Just to comment on the thread topic, I think in a matured industry such as manufacturing, there are just not many technological breakthroughs in recently years. In an industry where R&D only brings something evolutionary instead of revolutionary, the marginal benefit of R&D decreases. Therefore, the owners of the business are getting more reluctant to investment additional money into R&D where the risk is high and return is low. This makes it even harder for the manufacturing industry to attract top talents and bring innovation into the industry. More and more smart people nowadays are choosing to join the IT and finance industry because they can either do cool stuff or get paid crazy amount of money.
This may be a bit hypocritical to say as an aspiring financial engineer, I think there is excessive amount of talent and intellect in the financial industry. Too many creative and smart people (mostly science majors) are choosing to work in finance, a industry which is unnecessarily large and provides less intrinsic value to the society than the manufacturing industry.
(Software engineering, on the other hand, does provide a high utility to the society and I am glad many young talents are working in this industry.)
I am saying all these only because it is a saddening reality and it does not work in favor of the well-being or "happiness" of people (unless you get crazy rich like warren buffet and donate 80% of your money to charity). However, unless our government and the industry leaders (manufacturing) are willing to take more risk (I actually mean loss) and create more incentives for talented people to working in traditional science and engineering, more people like me will keep joining the profession that, quoting from Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong, "creates dreams" instead of "bridges".
