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Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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