Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. deserves praise as a remarkable radical thinker and businessman who made path-breaking innovations to transform modern life, from the Mac computer to the smart — both in looks and in performance — iPhone, iPod and iPad. But I would like to raise some deliberately jarring questions: Is the answer to the American jobs crisis to clone Steve Jobs? More pointedly, how many Steve Jobs could it take to break America's gloomy economic predicament?
The proof of Jobs' life and contribution to business, technology and the economy is the work he left behind, as well as in the millions from Cupertino headquarters in California to China who mourned him with praise, candles, apples and demands that he be canonized as patron saint of the Internet. He was in many ways the epitome of the American dream. He was given up for adoption at birth: his biological father was a Syrian, Abdulfattah Jandali, making Jobs half-Arab.
Jobs showed an early interest in computers and dropped out of college before co-founding Apple. It might be a worrying thought for the United States that Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates dropped out of university, as did Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg more recently. Yet part of mainstream America's unemployment problem is that too many people drop out of high school and college, and do not have sufficient qualifications to compete in a modern economy. Does America comprehend the difference between a genius who drops out because he or she cannot tolerate the stresses and stupidity of the system and those who quit because they cannot read or write?