Run or Fun?

When I was in the job market a few decades ago, everyone who couldn’t figure out what to do went to law school. Me too! Still a lawyer! Those who knew became engineers, doctors or scientists. A few years later, as junk bonds dominated the financial world, the new cool job was investment banker on Wall Street. And getting into the mailroom of a mainstream theatrical agency – then International Famous Agency, Creative Management Associates, and the William Morris Agency – was the coolest of the cool…. You could be an agent and someday maybe run a studio or produce mega-successful films.

Aside from the fact that none of those agencies exist today (William Morris at least retained its name in a merger becoming William Morris Endeavor), the big dogs on Wall Street are those who create new instruments and trade them (not the financial structural advisors called investment bankers), law school applications are down 18%, and if you are creatively cool, welcome to the Silicon Valley, not Hollywood’s Silicone Alley! And growth? What’s that? Find short term trading options or companies that can be worth billions in five years or less!

The new mega-cool job description is not really a job; it’s going into business for yourself. You can see it in undergraduate and graduate programs, carrying the word “entrepreneurial” in the degree description. What does that mean? That I can become Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Pincus, and the list goes on and on and on. We even make movies about these folks? But what are we creating? Hard patents that push our technology dominance forward or software patents that make life more fun and more connected? What is the impact on American jobs? Are we still leaders outside of military capacity? How are we doing on pharmaceuticals and biotech? How does American innovation stack up against the rest of the world, including the new emerging market powers?

Mirroring my own experience, Bill Keller, writing for the November 17^th New York Times: “[T]he main components of America’s success as an incubator of new things: a welcome mat for talented, ambitious immigrants. An education system that (when it is not teaching test-taking) values creativity. The availability of start-up capital. Patent laws that protect intellectual property. An infrastructure that gets things shipped and marketed. And, perhaps most important, a culture that preaches opportunity and celebrates the risk-taker, the pioneer. From the Wright Brothers taking flight, to Bill Bowerman of Nike using a waffle iron to revolutionize running shoes, to Steve Jobs and his beautiful machines..., we worship the inventive spark… The question is, can we keep it up?

“The culture part, at least, seems to be alive and well. ‘Entrepreneur’ is to the academic achiever of today what ‘doctor’ and ‘lawyer’ were to my generation. ‘It’s the cool thing,’ said Bill Aulet, who runs a center for entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘I would say nationally we’re looking at 20 or 25 percent of the student population that wants to be entrepreneurs.’

“But for all the pop-culture enthusiasm, there are signs that our innovative dynamism is diminishing. The pace of new business creation, on a per-capita basis, has been in a slow but steady decline since the mid-1980s, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurial trends. That suggests that other essentials of a thriving innovative economy have been neglected… Let us count the ways. The decline of our education system is exaggerated but real, especially in the scientific and technical fields. The Internet has made it harder to enforce intellectual property rights, creating havens for pirates and narrowing the advantage of innovator over copycat…

“Start-up capital is still more abundant than anywhere else on earth, but the supply has been depleted by the recession. Dane Stangler, Kauffman’s research director, said most new small businesses are financed not by high-profile venture capital firms, but by family and friends, including home equity loans that went away when the housing bubble burst. Crowdfunding is a new source of capital, but still minuscule.

“And then there is the erosion of our infrastructure — physical and intellectual. James Fallows, who wrote up The Atlantic’s great-inventions list (and who is an astute student of the economic cultures of the U.S. and China) worries about the dwindling of America’s publicly financed research. The budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other sources of investment in the long-term basic science that undergirds practical innovation have been slowly eroding — even before the ham-handed budget sequester and the idiotic government shutdown. ‘This is more maddening than the other most obvious problem, the neglect of physical infrastructure, because it would be so much easier to solve,’ Fallows told me in an email. ‘Rebuilding bridges, ports, etc. takes a long time. Increasing research budgets is an ‘it’s only money’ issue. The sums are small on the national budgetary scale but large in their implications.’

“PROBABLY the most perverse impediment is our immigration law. Currently, Bill Aulet reports, the brightest foreign students come to M.I.T., earn degrees in high-demand disciplines (with a healthy side order of rigorous entrepreneurship training) and then are recruited to work in Canada or Britain because they can’t get an American green card. ‘We should be embracing these people,’ Aulet said, as a source of the heterogeneity and drive that generate new ideas.”

Too many of the folks in Congress who are voting on America’s future don’t seem to care about any of this. They won’t invest in our school system or higher education. They continue to make getting student loans harder and filing bankruptcy when those loans crush lives nearly impossible. They have defunded research (the polite word “sequester” hides the damage they caused) but will vote for military deployment every time at the expense of civilian/medical research or reinforcing and expanding infrastructure. They see immigration as poor people climbing over a wall, even though just about every one of them are descendants of immigrants. The courts continue to support meaningless business method patents at the expense of true invention. Our leaders and our sacred institutions are simply killing our future. Wake up America; we are a great nation filled with great minds and incredible opportunities! It’s time to prioritize our future.

I’m Peter Dekom, and where did our common sense and long-term growth vectors go?