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| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Source: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation
Silicon Valley represents a textbook example of what economists call Opportunity Costs:
You can't do everything, so you choose to do this over that, and there are always costs associated with that decision, most commonly, things that don't get built, achievements forgone.
Silicon Valley is a collection of smart, educated entrepreneurial people, but they have wasted their technological talents on toys, when the world needs intellectual firepower aimed at reimagined cities, transportation, infrastructure, preserving biodiversity and habitat, food production, safe drinking water, energy production, and medical technology.
The world is in need, and a vast pool of "American ingenuity" sits in California playing with themselves and making obscene profits off of Chinese slave labor. A few days after writing the previous sentences, I stumbled across this, written by David Rotman in MIT Technology Review
Silicon Valley represents a textbook example of what economists call Opportunity Costs:
You can't do everything, so you choose to do this over that, and there are always costs associated with that decision, most commonly, things that don't get built, achievements forgone.
Silicon Valley is a collection of smart, educated entrepreneurial people, but they have wasted their technological talents on toys, when the world needs intellectual firepower aimed at reimagined cities, transportation, infrastructure, preserving biodiversity and habitat, food production, safe drinking water, energy production, and medical technology.
The world is in need, and a vast pool of "American ingenuity" sits in California playing with themselves and making obscene profits off of Chinese slave labor. A few days after writing the previous sentences, I stumbled across this, written by David Rotman in MIT Technology Review
The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs.
We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.
Source: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation
We were in a hole before Covid-19 hit, and its going to take new ideas and smartly-focused efforts to position us for success going forward. Economics professor John Van Reenen says "technological innovation is the engine of economic growth," and he describes how to do it.
Can government incentivize industry and brainpower to steer some of its attention away from shiny (and financially lucrative) toys, and turn to more prosaic, practical pursuits? Can we actually build things again here in America?
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