [1]http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial-state-debunking-private-vs-public-sector-myths/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/mar/24/entrepreneurial-sta...
lawless123 9y ago
Spot the Juicero owner..
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Never heard of it until I heard everybody else making fun of it. But yeah America can't innovate. Everything is doomed. Hide under your pillow. Google can't create a self-driving car! SpaceX can't land reusable rockets! America can't innovate guys!!!
  - lawless123 9y ago
    SpaceX benefits from some very patient Nasa contracts.

golergka 9y ago

I feel that this article tells much more about Guardian than America.

tanilama 9y ago

This is an example of an article that doesn't have substance with recycling ideas of old stories - Guardian just gets close to its quality suicide.

jp555 9y ago

"monopoly profits and tax evasion have enabled Apple to amass a cash pile of a quarter of a trillion dollars." Since when is ~15% market share a monopoly? Apple was the largest corporate tax payer in America last year (when were they convicted of tax evasion???). Maybe offering remarkable products is more why they have $250B?

collyw 9y ago
I wonder if they could also claim the title of largest tax avoider.
- jp555 9y ago
  They paid an average of ~25% tax last year.
  - fivestar 9y ago
    I'd like to know more about this since the global companies I have been involved with are all sneakily hiding profits offshore, hiding them from US and UK taxes. They can't re-patriate that money, either, so innovation has slowed. This is one reason why Trump proposed a sort of tax amnesty to get that money back on shore.
  - RugnirViking 9y ago
    Where?
    - AlphaSite 9y ago
      In the countries where the products were sold?
      - jp555 9y ago
        Imagine you pay income tax in your residence country, making web software for global clients. If you sell your product in another country, should you have to also pay income taxes in that country or just the VAT tax for the sale?

Ericson2314 9y ago

Lol the haters in this thread. Name me a wholely private sector invention.

golergka 9y ago
Name me a "wholely" anything. With this line of reasoning, you will go down the Hegelian "whole truth" path; there's nothing completely "private sector", as well as there's nothing completely "public sector".
- Ericson2314 9y ago
  Ok sure I suppose my word chose left me exposed there. But there's still a pretty damn good correlation.

cjf4 9y ago

This article had one interesting idea: the role of government funding in innovation. But rather than explore and flesh it out, it settled for a series of overgeneralized and unsubstantiated polemics against capitalism, akin to a sophomore political science student who's just finished the manifesto for the first time.

ygaf 9y ago
I think that was fleshed out, but yeah, the article doesn't even need the word capitalist in it. ("capitalist firms" - as opposed to what?)
beaconstudios 9y ago
that's fairly common for Guardian opinion pieces these days. They used to be a great source for investigative journalism (and I'm sure they still have some great journalists on the payroll) but in the last couple years they've definitely been sliding further and further into far-left political opinion pieces.
criddell 9y ago
Isn't military spending a type of government funding of innovation?
- fivestar 9y ago
  It is, but I am ethically bound to not work on any project that has military funding. In general, engineers and software developers need to make better ethical choices.
  - criddell 9y ago
    How much flexibility do you give yourself? For example, if a project uses a GPS receiver or GPS data, is that ok?
- geogra4 9y ago
  limited in scope and application.

MichaelBurge 9y ago

> On the contrary: it’s yet another example of how profoundly anti-innovation America has become. You can ignore any article that uses popular recent news to indicate a trend. * Point out a recent popular item to ride on its success * Class-baiting against the capitalists: They don't innovate, and they dodge taxes. * Frame it as something Trump is working against It looks like there's an argument like "The government should raise taxes on incompetent capitalists and fund basic research, since the money would otherwise go to juice machines", but I'm skeptical he's actually making an argument: It's more likely he's just telling people what they want to hear so they share his article. If he was making a serious argument, he would've at least ran it by an economist or two so the reader would have something to follow up on.

jamesrcole 9y ago
I don't see any in-principle problem with using a recent example to illustrate a trend, as long as they back it up with other examples, statistics, research or whatever.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jonstokes 9y ago

Hate on this guy all you want, but there's a lot right with this article. I covered this same set of issues at Ars way back in the day: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-national-security-vs-tech-innovation/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-... What passes for "innovation" nowadays, especially in the world of software startups that HN tends to venerate, is typically nothing of the sort. It's actually just gambling. https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-right-way-to-think-about-whatsapps-massive-engineering-team https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-righ... To do real innovation of the kind that got us where we are, today, you need to fund lots and lots of basic research on multi-decade time horizons. (Here's a rule-of-thumb test: if you and about 20 hotshot engineers could clone the product in a year, then it's not innovation, at least not in any worthwhile sense of the term that the generation that gave us the Internet and the transistor would recognize.) The stock market's quarterly focus, which incentivizes base hits and accounting tricks and punishes real risk-taking, makes the public sector a terrible place to do this kind of long-term, blue-sky work. Anyway, this is one of those sad, stupid stories like electronic voting -- a few people who are paying close attention write about it for a decade and bang the drum, and nobody really listens, and then when it's way too late people start to wake up to the problem. If you hated this article and came here to bash it, you'll have plenty more opportunities to trash this same argument, because it's one that way more people will be making as this freak-show drags on. That's because it's basically right.

wwkeyboard 9y ago
> if you and about 20 hotshot engineers could clone the product in a year, then it's not innovation I think this statement runs against the argument these OP is trying to make. It's the massive number of failures that occur on the way to finding the innovation that important but don't show up when duplicating the end product. It's not hard to make a lightbulb if you have a good vacuum pump and know what filament to use, but trying thousands of different metals while inventing new vacuum techniques is expensive and hard. (I appreciate your core argument, I just think this particular statement runs against it)

grecy 9y ago

I would broaden the statement and say "America has become anti-change, and it's suicide". For decades Americans were convinced they were the best country in the world, with the best Democracy, working conditions, quality of life, health care, education, infrastructure, etc. etc. Probably, most of it was true. Unfortunately, for the last 10-20 years America has fallen behind the world leaders in these key areas, but the chant of "We are the best" still rings loudly. By continuing to think they are the best, Americas have stopped trying to improve, and attempting to improve anything is now seen as "Anti-American". A country that does not try to improve itself does not have a bright future, and nobody should stop improving even if they are number one (that applies to a lot more than just countries)

fivestar 9y ago
Ours is a nation of rent-seekers. It is largely due to the Boomer demographic shift where so many people are headed for or are in retirement.
- grecy 9y ago
  > so many people are headed for or are in retirement. I believe that to be true of most OECD countries, though that doesn't make improving things unpatriotic in those countries...
squozzer 9y ago
I don't think it's a uniquely American problem. Most government activities everywhere are designed to prevent or mitigate change - because the "changes" within the scope of a typical government agency's purview are usually bad, e.g. FAA "changes" = plane crashes. So a lot of habit against change is built into our society. But I think before we decide to raise taxes and dole out lots of cash to basic research projects, we should at least examine HOW projects are funded, especially who decides and what criteria are used. Based on my limited experience in this area -- i.e. looking at grant proposals on various physics professor's desks, and listening to their fund-raising "war stories", it's not the most meritocratic system - it's very connection-driven.

apeace 9y ago

> ...the economy that produced Juicero is the same one that’s creating opioid addicts in Ohio... These phenomena might seem worlds apart, but they’re intimately connected. I don't think so. I'm from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a place that has had such a sudden and dramatic onset of opioid use it was the subject of an HBO documentary[0]. I know many people who have been affected by it. Cape Cod was never going to get tech jobs. It's a beach town fueled by tourism. Sure, we got a few hundred Uber driving jobs from the tech boom over the last decade, but not much else. While the author makes some good points about funding scientific research, tax cuts, and so on, I think there are many other important factors that outweigh the performance of the tech industry or "innovation". [0] http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa

mikebelanger 9y ago
I thought the same thing about that quote. What's fueling the opioid epidemic is a combination of cheap, easy-to-prescribe drugs, doctors who are unwilling to treat chronic pain cases with more diverse methods, and depression. Of course, there's the precipitating factors too: auto-accidents, sedentary lifestyles which make the body more vulnerable to chronic pain, and economic stagnation.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

This is a terrible article that nonetheless brings up an important point. Silicon Valley doesn't do itself any favors by abusing the term innovation by applying it to companies that sell juicer machines. The original iPhone with the app store was an innovation. It changed the world. Each new model is not. It's time for a new word. Does evovative work?

TimJYoung 9y ago
How about just "iterative" ? Capitalism is particularly good at iteration and driving something basic into something more appealing to actual customers.

abhv 9y ago

As another example of the author's premise, Snap spent 800m in R&D in order to make their app more addictive to 18-34. I cannot see how their investments lead to higher societal productivity and thus more societal wealth. It seems more like a wealth transfer (of advertising dollars), and overall, a way to make society less productive (by wasting its time).

skynode 9y ago
The social responsibility of business is to increase profits - Milton Friedman [0] Let every entity play its role. For private enterprise, their selfish pursuit of profits under a regulatory atmosphere actually helps society improve on so many levels as a net effect. That said, issues like this cannot be rigorously analyzed while ignoring the different contexts, changes in costs/benefits and the different periods in the historical development of the country. Thinking these background issues have remained constant will invariably lead to fallacies. Finally, we may need to think about these matters differently; it's 2017, there are many ways of being innovative without restricting it to your national boundaries or geography. One could easily be accused of tunneling if she thinks that all American exploits of science and technology must happen within the boundaries of United States in this century to qualify as an improvement of American society. The stage is bigger and the system has become orders of magnitude more complex. [0] http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/fr...

apatters 9y ago

Even though I'm a small government, pro-markets kind of guy, one point this article touched on which I find quite interesting is that so much of the good stuff on the Internet (TCP/IP, the WWW, NCSA Mosaic, the Linux kernel, the IRC protocol, etc.) was basically publicly funded--if not directly then it was usually a guy at a university somewhere. Whereas the bad stuff (AOL, Internet Explorer, spam, the scammy digital ads industry, Orwellian Google, Orwellian Facebook, mandatory DRM) has generally come from the private sector. (And VC, dear Hacker News, bears its share of responsibility.) My only takeaway from this, and it is admittedly milquetoast, is we should take a little more of that public money we spend on war and instead spend it on general science and technology research.

fivestar 9y ago
Google came out of Stanford--there was a lot of academic involvement in search engine research, competitions, and so on at the time. I went to some of the conferences where it all took place. I was startled by how quickly Google rose, though. I hear you about the "Orwellian" part--this isn't the Internet that I imagined, the one with RFCs and protocols. The worst offender is Facebook. I will never have anything to do with Facebook. I really wish there were more search engine competitors, too. It's important to not have monopolies on information seeking.
- apatters 9y ago
  This only underscores the point. "Do no evil" Google originated with academics who had figured out some neat tricks for improving search relevance. It was only later when they started investing huge amounts in ad tech that Orwellian Google emerged and they created something nefarious.
vtange 9y ago
It's funny you end your comment with that remark on war... The Internet you mentioned at the top of your comment saw its roots as a DARPA project called "ARPANET". That's right, it was a Department of Defense project. During the Cold War and the Space Race, the military was heavily tied with "general science and technology research". Aerospace, materials, you name it, if it had some sort of military application it was looked into. So yeah, war sucks and the military might waste money in some projects but it's unwise the look at military and science in black-and-white, this-or-the-other terms.

thr0waway1239 9y ago

America is the most anti-innovation country except for all those other countries that have failed at innovation time and time again...

mrfusion 9y ago

Yep you can see it right here on hacker news. Check out the top comment on any innovative idea. It's always some esoteric environmental concern or reasons it can't be done.

Spivak 9y ago
Because the announcement posts for these 'innovative' ideas are basically wish lists that rely on fixing some currently unsolved problem, have no plan for funding or deployment, require society to reorganize itself, or would require everyone to take a quality of life hit.

BEEdwards 9y ago

>Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, mythmaking aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for. My key takeaway from the article. When you research things, it's not like Sid Meier’s Civilization, you don't get a tech tree. You might spend years looking and find nothing or you might make the internet. Corporations won't invest that way, it would kill them.

mcphage 9y ago
> Corporations won't invest that way, it would kill them. It probably wouldn't, but their stockholders would.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Stockholders have massively rewarded AMZN for inventing and investing heavily in cloud computing. Me, I'd be buying lots of shares in SpaceX if it were publicly traded. I had to settle for buying TSLA shares (up about 50% from where I bought it).
  - mcphage 9y ago
    > Stockholders have massively rewarded AMZN for inventing and investing heavily in cloud computing. Yes, but AMZN is pretty unique in that regard. I don't know why, but AMZN shareholders have put up with things that I don't see any other shareholders putting up with. And it's gone well for them, so I'm definitely not saying it's a bad decision for their shareholders, just that... it's not the norm.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      Lots of companies have high P/E ratios, meaning the investors believe in the future of the company rather than next quarter.

thatwebdude 9y ago

America has become too ______________. (fill-in-the-blank)

tmaly 9y ago

This really comes back to economics if you think about it. The ZIRP ( zero interest rate policy ) has caused a miss-allocation of capital. There are large pensions and funds that are jumping into investing in startups where in the past it has only been primarily VC firms. All of these companies are looking for yield because they have to provide a certain return to their clients. Investing in companies like Juicero is just the natural consequence of this.

davidf18 9y ago

The government funded a tremendous amount of innovation while there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets launched a satellite before the US, that launched "The Space Race" where the government put an enormous amount of money into NASA, semiconductor development (for satellites originally?), science education. Also with the Cold War there was a tremendous amount of weapons development including nuclear weapons and ICBM systems. Supercomputers were needed for nuclear simulations and code breaking etc. The Internet is an outgrowth of military (DARPA) funding. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, there was no longer the political push to fund science. Israel is an example of a tremendous amount of innovation for a country about the size and population of New Jersey (8 million). They are surrounded by enemies and have been since even before the creation of the state. They have many military advances for such a tiny country. 3 different antimissile systems (Iron Dome -- short range, David's Sling - Medium, Arrow long range) sometimes co-developed with American firms. Israel was the beginning of the Drone industry and today is #2 after the US. Also #2 after US for cybersecurity. Your Intel processors are designed there and some are fabricated there (the 22nm node plant has been upgraded to 10 nm). Apple has a design group there that designs much of the ARM processors for the iPhone. Besides military, Israel has since biblical days water shortages. They innovated so that up to 1/3 of their water needs can be satisfied by very large desalinization plants. Unless the US wakes up about issues with China, we may not be investing as we should. Imagine if the US had the same motivation as Israel for development. For me, someone who is familiar both with Israeli and US innovation (per capita), it is very frustrating to see the government spend so very little on science compared with The Cold War/Space Race, especially today with advances in computing, biology, ....

notadoc 9y ago

I find this is an interesting premise and at least I know I'm not the only one that sees some of the "ideas" out there and remains baffled why they exist at all. There are so many big issues and tough problems that could be greatly improved or resolved by innovation, yet very few seem to be tackled or addressed. Perhaps because they are hard?

garyfirestorm 9y ago

'That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product.' This is a very inaccurate statement.