The U.S. Is Falling Behind In Science

For decades we’ve heard that the United States is falling behind in the sciences. First we were falling behind the Soviets and now that the U.S.S.R. is no more, we’re falling behind the Chinese. After the Communists in Beijing are forced to revalue the yuan I suppose we’ll be falling behind India.

Personally, I think we’re falling behind on the American Dream – of owning a home, having a small business, and shaping our days as we please. The fastest-growing asset class in our economy is intellectual property, and nearly all of this value is growing within large publicly traded companies. We as a nation are not producing enough new small owner-operated businesses that develop, own, and exploit intellectual property.

Why is this? In order to develop intellectual property you need to know some science. And where does one learn science? From large institutions that require one to conform to the style, method and pace of the institutional approach. It’s expensive, takes many years, and leaves the recipient either highly in debt and therefore with no capital to start a business, or conditioned to institutionalized settings and therefore averse to entrepreneurship. Most young people with science-based educations go to work for large companies or educational institutions. A few join new small businesses started by MBA’s from top business schools.

Hollywood movies like Spiderman don’t help either. What kid wants to be a scientist? According to Hollywood and MTV, all scientists are “mad scientists,” and the only cool jobs are in entertainment.

How many young people today have parents who are willing and able to invest in their child’s first business? Practically none. Most parents of college-aged kids are strapped for cash because they’ve lived at the edge of their means their entire adult lives - driving new cars, living in large houses, running up credit card debts, paying their own student loans. And of the parents who do have the means to invest in their children’s entrepreneurial activities, most will not take the risk. They don’t know their own children well enough to assess their true capabilities, because the parties have been institutionalized for the duration – the parents at their high-paying jobs, the children at daycare, camps, school, and college.

Where are young people supposed to get startup capital from if not from their families? Unless they’ve got an M.B.A. from a top business school they’re not likely to get startup capital from anywhere else.

Our society has become infected with the value of being a ‘team player’. A team player sets aside his or her own interests and adopts the interests of the other. If one is playing an actual game, not a sports business, then team play is fine, because everyone is there to have a good time together and get some exercise. But large businesses have appropriated the idea of team play to themselves. In a business, the overriding interest is the development of income for the owners. So when money is involved, team play simply means setting aside your own personal interests to enrich the owners. Yet, these owners somehow impute a moral responsibility to their employees to be team players – and the owners don’t have to do it at all! Only the employee needs to ‘be a good organizational fit’ and put out all kinds of unpaid overtime to ‘support the team’.

If someone could name me one American hero who was a ‘good organizational fit’ I’d give that person a million dollars. We are a nation built by renegade pioneers and hard-working risk-takers, not cubicle-dwelling automatons!

How did we get so far off-course? I’m sure there are many factors. One is the fact that during World War II, the federal government seized most of the industrial assets of the country to support the war, homogenized them to the latest military scientific standards of efficiency and management, and then returned them forever changed to their owners several years later. This mass homogenization of American industry set us on an irreversible course toward ever-greater consolidation of the institutional approach rather than the entrepreneurial approach. It is what has led us to accept that Wal-mart stores everywhere are all set up identically and carry virtually the same products. It is similar to the effect the freeway system had on public rail transportation. It was a massive subsidy of a single system of management, that, after World War II was so ubiquitous that it eliminated the evolution of alternate possibilities.

What can be done to recover the American dream, to go back to our roots as independent owners of our own homes and businesses? How can we throw off the shackles of government-controlled institutional education, of the media, of white-collar workplaces that demand long hours without overtime compensation, of the tragedy of watching our children grow up as strangers in our homes?

I believe that if we want to realize this dream, we must begin first to act like real Americans again – to become rugged individuals, willing to bravely face risk. We must then scale back our spending and begin to save money to start the businesses we want. We must turn off the TV and educate ourselves. We must learn who our children are and participate with them in planning for and achieving their dreams.

We must stop thinking about jobs and start thinking about businesses. We must realize that the colleges and universities do not have exclusive access to the subjects they teach and that we can get an advanced education simply by downloading the syllabi of the subjects we’re interested in, buying the books from Half.com, and setting out to gain the knowledge or skills ourselves. All it takes is careful planning, perseverance and discipline, and enough cash to keep going until the effort begins to yield its own rewards.

If enough people would do this, large businesses would soon find talent in shorter supply and would be forced to offer more attractive compensation and working conditions to retain employees. If the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the reasons for that are clear. Our government’s takeover of the economy in World War II may have saved us from ruin, but it also had the unintended consequence of weakening the entrepreneurial bent of our society. I think it’s high time we wake up and realize what has happened to us, then get out of the cubicles and rebuild the American dream once more.

Big Business Affects The Culture

Today in the business schools and trade magazines, scalability is the operative word. Everything must be done in a scalable fashion – that is – so that economy of scale can be achieved. Process variability is squashed, along with innovation and personality. Even in small companies, the doctrine is to standardize and streamline processes, so that the company appears modern and is saleable to a larger competitor.

The problem with this is that it’s only good for big business. Big businesses are good for the few rich families that own them, and for people who enjoy the lifestyle that is required to be successful working in a big business. But for those who enjoy autonomy, freedom, creativity, personality, independence, and all other individualistic pursuits, big businesses are generally bad places to work.