the end of the article states the most important thing. america’s bread and butter is invention. that industry is slipping away.
I agree that innnovation is important and should be protected vigorously, but not that it’s slipping away. My experience in a Fortune 50 company was the opposite - engineers in China and India are competent when it comes to doing the day to day work of developing a product, but have no clue WHICH product to develop. In other words, it has been American innovation that defines what must be done and offshore engineers who implement it, as well as offshore factories that make it. There’s an inverted pyramid effect here - lots of cheap labor workers at the top who have limited skills, a smaller number of more skilled engineers and technicians lower down who perform defined tasks, but at the bottom the entire product or enterprise rests on the creativity and vision of a few. Numbers don’t tell the whole story.