American corporations spend more on tort litigation than R&D. Full stop. John Quarterman elaborates on US News article "Can American Keep Up?":
In academics, America's mediocrity is a familiar story, one factor in President Bush's call, in this year's State of the Union address, for rigorous new training for 70,000 high school teachers. The reading literacy rate for 15-year-olds in the United States is barely above the average for western countries. American eighth graders rank ninth worldwide in science scores--and 15th in math, behind students in Estonia, Hungary, and Malaysia. And for years, U.S. students have been migrating away from hard sciences--which tend to be the source of cutting-edge new products and other innovations--toward business, law, and liberal arts degrees. "We had more sports-exercise majors graduate than electrical-engineering grads last year," lamented General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt in a January speech. "If you want to be the massage capital of the world, you're well on your way." US News and World Report
Hey, Estonia, no fair they have Ross Mayfield advising them. Why can't we get people like that here? Oh wait a second Ross is a Californian...maybe we should listen?
The article also quotes Axalto on the limited ability of the US to adopt smart cards. Bruce Sterling and World Changing talk about the leap frogging phenomenen quite a bit and this is something to watch for where our legacy baggage is a liability. Supply lines get longer, speed is reduced.
John Quarterman:
But industries where the U.S. used to hold the lead it is losing. New programming languages used to come almost solely from the U.S., but one of the hottest new ones in a while, Ruby, hails from Japan. In telecommunications, Japan, Korea, and even Malaysia are far ahead, along with smaller countries such as Finland and Hong Kong. This telecommunications lag applies to wireless voice, land-based broadband, video over IP, and voice over IP. Back at the ranch, almost everyone I mention this to, in that industry or without, makes kneejerk facile excuses: those countries have higher population densities; they're more urbanized; etc. The old U.S. can-do attitude does still pop up here and there, such as in some rural wireless initiatives started by entrepeneurs.
As Bill Gates is supposed to have said when targeting IBM in the early MS days: "success is a menace." Tort litigation can be viewed as a spend since it protects existing assets, R &D is a speculative investment, what is the right balance?
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