techno article.

How Science Can Create Millions of New Jobs
Reigniting basic research can repair the broken U.S. business model and put Americans back to work

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.
America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then an additional 10 million to keep up with population growth and to spark demand over the next decade. In the 1990s the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs, or 2.2 million a year. But from 2000 to the end of 2007, the rate plunged to 900,000 a year. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key fuel—basic research.
The U.S. infrastructure for scientific innovation has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership. It included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox (XRX) PARC, and the research operations of IBM (IBM), along with NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside pure research. There was ample corporate and venture capital funding for commercialization, so the labs were able to make enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy—including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs.
Consider a few milestones from Bell Labs: Fax transmission, long-distance television transmission, photovoltaic solar cells, the transistor, the UNIX operating system, and cellular telephony. Each of these innovations laid the groundwork for vibrant new industries. The transistor alone is the building block for computers, consumer electronics, telecom systems, high-tech medical devices, and much more. Likewise, DARPA's creation of the Internet (as ARPAnet) in 1969 and Xerox PARC's development of Ethernet and the graphical user interface (GUI) set the stage for the PC revolution. These basic research breakthroughs unleashed cycles of applied innovation that created entirely new sectors of our economy.
But since the 1990s, funding for basic research has slowly declined. Bell Labs had 30,000 employees as recently as 2001; today (under current owner Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)) it has 1,000. That's symbolic and symptomatic of the broken link in the U.S. business model. With upstream invention and discovery drying up, innovations capable of generating an industry have thinned to a trickle.
It's tempting to ascribe current job losses in the U.S. to the deep recession or to outsourcing, but the root of the problem is the absence of high-value job creation. We have been through three recessions since 1981, not including the current economic meltdown. Throughout those years, U.S. companies have engaged in aggressive outsourcing, yet the economy bounced back from each downturn with a new blockbuster industry or two. Eventually we will emerge from the current recession, but don't expect to see the same kind of job-creating vigor this time around.
In the past, when the U.S. exported high-paying jobs to low-wage countries, we replaced them with even greater numbers of high-paying jobs in industries whose inception could be traced back to science done decades earlier. The PC, Internet, and cellular industries, born in the 1980s and 1990s, more than offset the loss of high-paying jobs in consumer electronics, steel, and other sectors. But in recent years, outsourced software and manufacturing jobs have largely been replaced by millions of low-wage service jobs in fast-food, retail, and the like.
Compounding the effects of outsourcing and extended recession, the ongoing destruction of old business models (think print journalism, the music business, and landline telephones) will slash a large number of high-value jobs in the coming decade. The result? A broken demand structure. Of the roughly 130 million jobs in the U.S., only 20%, or 26 million, pay more than $60,000 a year. The other 80% pay an average of $33,000. That ratio is not a good foundation for a strong middle class and a prosperous society. It's time to identify—and fix—the root of the problem.