Don't shortchange the US. US is still the world's largest generator of patents.

A123, Tesla, SpaceX, Amgen, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Medtronic all these are in the US, not to mention most of the biggest companies in the world.

The problem is all those patents are definitely turning into profits, quite a lot of which does get distributed to Americans directly or indirectly, but definitely not by generating enough jobs to keep everybody employed.

May be the number of patents that are being produced has to be increased, to generate enough jobs to overcome the producctivty gains caused by new technology?

Of course, for that to happen, there should be the ability to produce still more patents, for which in turn the bottlneck is people, that is, qualified people.