You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs

nytimes.com

51 pointsandrewpbrett28 comments

Answer: Destroy the industrial base of most of the rest of the world, import 1600 top Nazi scientists, find a nuclear-armed expansionist global-superpower enemy with a fundamentally incompatible political ideology, and raise the top marginal tax rate to 91%.

Worked last time.

What are you referring to?

The US situation after the Second World War, obviously.

The industrial base of Japan and most of continental Europe was destroyed in strategic bombing campaigns or captured by the Soviets after WWII.

Nazi scientists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_paperclip

Global superpower is the USSR

Income tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MarginalIncomeTax.svg

If you look at the historical data, the US, when it geared up for war, had an industrial base that beat everyone else in the world without the bombing. The lack of ability to get the industrial base was kinda the reason Japan was going on the conquering kick. Jeep carrier is a pretty good starting point for research.

> raise the top marginal tax rate to 91%.

You forgot "include enough loopholes so employees are the only folks who pay that rate".

Basically, the 91% rate is what kept second tier actors like Ronald Reagan working. When folks got to the point where their marginal rate was too high, they turned down work.

> "include enough loopholes so employees are the only folks who pay that rate".

I thought it was always was, and always will be, that way :-)

> I thought it was always was, and always will be, that way :-)

The system is significantly more progressive now than it was in the past. The fraction of taxes paid by upper income folks is higher now than it was during the 91% days. Federal income tax is only paid by folks with greater than median income. (Yes, lower income folks do pay SS, but they get it back and more in retirement. SS is much less favorable, in rate of return, for upper income folks.)

What I'd LOVE to see is a federal grant program to fund work on popular or promising open source projects. Think how many jobs the LAMP stack has created? We need to find the next-gen of open source tools and make them more robust, better documented and more accessible to others. (Hint: Mochiweb could use some documentation love! :)

It's a nice idea but it's not compatible with our political landscape. It doesn't help anyone right this second. The laid off auto worker or construction worker probably aren't top candidates for a tech startup staff. Voters want easy answers and instant gratification. In their minds we should have been able to create 10 million jobs last year and fix all of our problems while cutting taxes and reducing the deficit. Why? Because they've been sold on decades of political non-sense from both parties. Easy answers, quick fixes, idealogical extremes. Politically the Republicans claim to support small business but they aren't too keen on giving anyone assistance in the form of government handouts. If the Democrats try it they'll be called communists and the American people, predictably enough, will be scared and oppose it. Maybe the Democrats would do it but it will be so watered down it doesn't actually work as intended so it looks like a gigantic, expensive, failure. I think this country has become so crippled by political fear and hatred that we just don't have the capacity to govern ourselves anymore via a democratic system.

The Democrats problem isn't the Republicans. They had a huge polling advantage and large wins against Republicans in the 2008 elections. The problem is that the administration hasn't focused on the problem of the economy. Instead of focusing they have been on this massive social engineering kick. It could be argued that health care is a part of the recovery, but given the timelines in the current bill, this just isn't true.

The sad part is that this is a repeat of the 1970's. Look at the articles from that era about the "failed experiment" or how the office of the president should be replaced. Some of that is from Nixon's behavior, but quite a lot of it is economics problems suffered by all the presidents (Nixon, Ford, and Carter).

Despite the title, this article has nothing to do with Steve Jobs.

The point of the article really is about creating more inventors/innovators and the author tries to use Jobs as the personification of innovator.

Even though the article makes some good points and I agree with the spirit of Friedman's suggestions, the actual results of any of his suggestions would not come about for 8-12 years.

Instead, by focusing more on the green energy economy that is clearly showing a rising demand, the US can be well positioned to take advantage of a bigger wave.

Going deeper into the specific policies, decisions and attention focus of Obama would likely take the discussion here in a clearly political & polarizing direction so I'll end right here.

What's wrong with investing for 8 years into the future?

Nothing, other than the fact that it's the typical length of a US presidency. Which makes it politically untenable.

Exactly. Without concrete results showing up in the next year or two, Obama would have to face the "He Did Nothing!" challenge when it comes time for re-election.

This makes me cry for our political "system".

Does it need to be done at the federal level? I'd imagine this could be done at the state level with nothing more than a good governor and mayors that care?

Thank you for trying to keep the politics out.

Do we really need more Steve Jobs's? Based on his examples it looks like Friedman is asking for more engineers instead. The USA can of course import more engineers, e.g., statistically India probably has 4 Steve Jobs types but maybe 400,000 engineer types.

On the other hand, there are a lot of unemployed American engineers who can't find work currently so that's not likely the solution either.

Given that YC applications always exceed the funding slots, I suspect what we really have here is a shortage of capital. For Obama, that actually makes the problem easier to solve: increase funding for NSF and (say) NIH, i.e., promote science and health. To fund this I would suggest we take money away from NEA and CPB (arts and public broadcasting) not because I'm Pat Buchanan, but to incentivize students away from those areas into more productive fields, as implied by Obama and Friedman.

Q: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over?”

A: Instead of taxing productivity, why not tax consumption instead? http://www.fairtax.org/

Per Annenberg, the 'FairTax' reduces taxes for the poor and the rich, squeezing the middle class:

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/unspinning_the_fairtax.html

Don't worry, we'll have both soon enough. Hello VAT.

The idea that you could somehow "round up" the country's leading innovators in order to ask them questions, is itself the problem.

Innovators seem to appear out of nowhere; by the time they are well-known enough to find them, they have already done the bulk of their innovating.

The title reminded me of the sound clip from Starcraft when you play as the Zerg: "Spawn more Steve Jobs!" I mean, "Spawn more overloads!"

s/overloads/overlords

"We need more minerals" is the obvious next step.

...and fewer Thomas Friedmans.

<starcraft> SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS </starcraft>

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