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How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and

• Guthur 7y ago
  Because this article is nothing more than thin emotive veneer over the standard extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda.
  • tekmate 7y ago
    it's got nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with capitalism. restricting the advanced workforce and research to the thin slice of a population with the opportunity (mostly well off parents, sometimes race and sex) you lose out on a tremendous amount of human resources with the potential to create value.
  • akhilcacharya 7y ago
    What, pray tell, is socialistic about this?
    • thrower123 7y ago
      It's not socialist, necessarily, but it's definitely blank-slatist, and the two are often stablemates.
      • akhilcacharya 7y ago
        I’m far from a blank slatist or a socialist, but as someone who is generally considered “untalented” on the HN scale of things please continue. What is objectionable about this viewpoint?
        • thrower123 7y ago
          To be honest, I find the blank slate model just cruel, because it shifts blame for failure to achieve results onto either a personal failure to work hard enough, or some ill-defined societal boogieman of oppression or structural isms. Which tends to need massive amounts of money or power in the hands of someone to try to rectify. In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no matter how hard you try.
          • akhilcacharya 7y ago
            > In reality, you just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit This is one of the most disgusting things I've seen on this website. Am I "chicken shit" to you?
            • thrower123 7y ago
              I don't know anything about you. Who are you again? I grew up in bumfuck Appalachia, and there's a lot of people there that are so inbred and unfortunate that they can barely chew gum and walk at the same time. You can put people through years and years of education and spend all the money in the world on them, but you're not going to ever get them to understand calculus or read on grade-level. Acknowledging people's individual abilities and limits is far more humane than pie-in-the-sky optimism.
            • mav3rick 7y ago
              He clearly used a generic phrase not aimed at you. What is it with deliberately taking things personally ?
        • haihaibye 7y ago
          It's not true. Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones. This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore. Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.
  • Jonnax 7y ago
    "extreme socialism inspired progressive agenda" A meaningless phrase that just states that "as a conservative, this makes me upset"
    • journalctl 7y ago
      The idea that the world isn’t the meritocracy one might believe it to be is very disconcerting to some people, especially the people who benefit from such privilege as wealth, or being the preferred race/sex in their particular culture. The idea that perhaps not everyone can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is foreign to people like this.
• zzzcpan 7y ago
  Well, if governments let corporations dominate, monopolize markets they are inevitably giving up competition and therefore innovation. Forcing talented people to work on evil things that advance company's dominant position, rather than working on innovations to have a temporary edge over competition.
• PostOnce 7y ago
  Everything is a hassle. Building permits, operating licenses, legal compliance, etc. All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful. I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc. There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially". You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit? I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    I'm a fan of the chemistry analogy here: you can catalyze (reduce barriers) and you can incentivize (increase rewards). If the incentives point the wrong way, catalyzing won't help. If the barriers are too high, incentivizing won't help. I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing incentives.
    • bumby 7y ago
      I think I agree but the question seems to be how do we lower the barriers smartly while still keeping the intent of the rules and regulations? Add to it our own bias to put more emphasis on the regulations that concretely prevent us from doing what we want now, rather than those that abstractly benefit us and its easy to point to them being the problem. It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche, something that you see as an impediment I see as a social good. Finding the right balance is tricky and unfortunately in a polarized political environment it's easy for people to fall into the far sides of the argument.
      • abakker 7y ago
        The real question is: why did we install the protections(barriers) in the first place? I assume that a major component of that was as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Self sufficiency is fine, but it is difficult to take the consequences for many things knowingly. As such, we created, one at a time, experientially driven barriers designed to protect people from new, novel issues. I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.
• aripickar 7y ago
  It depends on social pressure. For places like Silicon valley, the ultimate status symbol is being a founder, which inherently involves inventing (what a founder would call) important stuff. It's similar in Israel. Heck, there, startups are struggling to scale becuase everyone wants to be a founder.
  • petra 7y ago
    I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision". // Everyone wants to be a founder Well, you know the song "asiti": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw It's on Hebrew, but it basically talks about the Israeli tendency to always say "I did this, I did that"
    • everybodyknows 7y ago
      >I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff". Not what @aripicker claimed: "... being a founder, which inherently involves inventing ..." No mention of uniqueness.
• cwingrav 7y ago
  (US centric comment) I'll add that we're making it less likely people will take risks and act on their ideas with student debt and a lack of healthcare. People can't take risks if they don't have a cushion to rely on and risk their lives (or face massive debt) if a non-trivial health concern occurs. Compounding this is a draw back of social programs to get people back on their feet if their risk turns south. I'm not advocating for paying for "slackers", but giving people a chance at least as good as what their parents had.
  • mch82 7y ago
    People are also less likely to speak up about problems at work when they must worry about losing healthcare along with a job.
• solinent 7y ago
  I think we can certainly incentivize people more, but in order to invent "important stuff" we need significant resources. If everyone was given the money to invent this important stuff, it's hard to allocate the proper resources to them, or at the very least, they will get fewer resources. Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale. Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically. We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
• paulcole 7y ago
  I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.
  • petra 7y ago
    Not necessarily important as in "single handedly curing cancer". But taking part in an important thing , even in a small role, is important. But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.
• mncharity 7y ago
  > We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen. Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.