.
.
I am re-reading Judy Estrin’s Closing the Innovation Gap, in preparation for an interview I will be doing with her for Kaizen.
Estrin is a successful Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and is currently on the board of directors of FedEx and Disney.
She is worried about the U.S.’s culture of innovation, believing it to be in a (not irreversible) decline phase, and she discusses the many elements that drive innovation: education, tax policies, time horizons of investors, cultural beliefs such as religion, and so on. In discussing government’s role in crafting science-and-technology-friendly policies, she makes this striking comparison of the United States with China:
“Currently, eight of China’s nine top leaders are engineers, and the ninth is a geologist. Contrast this with our own legislature: less than 5 percent of the members of Congress list their occupation as being in medicine, science, or engineering, while 40 percent are in law.” (160-161)
So here’s a series of questions prompted by Estrin’s observation:
1. How relevant is politics to a culture of innovation?
2. If we look at the leadership of the science-and-technology-relevant branches of government, e.g., the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and so on, do we find the same non-science-and-technology backgrounds?
3. If we shift focus from the federal to the state government level, do we find the same pattern of lawyer-dominated politics?
4. Does the U.S. government’s system of appointing expert boards in the relevant areas (art, science, education, etc.) ameliorate the problem?
5. Do the differences identified in the quotation portend a relative rise for China and a decline for the United States over the next generation?
So, China’s government is run by engineers whereas ours is run by lawyers, and therefore they have an edge in innovation. That is doubtful. First, I know from both study and personal experience that most of the leadership of the former USSR was trained in engineering. This was (and still is) a way for Communist systems to steer people away from law, sociology, political science, and the social sciences in general. People trained in those fields are a greater danger to the regime, because they tend to look abroad for comparisons. Second, a horrible problem in China is protection of trade secrets, intellectual property, and the sanctity of contracts. You need intellectual property rights and enforceable contracts to foster innovation, and lawyers to protect these rights. A government composed of engineers may not be sympathetic to that.
Great website, keep it up. BTW I really enjoyed Nietzsche and the Nazis.
Reply
I’m afraid I can’t agree with you here. I think engineers are likely to be the worst people to put in charge of a government — or rather, any government that isn’t communist. All the old Soviet leaders were engineers. They think of the State as one giant machine to be centrally controlled and adjusted for perfect efficiency and output.
Better to have farmers than engineers.
Reply
Thanks, Vic, for your positive comment on my “Nietzsche and the Nazis” documentary. Much appreciated.
About political leadership and it impact on innovation (isolating innovation-related issues from other political issues as much as possible):
1. You point about intellectual property rights and contracts is spot on.
2. Are engineer-politicians or lawyer-politicians more likely to fund research and development in scientific and technical areas?
3. Are engineer-politicians or lawyer-politicians more likely to put bureaucratic obstacles in the way of research and development in scientific and technical areas?
I agree with “reader” that any non-communist government is desirable. I wonder, though, if the vice you ascribe to some engineers isn’t also applicable to some lawyers: couldn’t they think of the State as a giant legalistic bureaucracy to control every aspect of our lives?
Reply
Stephen – yes, I was so impressed with Nietzsche & Nazis that I got your book on postmodernism as well (which was also quite worthwhile).
On question #2, I assume you are referring to government-sponsored rather than corporate-sponsored research. On the former, a great deal of government-sponsored research is driven by national security needs, funneled through the Depts. of Defense and Energy. Then, of course, other areas of importance are health and research on specific policy issues in order to broadly pursue the “national interest,” i.e. boost military strength and economic competitivess.
(If you want to see the types of things the US govt spends money to do research on then peruse the National Academy of Sciences online bookstore)
So I think a fair question to ask is: are engineers more likely to be able to identify and act on the national interest than lawyers? I don’t know. I don’t think there is anything specific to engineering or the law that would bias the identification of the national interest. On question 3, I can’t think of an instance where a certain politician blocked important legislation on research in science and technology, and where his reason for doing so could be traced back to his legal training.
Reply