How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Americans are ambivalent about innovation –  the idea  sounds good to them – but they are not about to go to bat for it – or much of anything else. They know behind the scenes – and not very far behind the scenes – powerful forces will slap them down if they try to be different. It is safest to stay put, and don’t do anything at all. Let someone else live dangerously, not them.

Here is one paragraph, out of many:

And finally, if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with the current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it’s clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.

Bear in mind also that this is the Harvard Business Review – hardly a radical rag.

About these ads
  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 361 other followers

%d bloggers like this: