Book Review: Ingenious by Jason Fagone

Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive AmericaIngenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America by Jason Fagone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is about the X Prize -- specifically for the 100 MPGe car. The author follows four of the contestants and chronicles their challenges, failures and successes.

But it is also about quite a bit more. The book is about a spirit of inventiveness and practicality, Yankee ingenuity, that is being lost. Fewer of us make physical, tangible things. And our world needs better, energy efficient things more, much more, than it needs social media software, internet advertising, or financial innovation. How did we get here? The author offers an observation on page 190:

"Then something sad happened. In the eighties and nineties, in the name of budget savings and short-term profits, the engines of American invention forfeited their powers. NASA ramped down, struggling to find a mission that made sense in the absence of the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush pushed defense spending at the expense of science and technology -- DARPA veered into making military machinery. Corporations outsourced jobs and factories to other countries, making it harder to quickly scale up ideas in America. Bell Labs was spun off into Lucent Technologies, which later sold itself to a French company. By 2009, only one thousand people worked at Bell Labs, down from thirty thousand in the early 2000s."

People need shelter, clothing, clean water, food and transportation. We need energy, in various formats, to get all those things. It seems much of the US effort and fortune is headed in other directions. As I write this, the top 10 companies on the NYSE by valuation are: Apple, Saudi Aramco, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, United Healthcare, Meta/Facebook, and Johnson & Johnson. Six out of those 10 do not make things. We do need some of the 6 companies' offerings in our modern economy (we need healthcare!), but if Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, and Meta/Facebook disappeared tomorrow, that would not be an existential event. We'd be fine in the long run, perhaps better without Facebook.

Since the rise of the MBAs in the 80s our economic lives have been distorted by the predominance of finance. We need financial markets to make things work, but finance should serve the needs of organizations that make things we truly need and for the last 40 years it's been the other way around -- and now we are dealing with the ramifications.


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