

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

======
giardini
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?

~~~
roblocop
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html)
Maybe it's just another crapshoot, but I think it's another way to rethink our
education system.

~~~
mlinsey
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.

------
emontero1
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.

------
tokenadult
"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.

~~~
jibiki
> 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?

~~~
tokenadult
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.

~~~
jibiki
Thanks, those are great.

"A bell rings every 25 minutes while another bell rings every 40 minutes.
Suppose they rang together at 6 a.m., when will they ring together again?"

Very cute. Do you find that students prefer such problems to the normal "plug
and chug" type? (Also, when you say "advanced math students", what age are you
talking about?)

~~~
smanek
Really? I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - not
actual math.

Most of the questions I saw were just annoyances dealing with
fractional/decimal arithmetic. There were some interesting word/figure
problems, but the difficulty in those usually lay in doing the arithmetic by
hand.

~~~
tokenadult
_I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - not actual
math._

Same request as the friendly request above to which I responded: what
resources would you suggest for examples of "actual math" appropriate for
elementary-age students.

I use a great variety of problem sources, published in both English and
Chinese, to teach various learners of elementary math supplementary lessons,
which is my current occupation. But one can never have too many sources of
problems, so what sources do you suggest? There's no "ceiling" of difficulty
level, because I have early-elementary-age students who are already well along
in secondary-level math, so I have to keep looking for more challenging
material all the time for my most advanced students.

~~~
Arun2009
See the following for general pointers. They may not be the exact material you
want though.

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/>

[http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-
Solving/dp/047113571...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-
Solving/dp/0471135712)

I wish I had access to people who were _really good_ at problem solving when I
was in my pre-university days. The intention is not to really become an ace
problem solver, but to give the brain a real good workout.

~~~
tokenadult
I concur with the recommendation of the Art of Problem Solving website for all
ages of problem-solvers. That's where I first took up the screen name I also
use here on HN.

------
caffeine
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

~~~
abi
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.

~~~
caffeine
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...)

~~~
abi
High performance in math competitions is simply a result of a lot of training.
There are only so many different kinds of problems and only so many different
techniques that can be employed to solve such problems (the kind that come out
in olympiads, etc). I'm not saying there's no creativity in math (absolutely,
there is) but coming up with a new theorem is very different from simply
knowing which theorem to apply where.

I didn't really say critical thought and creativity are the same thing but
yeah, I shouldn't have lumped them together. From my experience, critical
thought is much more common here than creativity but even that is not applied
to anything outside quantitative subjects, such as politics or philosophy.

P.S. There are many creative, smart people here but they are creative because
they are creative not _because_ of the school system. What happens to these
people later in life? Why don't they found companies? I suspect the answer
here is because of the Singaporean mentality where entrepreneurship isn't
valued as much as a stable job. But even more that, it's because these people
are often given scholarships to study overseas. These scholarships have bonds
where you have to work for the company (in most cases, the government) for 5/6
years. By the time they get out of their bond, there are already ~30 or older,
have a family and can't bothered to switch/start companies.

------
tybris
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
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.

------
sachinag
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

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

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

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

------
sanj
He had me until

3) lower the corporate tax rate

------
kingkongrevenge
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
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.

------
TweedHeads
"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.

------
pj
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
So you mean to say only Americans build FOSS?

