>Today, the manager is a smug MBA who is at best remote from those who are supposed to produce. The prodigy who is made to participate in admin makework s/he detests also feels under-appreciated and underpaid, so they under-perform accordingly, sabotaging when able until somebody offers them $100,000 to spill the trade secrets. Truth be told, they'd probably take $1000 just to shaft the *holes who lecture them about the need to work harder if they want to earn 5% as much as the golf-playing dullard in the glass office upstairs.

The same goes for software production. Just look at the webpages of the most prominent sites - they all look the same, and the things you just loved about them tend to vanish after a while, in the next iteration of beautifying the so-called "experience" (btw, the "user experience" is a mantra from Redmond, because windowses are not for rookies, they need experienced users). The most engineering goes into gradually hiding the features they don't want you to use; they shift the controls around so what you want may take a few clicks more, and what they want you to do is one-click or completely clickless (unless you bother to read the documentation, three or more levels deep of legalese and EULAese, to find how to opt out). And I'm not speaking from my database app backwater - since a year ago, another daughter of ours has become a programmer, and does stuff all webby, so I heard it from the horse's mouth.

That's not innovation, that's not technology. That's corporate bullshit, which is, unfortunately, imitated around the world. Americans do it, so it must be good. It's good that there are still places where a different kind of lunatics run their own asylums and produce some miracles. That those places are mostly not in the US, well, tough luck. You described part of the causes, but I'm sure there's more.

>This isn't the first time: not so long ago Britannia ruled the waves as well as a third of the planet, driving the world's industrial production. Their decline wasn't because they put looters in charge (since the aristocrats had everything already sewn up for generations and despised talk of trade) but because they kept picking fights with Germans. Just as sad in hindsight IMHO.

That thesis, that war makes science, is patently false. What war does is make weapons, and science then gets the money. Provide the same money and push, and you'll get results in peacetime as well.