Even great minds need to eat. The problem is that truly daring, innovative work simply doesn't pay that well. It's an uphill battle at best, and a vow of poverty at worst. There is very little funding for hard, long term, daring projects.
The other problem is more systemic and less confined to tech. Most of the people I know under 40 are shackled to student and other forms of debt and home ownership is utterly unthinkable to them. (So they have no way to ever escape paying rent to the rentier class.) They have no "fuck you money," or even enough slack to contemplate changing course. They have to go for whatever pays the best even if they hate it and even if it's stupid or they have no hope of ever escaping the indentured servitude of the debt-financed college degree.
Combine that with real estate hyperinflation and you have a formula for an economy that encourages premature convergence on local maxima:
The other problem is more systemic and less confined to tech. Most of the people I know under 40 are shackled to student and other forms of debt and home ownership is utterly unthinkable to them. (So they have no way to ever escape paying rent to the rentier class.) They have no "fuck you money," or even enough slack to contemplate changing course. They have to go for whatever pays the best even if they hate it and even if it's stupid or they have no hope of ever escaping the indentured servitude of the debt-financed college degree.
Combine that with real estate hyperinflation and you have a formula for an economy that encourages premature convergence on local maxima:
http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/4291/1/P07...