Let in the Smart Masses

I generally tend to be pretty skeptical of Tom Friedman's writing, hoping that he would think about some of the things he says a bit more critically before putting them out to the public as fact, and I don't agree with much of the (admittedly partially satirical) tone of his last column, but he is 100% right on the core conclusion:

We live in a technological age where every study shows that the more knowledge you have as a worker and the more knowledge workers you have as an economy, the faster your incomes will rise. Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter and attracts more smart people to our shores. That is the best way to create good jobs.

A government-funded venture capital fund might not be the right solution (that's a longer question I don't want to get into now) but he's right - this is also the time to get smarter, more agile, and more productive.

We don’t want to come out of this crisis with just inflation, a mountain of debt and more shovel-ready jobs. We want to — we have to — come out of it with a new Intel, Google, Microsoft and Apple. I would have loved to have seen the stimulus package include a government-funded venture capital bank to help finance all the start-ups that are clearly not starting up today — in the clean-energy space they’re dying like flies — because of a lack of liquidity from traditional lending sources.

Newsweek had an essay this week that began: “Could Silicon Valley become another Detroit?” Well, yes, it could. When the best brains in the world are on sale, you don’t shut them out. You open your doors wider.