Innovation Comes From Liberal Arts, Not Science And Engineering

This is a point that I repeat over and over. Whenever you hear somebody saying something like, "We need to strengthen our science and math curriculum to compete and innovate in the 21 century economy," recognize that the person saying these things thinks that they are sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and intelligent, but they are actually idiots.

Robert Reich and Tom Friedman say shit like this all the time, both idiots. Well, that's not quite fair. Friedman isn't an idiot, but he spends so much time coining annoying catch phrases that he doesn't think stuff through. Read his books and articles with a huge grain of salt. Too many people take his stuff as gospel. Oh, and Reich is simply an idiot.

Most scientific progress is drudgery. Truly ground-breaking discoveries are few and far between. But in either case, and this will probably shock some of you, it doesn't really matter if those discoveries are made here or not. It's great that Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc are pushing the bounds of science, but that doesn't pay the bills. What pays the bills is taking that new knowledge, packaging it, and selling it. That's what drives innovation and economic growth.

The United States has the best infrastructure for pushing the bounds of science, developing technologies that exploit the new scientific knowledge, and then packaging and selling it. This is due in part to the public-private competitive nature of American higher ed, but most people don't realize that a large part is also due to our focus on liberal arts education. We overlook this at our own peril.

The best company, hands down, for packaging existing technologies into attractive, user-friendly solutions is Apple. Steve Jobs, not science nerds, computer geeks, engineers who love technology for technology's sake, is primarily responsible for Apple's success. In a commencement address at Stanford, he explained part of why he is so successful:

Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.

It's the liberal arts that provide insight into what's important to people. This in turn provides insight into how technology can be useful to people, not cool technology for technology's sake.

I don't worry when I hear that Asian students perform better on math and science tests than American students. I'd like it not to be the case, but it's not an economic concern. When foreign countries start developing world-class liberal arts higher education curricula, then start worrying. Nobody has a monopoly on scientific breakthroughs knowledge. It's out there on the internet for all to see as soon as it's discovered, but the US currently has a monopoly on the liberal arts education that can package that knowledge.