Monday, July 7, 2008

We're number 1, for a while...?

Linked HERE is an interesting article originally published in American Conservative (which looks like a fine magazine, LINKbut then excerpted and published in the recent issue of Utne.


The article entitled "The Creativity Conceit" does a good job of making us look closely at some of the assumptions we have about so-called American dominance because, as is part of the author's thesis, "The wealthier a society is, the more inventive it tends to be," and people's belief in American "freedoms" making us an inventive country needs to be questioned.

Since China, India, and the EU are very strong economic players and our country is in hock to the Chinese, what this article strikes home to me is that American political leaders and American industry needs to get it together.
American companies are far behind in the "greening" (not "greenwashing," which they're good at) of products and producing green products. Japanese companies dominate the solar energy production market, and Danish and German companies dominate the wind turbine market. 

GM, strikingly enough, is going for it all in their program to create a very ambitious electric vehicle called the Volt (for The Atlantic's great article on that, click HERE), but an Norwegian company is already set to deliver on that good in the near future with the Think car (for that Car's corporate link, click HERE).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is a bit of a stretch but it would seem that one could also correlate the decline of American corporate prowess with the dilapidation of the family values / structures of the American family.

The other powerful societies of the past and present mentioned in the article hold the value of education much higher than we do as a society. Thus in essence it would appear that the United States is producing proportionally fewer “inventive individuals” than other countries. The fact that education is not taken seriously, the public school system is almost forced to be churning out sub-par students in comparison to the other industrialized societies mentioned.

If not careful we as a country will be passed by.