This is too big a topic for one (over)post, but I think you’re staring at a rearview mirror, Doug. Does the emerging generation of researchers have the smarts to sustain past US performance in patents/Nobels? I believe that a sizable and growing percentage of grad students in U.S. institutions in technical fields today are non-Users, which means that the export of our knowledge base is proceeding apace with the growth of our current account deficit. The giant sucking sound is everywhere these days.
And remember, a lot of our education is focused on cultivating *pathogenic* expertise – e.g., on creating hordes of MBAs to send gales of destructive creation across the land. This "elite" alone could be our undoing. As has been said, the US hasn't become affluent because it has a lot of MBAs; it has a lot of MBAs because it has been affluent.
(BTW, I note that in a subsequent post Carrol has anathematized this thread as "a stupid conversation, unworthy of anyone who has the remotest pretensions to left politics." So I think it wise to absent myself from further involvement in this topic and go stand in the corner for a while.)
Carl