MY model American entrepreneur of the moment is Cheong Choon Ng. He has not attracted a $3 billion bid from Facebook, like the young inventors of the photo-sharing service Snapchat. Wall Street is not cooking up an I.P.O. But Ng is a star in my household. He is the creator of the Rainbow Loom, which in the middle-schooler market is the hottest device not called iSomething. If you have noticed that half the children in America — and a fair number of adults — seem to be sporting bracelets that are braids of brightly colored rubber bands, then you have seen the fruits of the Rainbow Loom.
在我看来，当下美国创业者的模范是吴昌俊（Cheong Choon Ng，音译）。他还没有像照片共享服务Snapchat的年轻创始人那样，从Facebook那里收到30亿美元（约合183亿元人民币）的收购要约，华尔街也没有在为他酝酿首次公开募股，但是在我的家里，吴昌俊是一个明星。他发明的“彩虹织机”(Rainbow Loom)是美国中小学生市场上最热门的非苹果设备。可能你已经注意到，美国一半的儿童，以及相当数量的成年人，手上戴着颜色鲜艳的橡皮筋编制而成的手环，那其实就是用彩虹织机织出来的。
Ng told me he has sold about three million of them, even before cracking the overseas market. Not least among the charms of his simple device is the fact that it unplugs children for a while from the mind-sucking Matrix in favor of projects that require focus and creativity. (In fairness to the Internet, I should note that kids learn new bracelet designs from demonstration videos on YouTube.)
吴昌俊告诉我，甚至在打入海外市场之前，他就已经售出了约300万台彩虹织机。他这个简单的设备富有魅力，其中重要的一点就是可以把孩子们的注意力从令人上瘾的网络世界里拉出来一段时间，转移到需要集中精力和发挥创造力的活动上。（我也应该为网络说句公道话，孩子们是通过YouTube上的演示视频学习新的手环设计的。）

The United States may not manufacture as much stuff as it used to, but we are still the world's cradle of innovation. Inventiveness has been an American point of pride dating back to the days when the country was in its infancy. The Atlantic magazine, in one of those exercises that manages to be both arbitrary and fascinating, this month asked a panel of smart people to identify the greatest inventions since the wheel. If you discard breakthroughs made before the United States was up and running, an astonishing number of civilization-altering innovations — 16 of 30 on that list — were born here. Oil drilling. The telegraph. Refrigeration. Anesthesia. Electricity. The airplane. The Pill. The semiconductor. You might say that America itself is something of a civilization-altering innovation.
美国制造的东西可能没有以往那么多了，但这里仍然是全球创新的摇篮。创造力一直是美国引以为豪的东西，这可以追溯到这个国家创立的初期。《大西洋》(The Atlantic)月刊推出过很多既武断又吸引人的调查，这个月，它让一组聪明人列出自车轮之后最伟大的发明。如果不算美国建国之前人类取得的那些突破性发明，大量改变文明进程的创新都出现在这个国家——占据了名单上30个发明中的16个。石油钻探、电报、制冷、麻醉、电、飞机、避孕药、半导体。你可能会说，美国本身就是一个改变文明进程的创新。
Choon Ng is in several respects a case study in how America has kept its edge. He moved here from Malaysia at age 21 to earn a master's degree in engineering from Wichita State University. He hadn't planned on staying, but he was offered a job as a crash-test engineer in the auto industry. The companies he worked for sponsored him for work visas until, after a dozen years, he had negotiated the arduous path to citizenship. Then inspiration struck.
从好几个方面来看，吴昌俊的经历都是美国如何保持优势的一个研究案例。他21岁从马来西亚来到这里，在威奇托州立大学(Wichita State University)攻读工程学硕士学位。吴昌俊本来没有打算留在美国，但他得到了一份工作，在汽车行业担任碰撞测试工程师。在他任职公司的担保下，他拿着工作签证，直到十几年后，他才经过艰难的历程成为了美国公民。然后，灵感突然降临。
The loom, originally a wooden tablet with a grid of pushpins, began as an attempt to score dad points with his craft-obsessed daughters. When it was a hit at home, he fashioned a version out of molded plastic, scraped together his savings and loans from his family, and went into business. Eventually he managed to line up a few retailers to stock the loom, and quit his day job. He is a cheerful advertisement for the American dream. "The longer you stay, the more you see the opportunity," Ng told me from his home in Michigan, where he is working on a loom upgrade and his next invention. "Whatever you work for, you can own."
最初的彩虹织机是一块带图钉网格的木板，吴昌俊发明它是为了讨女儿们的欢心，她们非常喜欢做手工。这个东西在家里大受欢迎，于是他用模铸塑料制作了一具彩虹织机，拿出自己的储蓄，又从家人那里凑了一些钱，开始做生意。终于，吴昌俊说服了几家零售商购买彩虹织机，然后他辞去了工作。他是美国梦一个令人愉快的展示。“你留在这里的时间越长，看到的机会就越多，”吴昌俊在他密歇根的家里跟我说，他目前正在研究彩虹织机的升级版以及下一个发明，“不管你为什么缘由努力，你都可以有所收获。”
His loom, by the way, is now manufactured in China, which makes a lot of things but invents very few.
顺便说一下，他的彩虹织机目前在中国制造。中国可以制造很多东西，但发明的东西非常少。
In Ng's story you can discern the main components of America's success as an incubator of new things: a welcome mat for talented, ambitious immigrants. An education system that (when it is not teaching test-taking) values creativity. The availability of start-up capital. Patent laws that protect intellectual property. An infrastructure that gets things shipped and marketed. And, perhaps most important, a culture that preaches opportunity and celebrates the risk-taker, the pioneer. From the Wright Brothers taking flight, to Bill Bowerman of Nike using a waffle iron to revolutionize running shoes, to Steve Jobs and his beautiful machines, to Choon Ng, we worship the inventive spark.
在吴昌俊的故事里，你可以看到美国作为新生事物孵化器成功的主要元素：对有才华、有事业心的移民的欢迎。重视创造力的教育系统（当它不教应试课程的时候）。可以获得创业资金。有保护知识产权的专利法。有完善的基础设施来运输和销售货物。也许最重要的是，它还有一种宣扬机会，为冒险者、开拓者喝彩的文化。从莱特兄弟(Wright Brothers)的飞行实验，到耐克(Nike)的比尔·鲍尔曼(Bill Bowerman)使用烙饼器来革新跑步鞋，到史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)美丽的苹果设备，再到吴昌俊。我们崇拜发明的火花。
The question is, can we keep it up?
问题是，我们能保持吗？
The culture part, at least, seems to be alive and well. "Entrepreneur" is to the academic achiever of today what "doctor" and "lawyer" were to my generation. "It's the cool thing," said Bill Aulet, who runs a center for entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I would say nationally we're looking at 20 or 25 percent of the student population that wants to be entrepreneurs."
这种鼓励创业的文化，至少看起来仍然有很大的影响。如今，优秀学生眼中“创业者”的地位，就好像我们那一代人眼中“医生”和“律师”的地位一样。“这是一件了不起的事，”在麻省理工学院（Massachusetts Institute of Technology，简称MIT）负责一个创业中心的比尔·奥莱特(Bill Aulet)说。“我会说，从全国范围来看，大概有20%或30%的学生想要成为创业者。”
But for all the pop-culture enthusiasm, there are signs that our innovative dynamism is diminishing. The pace of new business creation, on a per-capita basis, has been in a slow but steady decline since the mid-1980s, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurial trends. That suggests that other essentials of a thriving innovative economy have been neglected.
但是，尽管流行文化鼓励创业精神，却有一些迹象显示，我们的创新活力正在不断下降。根据研究创业趋势的考夫曼基金会(Kauffman Foundation)，上世界80年代中期以来，从人均水平来看，新企业诞生的速度一直在下降，虽然下降得很慢。这就意味着一个蓬勃发展的创新性经济所需的其他要素已经被忽视。
Let us count the ways. The decline of our education system is exaggerated but real, especially in the scientific and technical fields. The Internet has made it harder to enforce intellectual property rights, creating havens for pirates and narrowing the advantage of innovator over copycat. (Ng's greatest frustration is protecting his patent against aggressively lawyered-up imitators.)
让我们来看看造成这个局面的原因吧。我们教育体系的堕落被夸大了，但问题的确存在，尤其是在科技领域。互联网增加了保护知识产权的难度，成了盗版者的避风港，缩小了创新者相对于模仿者的优势。（最让吴昌俊感到沮丧的，是如何保护他的专利不被有律师撑腰的模仿者盗用。）
Start-up capital is still more abundant than anywhere else on earth, but the supply has been depleted by the recession. Dane Stangler, Kauffman's research director, said most new small businesses are financed not by high-profile venture capital firms, but by family and friends, including home equity loans that went away when the housing bubble burst. Crowdfunding is a new source of capital, but still minuscule.
美国的创业资本仍然比地球上的任何其他地方都充足，但是已经因为经济衰退而日渐枯竭。考夫曼基金会的研究主任戴恩·施坦格勒(Dane Stangler)说，大多数新建的小型企业的投资，并非来自著名的风险投资公司，而是来自家人和朋友，包括房屋净值贷款，这种贷款在房地产市场泡沫破裂的时候也消失了。“众筹”(crowdfunding)是一种新的资本来源，但规模仍然微不足道。
And then there is the erosion of our infrastructure — physical and intellectual. James Fallows, who wrote up The Atlantic's great-inventions list (and who is an astute student of the economic cultures of the U.S. and China) worries about the dwindling of America's publicly financed research. The budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other sources of investment in the long-term basic science that undergirds practical innovation have been slowly eroding — even before the ham-handed budget sequester and the idiotic government shutdown. "This is more maddening than the other most obvious problem, the neglect of physical infrastructure, because it would be so much easier to solve," Fallows told me in an email. "Rebuilding bridges, ports, etc. takes a long time. Increasing research budgets is an ‘it's only money' issue. The sums are small on the national budgetary scale but large in their implications."
还有我们的基础设施的削弱，这既包括实体的基础设施，也包括知识上的。詹姆斯·法洛斯(James Fallows)撰写了《大西洋》月刊(The Atlantic)的伟大发明名单（他对美国和中国的经济文化也有深入的研究）。他对美国政府出资的研究的日益减少感到担忧。美国国立卫生研究院(National Institutes of Health)、国家科学基金会(National Science Foundation)的预算不断减少，长期基础科学研究的其他资金来源也在慢慢减少，而实际创新需要基础科学研究的支撑。甚至在笨拙的预算缩减和愚蠢的政府关门发生之前，这些资金就已经在减少了。法洛斯在一封邮件中告诉我，“这比其他最明显的问题，以及忽视实体的基础设施更令人抓狂，因为解决这个容易多了。重建桥梁、港口要花很长时间。增加研究预算则是花钱就能解决的问题。这些花费在全国预算中的比重很小，但是影响巨大。”
PROBABLY the most perverse impediment is our immigration law. Currently, Bill Aulet reports, the brightest foreign students come to M.I.T., earn degrees in high-demand disciplines (with a healthy side order of rigorous entrepreneurship training) and then are recruited to work in Canada or Britain because they can't get an American green card. "We should be embracing these people," Aulet said, as a source of the heterogeneity and drive that generate new ideas.
也许最有悖常理的障碍就是我们的移民法。比尔·奥莱特(Bill Aulet)说，目前，最聪明的外国学生来到MIT，拿到需求量最大的学科的学位（并且也会经历严格的创业训练），接着他们会到加拿大或英国工作，因为他们得不到美国绿卡。奥莱特说，“我们应该接受这些人”，让他们成为多样性的来源和创造新想法的动力。
"The U.S. attracts a lot of talent," Ng agreed. "But it's very hard to stay and contribute."
吴昌俊同意这种观点。他说：“美国吸引了很多人才，但是这些人才很难留在这里，也无法为美国贡献才智。”
The comprehensive immigration bill passed by the Senate includes more immigrant visas for foreign graduates in sciences and technology and a small pilot program to admit promising entrepreneurs. But that measure is stranded in the House, another casualty of our broken politics, and another reminder that these days Washington is where bright ideas go to die.
参议院通过的全面的移民法案，将为更多科学和技术领域的外国毕业生提供移民签证，还会启动一项小型的试点项目，吸纳有潜力的创业者进入美国。但是这个法案却在众议院搁浅了。这个法案成为我们支离破碎的政治中的另一个牺牲品，这也提醒了我们，如今，华盛顿才是聪明想法的坟墓。