> Americans need to recognize that the purpose of innovation is ... to sustain productivity and employment growth in order to ensure real income expansion. Th

> Americans need to recognize that the purpose of innovation is ... to sustain productivity and employment growth in order to ensure real income expansion. That's a highly dubious criterion, one which Germany's inelastic labor market certainly has an advantage in. Since strong unions make it much harder to lay off employees in Germany, German manufacturers have substantially less incentive to invest in labor-saving innovation. Their American counterparts do, which contributes to our GDP continuing to grow steadily. Also, US manufacturing is certainly bigger than Germany's—it's just taken as a percentage out of a bigger whole: the US GDP per capita is nearly $10k higher than Germany's. [1] For the rest of us, it's well-accepted that one of the key drivers and outcomes of innovation is to increase output without increasing factors of production, including labor. Put simply, a more innovative society is almost certainly one that's losing jobs (particularly jobs in traditional sectors). Keynes, a favorite of socialists and liberals, absolutely acknowledged that the expected outcome of technical innovation is less and less work. [2] Though we've continued to invent new jobs for people displaced by disruption ("social media manager"), it's completely expected that employment is lagging in traditional sectors like manufacturing. By reasonable criteria, the US dominates Germany in innovation. We innovate people out of jobs. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... 2: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1...