a post by Zosynspiracy had this to say:
Put all those people out of
work into farming. ... we need to add value to the economy. We need to trend away from consumerism and get back to industry and innovation.
a post by apacheman had this to say:
the super-wealthy aren't in it
for the money, since by definition, the money is meaningless to them. They are in the wealth-building game for the ego boost. ...
They don't provide jobs ...
They don't innovate: innovation brings change, and that's the last thing they want; they are far more likely to kill innovation than create
it.
Both these posts mention the word '
innovation', whereas no other posts do! I commend them for it; star for them!
As zosynspiracy says, we need to add value to the economy. Not cash, but value.
Playing with tax policies, business laws or cash policies like inflation all follow strict rules of a zero sum game. Value that is lost by one player
is gained by another. Its a dog eat dog system. Innovation, on the other hand, creates value that wasnt previously there!
But, what really is innovation? per wikipedia, Innovation is a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful".
3 major innovations that took place a decade ago and were largely responsible for the economic prosperity in the US at the time were: advances in
computer hardware/software, database, telcoms.
A world wide demand was created out of thin air, putting value in the economy of those countries that capitalized.
Unfortunately, really no additional significant innovations have occurred since that time. The Bush oil types all got jealous seeing so many more
millionaires emerge from the tech sector, until issued stock options were required to be declared as corporate expenditures, which reduced
incentive.
And, instead of creating innovation, companies like microsoft bought out and destroyed their competition like a typical monopoly, making deals with
hardware vendors stipulating that they do not disclose the programming code that makes their hardware work to anyone else except Microsoft, and
generally making a business out of creating and marketing buzzwords. Moreover, venture capital groups unwittingly determine the direction of their
investments largely by these buzzwords.
Recently, Offshoring and efficiency have become the buzzwords, and Cloud Computing (the cloud which floats above these offshore countries ). So,
these venture Capital firms for the sake of efficiency are all flocking to invest in sun belt countries to make a quick buck. The value that is added
to the sun belt countries economy is what would have been added to our own. In the short term this works for them. But, they will continue to want
to see profit gains and they wont see them, because they truly do not understand the concept of innovation.
Efficiency does not necessarily lead
to innovation. Infact, efficiency creates a state of mind that stifles innovation!
The GUI and ability to 'cut and paste', using a mouse or pointer, was a good innovation. The guy who created the mouse wasn't in a 'fight or
flight' state of mind that is inherent to the, for example, Japanese style efficiency of 'crack of a whip'. He just thought, 'hey this looks like
it will work' and did it.
The Japanese in the 80s failed to capitalize on digital technology, instead obsessed with making their analog tech more efficient, per Demmings
teachings of quality control. Lately, the Japanese have been aggressively making things like Chinese puzzle-boxes out of pc cases and robots that
play violin. But, their cars were innovative..
In general, a survival mode of existence does not foster the higher level creativity required for innovation
I dont think it can be forced.
[edit on 8-2-2010 by I Hate Trolls 2]
