Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28friedman.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

by wyday • 17 years ago

51 40 17 years ago

nytimes.com

caffeine2• 17 years ago

Other suggestions:

- All SBA loans should come with free lifetime supplies of Provigil

- We should send our kids to Singapore to learn math and physics

- Earlier specialization

abi2• 17 years ago

I just graduated from a high school in Singapore and I'm heading to Stanford this fall. And I think the Singapore education system is extremely overrated. I felt like I learned nothing in high school. Of course, the math problems might be tough and Singaporean kids might do well in international competitions. But really, do you know a single great company that was founded in Singapore? There's a complete lack of creativity and critical thought here.

caffeine2• 17 years ago

Sometimes it seems that Singapore is a single great company that was founded in Singapore. To address your point though - I'm surprised that you lump creativity and critical thought into the same bag?

Also, judging from the admissions behavior of top PhD programs in quantitative subjects (and assuming they know what they're doing), high performance in math competitions is a good indicator of both critical thought and creativity.

(Also, I hope it was clear that my list was being a bit ironic...)

tybris• 17 years ago

Inventing something is the easy part. If you don't do it, someone else will. Making it into a business is what's hard and that alone is what makes your invention special.

skmurphy• 17 years ago

I agree, "Adopt, Adopt, Adtop" is much more important. Michael Schrage has made this point many times: "innovation is not what inventors develop, it's what customers adopt." It would be more useful for Friedman to encourage experimentation by business, especially to look at practices in adjacent industries that could be incorporated into their own business.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

"Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door"

This would help a lot. I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore. For my best students, I have to turn to problems adapted from "key" school textbooks from China.

jibiki2• 17 years ago

> I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore.

If it's not asking too much, can you give some examples? Are these contest-style problems, or computational problems?

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

These Singapore Primary Mathematics series placement tests

http://www.singaporemath.com/Placement_Test_s/86.htm

give some idea of problem types at different grade levels. They are not exhaustive, of course, as the distributor of the books doesn't want to give away all their content for free online.

alain94040• 17 years ago

Here is an example from the typical French high-school graduation question: http://xmaths.free.fr/TSTI/exos/exercice.php?nomexo=TSTIpbac...

If you wanted to graduate this year, this is the problem you had to solve: http://www.maths-express.com/bacs/2009/FranceSjuin2009.pdf (in PDF, easy to read).

(even if you don't speak the language, it's math, so you can probably figure out what the questions are, the formulas themselves are universal)

jerf2• 17 years ago

For completeness, have you gone the other way?

I still wouldn't expect the Americans to come out on top but the distinction might be less than you think. I remember in school that word problems tended to be written very stereotypically for any given book or curriculum, and students who just barely managed to learn how to do that stereotypical set might have a lot of trouble doing problems from a different "word problem tradition" (if I may coin the phrase). You might find more Singapore students have trouble doing the American problems than you expect, even though as I said I'd still expect the Singapore students to come out on top in general.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

I don't have current access to students from Singapore, but later this summer I'll have a visit from a student from Taiwan, and I could try American problem types on him.

My two older children have lived in both Taiwan and the United States, as my wife and I have at various stages of life.

sheriff• 17 years ago

Then I have to ask: what do you mean by "advanced math students"?

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

I have students of second-grade age who have been learning to solve systems of two linear equations in two unknowns (with arbitrary coefficients in each equation). I hear from some schoolteachers that it is "impossible" to teach algebra to students before eighth-grade age, but I have definitely proved that wrong multiple times in my own experience.

sachinag• 17 years ago

SarbOx has something to do with starting up small businesses? I'm glad to see someone's (Craig Barrett, in this case) parochial interests being so poorly disguised as a prescription for American economic woes.

jerf2• 17 years ago

ISTR pg has an essay on this somewhere, but anything you do to make the top-end payout for a business starter worse has a disproportionate effect on their willingness to incur the risks of starting a business. If SarbOx makes it harder to take a company public, which is one way to get a payout, it can have that effect. Economics isn't just about first-order effects.

In fact, it is sufficient for it to be perceived that it limits your top-end gain, even if it doesn't, and I think that I confidently say that such a perception exists in many people's minds, even though I could not say a word about SarbOx's true effects.

emontero1• 17 years ago

As a foreigner in the US about to finish a MS degree in IT and travel back home, I find Friedman's words apropos. The limitation on H-1B visas does more harm than good. I've met many young, intelligent knowledge workers about to get their advanced degrees who, unfortunately, find themselves unable to stay in this country because of visa restrictions. Sending those brains back home is a mistake. A new approach is required if the US veritably wants to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

sanj• 17 years ago

He had me until

3) lower the corporate tax rate

kingkongrevenge2• 17 years ago

Does anyone out there actually believe getting a high school diploma does anything to increase an individual's productivity? I thought it pretty clear by now that people advance through the educational system to their abilities. You can fiddle with methodologies and testing all you want, but the raw material is what it is.

Government funding of scientific research is the problem. About two thirds of scientists make their living off the government, directly or indirectly. We need less of that, not more. Scientists need to stop making ultimately useless death machines for the DOD and other government agencies and they need to start working on technologies for the free market. Eliminating DARPA and throwing all the scientists who depend on it out of work would be a good start. They'd be forced to come up with business ideas.

The problem with health care in America isn't that too many aren't "covered," it's that too many can't afford medicines and procedures because they're too expensive. Costs and prices need to be driven down. That would happen right away if you eliminated the tax deductibility of health care benefits. (Maybe give an offsetting tax credit to make it political palatable.) Millions of people would opt out of their employer provided plans and go comparison shopping for much cheaper high deductible plans so they could pocket the savings. This consumer driven pressure would force insurance prices down dramatically. The high deductibles of these cheap plans would have people comparison shopping for the cheapest medical services, which they basically don't do now. This would drive down prices dramatically.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

Eliminate DARPA? The majority of what they fund is really cool, useful technology that just happens to be a little too risky or costly for businesses to fund (especially with capital harder to come by today). Look over their list of projects; you'll find a shortage of "ultimately useless death machines" and an abundance of worthwhile science and engineering. I doubt you could have made a convincing business case for building the ARPANet -- too expensive, and how are you going to earn money from it? -- but it turned out to have been worth doing anyway. Likewise for most of the DARPA projects I've been seeing.

mvbma• 17 years ago

Without darpa, how would the internet get it's start?

giardini• 17 years ago

He's nuts and education researcher Roger Schank would agree. You don't need a high school degree and you don't even need math to drive a taxicab.

All this yak about raising the education standard in the USA, when we've got Ph.D.'s in unemployment lines is disheartening. Retraining is the greatest joke. If you're an unemployed IT worker, what is the "next tier up" on the ladder to success? Material physics, which requires 5 years study to get online?

Economics and economists have some credibility in microeconomics, but outside that limited subject they are herd-oriented and usually wrong, wrong, wrong. Ask Nicholas Taleb what he thinks about the economics profession. Hell, look out the window and remember what economists have told you about the economy over the last 20 years. Were their predictions ever better than a crapshoot?

kingkongrevenge2• 17 years ago

Japan and Germany dominate industries like machine tools in part by beginning skilled craft training in high school. They have self-selected fifteen year olds learning how to use industrial lathes and such. Or in the case of Japan learning the hi-tech business of modern fishing actually out on the high seas.

It seems like there might be a good idea there. But of course Friedman is just talking about making sure everyone suffers through algebra II even if they learn nothing from it.

access_denied2• 17 years ago

The German system (What SKorea and Japan took as blueprint to design theirs) goes like this. After High School you do 1 of 2 things (doing none is not accepted from society, well it happens, but is seen as fail): you either do prolonged High, which means you qualify for studying at University (wich is dirt cheap) or you take the route of learning what we call a profession (It's different word usage from US). What this means is, you work 3 years in an industry as apprentice (almost full-time). That's how the talk goes: "What do you do?" "I am making an apprenticeship". In parallel you go to "professional school" to learn some theoretical stuff. That is the basic qualification everyone has over here. You can upgrade by going to college or making a "Master", again different meaning from US usage. Or you can just stay that way. But basically everyone has a basic qualification and a home industry. This has produced a quality workforce (so far).

roblocop• 17 years ago

I don't think pure academic advancement is the answer as a means to invent and thereby dig ourselves out of the recession. More kids graduating high school really doesn't imply that they'll find better jobs or rather even be better off because of it. I would argue it's even the same metaphor for college. Most people go to get better jobs, but in reality, the risk is just as high to not find one, especially in this economy. Honestly I think we're still at the point where people are too prideful to get work just for work. I know plenty of college grads who are "above" working at Starbucks or restaurants of the like. The problem is that there's a definite devaluing of infrastructure type jobs that keep the country running. I think Mike Rowe (my hero) summed it up best: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm... Maybe it's just another crapshoot, but I think it's another way to rethink our education system.

mlinsey• 17 years ago

Thanks for the link; that talk was brilliant and excellent food for thought to make us think about the "follow your passions" common wisdom around here.

pj• 17 years ago

This is another problem with Open Source. Americans need to create something of value to the rest of the world that the rest of the world is willing to pay for. If we continue building open source software, then the rest of the world never has to pay us for our innovation. They just compile it themselves and leave us in the dust.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

So you mean to say only Americans build FOSS?

pqs• 17 years ago

He talks about Russia and China, but not Europe. Why?

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

"how America should get out of its current economic crisis."

Put the bankers in check, put the media conglomerates in check, put the politicians in jail and put everybody else to work.

whyleyc• 17 years ago

"Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent"

Hmm, make something people want. I heard that somewhere else too.

Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent

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