Yankee Ingenuity Replaced with Third World Hacks
by Charles Coughlin
The greatest advantage one nation can have over another is a large population of inventors. For generations, creative people from all over Europe immigrated to America. The result was a wealth of inventors. The term “Yankee ingenuity” became widespread.
Unfortunately our modern America glorifies worthless sports stars and actors while inventors get almost no mention. Colleges make no attempt to recruit people for their creativity. College admission nowadays is based overwhelmingly on exams that involve memorization, some math skills and little else. Political Correctness then demands racial quotas which further lowers the bar.
It has become much more difficult for an inventor to make a fortune. Most corporations would completely ignore an inventor if he showed up with a brilliant new device. Most young scientists who get work at big corporations are forced to sign away any claim to any great new breakthrough that they may make at their jobs. Instead of getting a percentage of the profit from a patent that is 100 percent their creation, they may get a certificate and a $100 bonus for a new product that will make the company millions. This is a disgraceful situation. An inventor should get a much larger share of the profits so that he can become more independent and turn his creativity to new directions rather than be condemned to live in a cubicle at professional minimum wage.
Today there is a trend away from creativity. Thousands of patents sit dle because big corporations are completely cowardly. In the early part of the 20th century, almost every American business had a research and development department. Most R&D departments were abolished as “cost saving” measures. To use a fable for an analogy, this would be like “saving money” by not feeding the goose that lays the golden eggs. Today, most corporations simply re-hash some existing design with as little creativity as possible. Many engineers are so disappointed by the mindless tedium of working for a big corporation that they change their professions.
One additional problem plaguing American corporations is a flood of third rate engineers from the Third World. There’s a reason why Bangladesh and the Philippines have negligible economies, their engineers are terrible. It is flat out insulting to American engineers when corporations import these cheap foreigners and pretend that they are “equals.” Some corporations will even fire an American engineer if he complains too loudly about an incompetent foreigner even if he avoids mention of nationality. With this sort of work environment, it is no wonder that more and more Americans are seeing engineering and science as career choices to avoid.