Salute to 2004's Technical Miracle Workers

Wall Street Journal ^ | December 28, 2004 | GEORGE MELLOAN

[OESY]

Americans have had no lack of dramatic news this year. The Boston Red Sox finally broke the 86-year-old "curse of the Babe" and won a World Series....

But events that don't make headline news often are more important than those that do. That quiet backdrop is explored by Sir Harold Evans, a British journalist, in "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine -- Two Centuries of Innovation," (Little Brown & Co.) In an interview in the winter issue of "Invention & Technology" magazine, he is quoted as saying that America became economically strong through the "adaptive genius of innovators and inventors."

The lengthy report of an ambitious investigation of the "Culture, Leadership and Organization" of 62 societies, called the Globe project, finds that Americans get one of the best marks on what the study calls "uncertainty avoidance." Business leaders and their organizations rely less than those of most other cultures on "formalized policies, procedures and rules and tend to be less calculating when taking risks," according to Wharton management professor Robert J. House, who initiated the study. The score suggests a nation of risk-takers and innovators who adapt readily to change.

Globe doesn't draw any broad conclusions from its sociological study but the research surely suggests that the American success story can be related to the American success in developing a free and liberal economic order. There is not much holding anyone with a good idea back, neither a stratified class structure, nor an excess of regulations designed to protect an existing order, nor a lack of access to as much learning as the individual can master.

It is this dynamic mobility that drives the American economy, creating new products every year that consumers didn't know they needed before they were invented but now find indispensable....

[First_Salute]

I was expecting a story about computer systems administrators who had fought off a series of attacks throughout the year, which are the result of "the best and the brightest" of resume authors in charge of "corporate American," picking Microsoft as the "solution," while laying off workers who actually produce, and screaming at the system administrators to stop all the damage caused by, again such "executive decisions" ... and paying enormous gobs of "earnings" to lawyers with which the marketplace is supposed to be molded advantageously to said corporations.

[banjo joe]

Sounds like you worked for CSC, a truly evil outfit.

[banjo joe]

Sounds like you worked for CSC, a truly evil outfit.

[thombo]

In other words, capitalism is a dynamic system that encourages innovation and competition.IMHO even with it's shortcommings capitalism is still the best system out there.