April 2, 2013
AMERICAN
INNOVATION
-REALLY?-
My friend and long ago law partner,
Keith Roberts, has published a thesis congratulating American capitalism on the
advancements its technological innovations have brought to mankind. Not withstanding the ease and lucidity of
the piece, it is just plain wrong.
I will approach this on a seriatim basis.
If Americans have creativity and
invention written into their DNA, then that is because the natives of the
countries that settled here shared that DNA.
Open land, a tolerance for larceny and a paucity of law enforcement are
more likely explanations for the economic growth of the nation in its early
years and well into the Nineteenth Century.
A peculiar strand that could be identified as American – democracy- often
stood in the way of the reckless and the savage.
This country’s “troubles of recent
years” were and remain a consequence of the same larcenous tendencies
manifested in the ruthless tactics of monopoly building, getting ahead by
crushing others and extracting value from cheap labor. The only innovation
involved in that “trouble” was camouflaging lies and making money from it.
It
cannot be seriously claimed that the American education system is or has been
robust for many of the last forty years.
Can a system that produces a
higher rate of illiteracy than any other industrialized nation be called
“robust”? Should we take pride in an
educational system that produces members of Congress that believe the universe
was created in a matter of days and only a few thousand years ago; that deny
evolution; that insist that dumping hundreds of tons of carbon derivatives into
the atmosphere everyday carries no adverse consequence for the planet?
As
for marketing and financing, there is little doubt that the American experience
has produced new forms, but there is doubt as to whether those forms have
contributed to a healthy, if robust, economy and society. Marketing the “cornucopia” of goods to
Americans is fraught with fraud, i.e. misrepresentations and undisclosed
dangers. Attempts to ameliorate the
dangers inherent in such marketing have been opposed mightily, ruthlessly and
legally. The claim is that freedom to lie about one’s product is protected by
the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One need only understand that truly native
genius involved in marketing cigarettes to conclude that American innovation in
marketing is probably not a good thing.
As
for financing: banks and their endlessly
varied progeny have combined regularly for nearly three centuries to destroy
the economic lives of millions. This
last disaster (that is to say, most recent) demonstrated to anyone paying
attention that the American financial system is as dangerous to all of us as a
trainload of nuclear waste. If “robust”
is the same thing as a system that permits its participants to wreak havoc and
then take home outrageously large paychecks, then “robust” is not something to
be real happy about. Across-the-board
rewarding of abject incompetence is hard to justify.
The
design innovations that inspire Mr. Roberts’ enthusiasm, to the extent they are
really American, are, upon close inspection, revealed to be unworthy. Carbon fuels have been with us for more than
a century. Somewhere shortly after the
end of World War II, there was a general awareness that petroleum was power,
let alone untold wealth. Our
manufacturing leaders made vehicles that required the use of petroleum products
and, until 1970, took no steps to improve the fuel efficiency of its products –
even in the face of competition of small cars from Japan. American auto manufacturers failed to make
any serious effort to replace the gasoline or diesel fueled internal combustion
engine until California and the Federal Governments began to require those
efforts.
Innovations
that we, as a society, require for our own “robustness” are not the subject of
capitalist enterprise. Rather,
innovations that return wealth to the wealthy proliferate. Overarching those
efforts is the ongoing search of American capital for means to avoid paying
labor the value it produces. The most
destructive of the creative and innovative devices in recent years has been the
evisceration of the American producing class by shipping jobs to overseas
locations.
While
it is with a great deal of affection that I celebrate my former partner’s
celebration of American capital over a libation or two, I can’t, in conscious
permit it to go unscathed by truth.
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