Innovation: The Key to Prosperity - Technology and America's Role in the 21st Century Global Economy

An incisive diagnosis of America's economic meltdown. Searingly indicts decades of technological complacency and anti-scientific propaganda that's left America hostage to energy cartels, inept bailout-seekers, cripplingly obsolete technology and worthless financial paper. Formidably informed yet cracklingly vivid and compulsively readable. Johns Hopkins University's chief technology enterprise expert former COO of a multibillion-dollar high-tech firm and an honored scholar / former Reader's Digest senior editor show how modern America was created by technology but lost its technological nerve around the 1960s. Showing that innovation isn't spontaneous but demands careful nurture, and blending fascinating facts with triumphant optimism about the 21st century, it argues that "returning America to the technology standard" can build a magnificent civilization with mass employment, environmental wisdom and energy sufficiency. A brilliant intellectual detective story, lucidly explaining how nanotechnology, the knowledge economy, magnetic levitation, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, global warming, energy research, the Internet and physics are intertwined and relate urgently to government policy. "Could not have come at a better time." -J.S.Gansler, former US UnderSecretary of Defense. "Essential reading." -G.F.Decker, former Science Advisor to US Secretary of Defense. "There is only one way out of the country's economic, environmental and energy mess and it is described with rare clarity in this book."-Manufacturing & Technology News. "Excitingly signposts the way out of America's crisis of confidence. All business, government and educational leaders will benefit from this timely, nationally and internationally relevant work." -Emily DeRocco, President, National Center for the American Workforce, former US Assist.Sec. of Labor.