"We've lost it ... no doubt about it."
I was having dinner with an astronomer colleague who works at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and his downer of a message was in reference to a NASA telescope project that had hit a brick wall. Despite years of effort, it was unclear if the new instrument would ever be built. My friend thought that other nations were overtaking America's lead in space exploration.
His disheartening assessment struck a resonant chord: was this merely one more example of a far bigger problem -- the evaporation of America's "can do" attitude? Has "Yankee ingenuity" been supplanted by "Yankee ineffectiveness"?
More specifically, can we still build anything?
You have to wonder. Consider the well-worn examples. When was the last time you bought an American-made radio or television? If you're Gen X or younger, the answer is "never." Does the label on that shirt or skirt you're wearing say "Made in the USA"? If so, you probably got it at Goodwill, or maybe at a Smithsonian garage sale.
How about that car you're driving? I still remember my dismay in the summer of 2007 when -- for the first time in the history of planet Earth -- America's share of auto production dropped below 50 percent.
OK, those are merely trite testaments to the country's shift away from making its own consumer products. Everybody knows about it, and some people would argue it's a good thing that the steel mills are gone from Pittsburgh, and the factories in San Francisco have been turned into lofts for artists.
But the problem is more serious than the failure of American companies to fill the shelves at Walmart. We can't seem to get behind the big projects that define first-world status: namely, infrastructure and major research instruments.
Consider this: Do you think we could build something like the Panama Canal today? In 1904 Teddy Roosevelt took over the failed French canal effort, and a decade later, ships were gliding between the seas. Today, that wouldn't be time enough to get the paperwork signed. After the Civil War, seven years were spent spiking the transcontinental railroad in place, surely one of the most ambitious projects of the 19th century. Here in the Silicon Valley, it took longer than that to approve and construct a ten-mile, light-rail (read "trolley") line to San Jose.
America's premier high-energy physics machine -- Fermilab's tevatron -- will shut down this year, abandoning the search for the Higgs boson to the European Large Hadron Collider. (In 1993, Congress killed what could have been a worthy competitor to the LHC, the Superconducting Supercollider.) Our plans to go back to the moon are scaled back, while China's space ambitions are scaled up. And oh, by the way, China is putting in miles of high-speed rail every day. Here in California the citizenry is blocking progress on fast trains because we can't seem to build them at an affordable price, and the citizenry whines about having the darn things in their backyards. Ten years from now, when they're stymied at the airport, or bumper-to-bumper on the freeway, it's conceivable they'll wonder what went awry.
Some of this litany of non-accomplishment is rooted in politics. But I suspect there's another component: today's American kids don't seem to build stuff anymore. When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to Popular Electronics magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion -- a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest.
What about knocking together something mechanical? Well, hire yourself to a woodworking fair this weekend. You'll find it fertile ground for soliciting AARP memberships. Same thing at a radio amateur ham fest: too much of the hair is grey.
Judging by informal observation, most young Americans burn up their spare time buffing their emotional IQ and self-esteem with social media and non-stop texting. That's great for eye-thumb coordination, but what about the satisfaction of actually making something?
I don't think for a moment that today's populace is any less talented or creative than its predecessors. If nothing else, the inertia of DNA ensures that. But isn't it possible that a society in which young people only rarely construct things will become a society in which engineering is an impoverished enterprise? The concern is not so much that we don't put together the big stuff, but that we can't.
Not to worry, you say. Today's youth are building new things, too. Look at Facebook or Google.
But maybe that's the problem: too many of them are.
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Check out also Arduino, Parallax Basic Stamp and its offshoots, and companies such as Sparkfun Erectronics. Altogether, they most likely don't compare in numbers with Pop' 'tronics, but they are cause for hope.
However, the photos of Detroit's decay (and, worse, Gary Indiana) are heartbreaking. An astute friend says that the USA "is becoming a third-world country just as fast as our little feet can carry us." Heck, a lot of us can't spell such a common, short word as "off"! Some time ago, a Ph. D. couldn't spell "off", nor could he spell "summer".
True we need a new apollo a new manhattan project, to unite as one our minds and will bent towards a common goal. We need a need. Something to inspire us to great heights a cripple the international capitalism that has us in its grips.
And for the record, its the ppl your age who choose to cut corners and outsource alot of the positions in the industrial & construction field, making it harder for even the most eager & 'qualified' American to land 1 of those positions--so talk to them.
Big science or exploration can only be afforded by countries that are economically sucessful, which currently excludes the United States. ie we need to start manufacturing and dloing R & D in THIS country again.
If this is what is really happening, than I am more grateful for it than you can imagine.
Right now, major law firms all over America are finding that they need to send their new associates to remedial writing classes due to their inability to compose grammatically correct, lucid and informative prose! Imagine what engineering and architectural firms are having to deal with. And many of America's scientific research organizations, public & private, are top-heavy with foreign nationals. What all this implies for America's future is easily deduced. It's not pretty and bodes ill.
Young people today very often cannot earn a living wage, let alone one that would allow them to become one of this country's 'Landed Gentry'. Ask around. Most kids these days don't ever expect to be able to really earn enough to buy a house at the prices they've reached, even with the downfall in prices, or with a degree that will likely just put them in deep debt, and STILL leave them without a job, or a well-paying one at least.
You want kids to build things? Give them a place, and/or the equipment to do it, and they likely would. But now they're only real option is to build castles in the sky, because that's the only place left where they are allowed to build them.
- James Watson
But technology has changed. Automobiles are inaccessible to people even with a good set of common tools, so gathering a bunch of teenagers around a car and tinkering isn't possible anymore.
or needs to be done according to one person's or one group's
idea of what's right. Especially not when that person or group
wants it done on somebody else's dime.
Americans "do" every day. Not all of them. Not all of them ever
have. Pioneer mythology is spoon fed to us all but there was a
whole mess of folks who never moved west of the Hudson. And
so it remains. Statistics mean diddly. Only the outliers matter.
And they are still there. Too bad the dull mean is just too far
underwater to fund grandiose "moon shot" projects for the sake
of rhetoric.
If you're not seeing innovation, creation and people building
things, step outside the ivory tower. Ivory tomb, more like.
There are people who make something new because they
looked around, and there are people who just publish another
paper after looking up through a hundred million dollar lens.
Which is the real innovation? Oh, and which one didn't pick
somebody else's pocket whilst patting them on the head?
Corporations exploiting cheap labor abroad have destroyed the ability for a meaningful number of Americans to feed themselves with a trade. The only trades left are the ones that can't be exported, and they still don't pay as much as computer software design.
For now, anyway - that's being exported too.
And that's why God created illegal migrant workers.
I was a software engineer for over twenty-five years (
scientific and engineering applications). Four years ago,
I quit that profession and started working freelance as
a technical translator and editor (German to English).
I noticed that, toward the end of my first career, it was
becoming ever harder to find work. And the work was
becoming ever more challenging. In the old days, you'd
get hired to write and/or maintain Fortran, PL/1, C, and
later C++ code. It was challenging but not overwhelmingly
so.
However, starting with the introducti¬on of XWindows
and event-driven programming, things started to get nastier
and nastier. I was able to master Unix/Linux and object
oriented programming in the guise of C++, but I never really
got the hang of GUI programming. Then came multi-
threaded and distributed programming (CORBA and all that),
realtime, and embedded programmin¬g. That's when I called
it quits.
My theory is that, as the low-level work migrated overseas,
the highly specialised, difficult stuff got left behind for the Amis
to deal with. I wouldn't be surprised if someday soon, cheap
overseas talent is doing the really challenging stuff too. Better
start getting an alternate career ready, Indon.
And as for spending a lot of time on the computer, that doesn't seem to impart any useful skills. My nephew is apparently a Counterstrike player of the highest caliber, but managed to fail grade 10 computer science.