Someone Obama Should Invite To Dinner

Surely, you know who James Dyson is.

Dyson is the engineer/inventor of the Dyson vacuum, among other things, and a billionaire. But the reason Dyson should have a couple of hours of the President's undivided attention is because Dyson has some really good ideas on how to save the free world.

I heard Dyson interviewed on a local radio show while driving home from work, so I'm going to paraphrase what he said. I'm sure you could look up the specific facts and figures, but here's the gist of it...

Great design and engineering can restore America, the UK, etc. by sheer fact that technological advancement is the key to a market driven economy. If your engineering is better than your competition, the business will come your way. If you need an example, look no further than what Steve Jobs has done again and again with Apple. It was our technological advancements that made America the dominant world power, and we're letting that slip away.

Dyson points out that we don't train enough engineers. I recall him saying that the UK graduates something like 24,000 engineers a year in a market that needs 36,000. The US mints like 60,000, but Japan trains twice the amount we do in the US, and China four times that. Look at the result -- where is innovation coming from? And where are the resulting dollars/yen/yuan/pounds/Euros from sales going?

The best insight was this: In America and Britain, our politicians are, by and large, trained as lawyers. In Japan and China, political leaders have engineering backgrounds. Think of the difference in values that makes when it comes to allocating governmental priorities.

Oh, and one more thing Dyson mentioned. Job satisfaction. Only about 15 percent of engineers are dissatisfied with their jobs, far less than folks in other careers, like sales, medicine, and media.

We ought to be showing every 13 year-old kid in America what great opportunities there will be as engineers.