Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Myth of STEM Labor Shortages

Given the current corporate culture at the most senior management levels, who cares about the long term? The days of running a company for 30 years and handing it down to family are over. Today it's all about inflating stock values through any methods necessary, then cashing out options before the inevitable fall. Why work for 30 years when you can get the same amount in 5?

It's worth noting here that Bell Labs' biggest customer was the US government, because someone has to have both the means and the will to bet big on new ideas. Nowadays, nobody has the means or will... hence the decay of research-based science.

According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs was originally created with the funds received from a French government prize.

All good points. Its taken me years to get my firm to hire people with little experience then make the investment to bring them up to speed. I've seen that this approach takes more time, but you end up with a much better, highly loyal, and less expensive work force.

The focus is on the short term rather than the long term. The older I get the more I see that this is a function of the generation born in the 40s-60s. Its all about ME and RIGHT NOW rather than what is best for all and in the long run.

It takes 5-8 years to come up with truly original ideas and then to bring them to fruition. Given that the average tenure at CFO/CEO is 5 years, that leaves little room for the long view.

This is one reason why private equity is making a comeback.

It took the founders of Instagram less than two years to get a $1 billion bid from Facebook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram . Whether Instagram's product is "truly original" is arguable, but when people see wealth created so quickly, time horizons may be shortened. In general, someone with a very good idea can monetize it faster than 5-8 years , which is a good thing IMO.

Boomers are individualistic.

Technically, they are individual-spiritual in generational orientation.

It seems to be related to the credit-innovation waves.

It goes away when they go away.

I suppose it's good if your definition of "a good thing" is revolves around making money quickly. Though I don't agree with your "in general" statement. Rapid monetization applies to ideas that can be rapidly developed. Some things, like new theories about gravitation, don't fit that model.

IMO, when profit becomes the primary focus, all kinds of problems develop: the focus shifts to stuff that can get done quickly, quality tends to decline, and more meaningful longer-term projects don't get attention. It's given us a Twitagram A.D.D. society.

To me, focusing on trivial stuff that generates PROFITS FAST is kind of like going through life eating mostly dessert. It's great for a while, but eventually, things in your body will start to fall apart due to lack of nutrients.

Academia has this problem just as badly as industry, with funded grants (and the indirect costs they provide) being the rapid payoff.

Yes, and the pace of that transformation seems to be accelerating. Fewer and fewer R01's for research that "might" pay off and is based on daring or off-beat insights or hypotheses based on natural correlations, and more and more for publishing preliminary research that merely requires a few 'increases of n' to turn it into a couple of papers in second-rate journals that few people outside the niche are ever going to care about... Yuck.

There isn't a way to develop a new drug from start to finish in less than the pace of clinical studies. There is no short cut. There isn't a way to evaluate safety without using live organisms, and that takes TIME.

Therefore, the only end-run around that is to NOT take risks on truly novel pharmacology, because at least if you go with a known winner, you know that the payoff is much likelier to be there in the end. I give you "Xyzal." :sigh:

This fools many people who don't know much chemistry or biology, of course. It's certainly eligible for its own patent.

The problem is that antimicrobial agents in the "same drug class" tend to not necessarily work any better than anything else in that drug class, and eventually we discover that the opposition has been developing better technology while we've been tinkering with the firing pan on our muskets, over here, and granting patents for different trigger designs. So while Xyzal may fool people, an antibiotic clone isn't going to fool a resistant organism that doesn't read DTC advertising.

Really remarkable innovation takes time, and is often serendipitous to begin with, meaning that the target activity had no real intent to make the discovery to begin with. The sheer scale of the spin-off technologies that came out of government-sponsored programs run by the national laboratories and NASA is mind-boggling, and I find it horrifying to imagine that all of that is ending in my lifetime because of such short-sightedness.

The free-market theory is simply not a good model for everything. Yes, I'm well aware that this is an opinion. But human history seems to back this idea. Civilizations that value innovation for its own sake survive longer because they seem to have a greater variety of sources to draw from when facing challenges. The platform is already built, basically, even though there wasn't a reason to build one, therefore it's easier to build atop that platform more rapidly when need arises.

Agreed; I am so fed up with hearing funders (VCs, Pharma, etc) announce that they won't fund something unless it's ready for Phase II. Argh.


It's my opinion too. Free markets work well some things, but there are times when basing things on profits just don't work well. Basic research is one of them.

Austin, kudos to you for convincing your employer to invest in talent and potential over criteria! How did you do it?