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Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
- matrix 16y agoPure link bait; the actual article does not say anything of the sort. The article is, in fact making the point Americans as a whole no longer "make things", and are avoiding getting their hands dirty.I'm not sure if the premise is true - it would be nice to see some hard data to back it up.
- nostromo 16y agoIt's a direct quote from the article, "America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism." Btw, he should have added "pundit" to the list of non-productive fields. ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- secret 16y agoUpvoted because its a good starting point for discussion, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the premise. Why should anyone go into a productive industry (by which it sounds like he means anything in which there is an end product) as we move into a service economy and production continues to be off-shored? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding/missing the point. It seems like people at all levels should go where the money and jobs are.
- varjag 16y agoWhen it's finally explained how service economy can be sustainable long-term, I suspect many people would have no problem with outsourcing production whatsoever.
- secret 16y agoIt is something to think about. Service jobs were appealing because they seemed impossible/impractical to outsource, but its not necessarily the case with many anymore. Doctors/lawyers/realtors and the like will always be protected by their professional associations creating a barrier to entry through licensing and legislation. Maybe we'll see a rise in these sorts of regulatory boards for other professions. Maybe we'll see a rise in business creation when people can't get a job working for someone else. It happens during every recession. I wonder what the impact would be of corporate jobs becoming increasingly rare.
- eru 16y agoYou sell investment banking advice, software and self-help books to the Chinese, the Chinese sell you cars and dish washers. What's not self-sustaining about this? (Of course, the USA still produces lots of stuff you can kick. Don't worry.)
- varjag 16y agoHow many Americans are fit for working as investment bankers? OK, you would also need a handful of plumbers, hairdressers and real estate agents to accommodate for the needs of Wall st. Is that it? Also, where the confidence that Chinese would continue to need American investment advice comes from? If they get the majority of capital and trade along with industrial base, wouldn't these jobs simply follow the money? Americans certainly didn't need any external help back in the day.
- eru 16y agoInvestment banking was just a silly example. America did use lots of foreign help back in the day. The British helped finance the railways. But America did not rely on foreign finance forever. After the First World War there were the greatest creditor nation. The rise of America has not dented the European standard of living. And neither should the rise of China curb the American living standards. Relative decline is not absolute decline.
- sabat 16y agoDefine "brightest minds." I don't agree with their implied definition.
- zwieback 16y agoAgree. He goes from "elite" to "Ivy League" to "Harvard" and stops there. I'd like to see numbers from a broader spectrum of universities.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jedwhite 16y agoThe Founding Fathers were aware of this. In fact John Adams saw it as an aspiration: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
- hyperbovine 16y agoFunny, that sounds like a recipe for the sort of social structure they were trying to break free of in colonial England. Just goes to show how 200 years of politicking and beatification has distorted the images of the founding fathers.
- dillydally 16y agoNo, in England you'd study whatever your father studied. If he was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith. If he was an aristocrat, you were an aristocrat. What Adams is talking about is quite different.
- eru 16y agoWasn't England starting to industrialize around that time? They kicked off the biggest change in human life ever. (Or perhaps the second biggest. Agriculture was pretty big, too.
- saulhoward 16y ago> in England you'd study whatever your father studied. If he was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith The idea that England had (and has) no social mobility is quite wrong. People have been climbing the social ladder since long before the Industrial Revolution. It may help you in some ways to think of the new America as opposed to everything Britain stood for, but I think that is mostly incorrect. The philosophies and values of the Age of Enlightenment came from a long history of European thought. America was far closer to a young son continuing and realising the father's long held hopes and ideas with fresh blood and the chance to start on its own feet.
- rysmit 16y agoMike Rowe spoke on this during his TED talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...
- nene 16y agoHey, you can't post a link to Hacker News starting with "Brooks:" when it's not Fred Brooks. Seriously! Who is this David?
- todayiamme 16y agoWait. When did making more and more stuff become a gauge of national production? Just because something is intangible doesn't mean that it isn't wealth. Moreover, the 1800 Britain he talks about in which technology roamed free was a horrifying place to live in if you didn't belong in the right categories. It was a time when the world of Charles Dickens wasn't a fantasy. The problem over here isn't the fact that the USA is moving from technology or innovation. It's just that the shape of it has changed. Instead of dashing off a patent for a new harvest machine. Today, people apply themselves in creating digital enterprises(not just software, this includes algorithms, hardware, AI, media, etc). Yet, the metrics that plug those super policies don't take this into account; if there was a measure of the total lines of code written in the USA then they might start taking things differently.
- illumin8 16y agoNo, a country without a solid manufacturing base cannot stay dominant in the world forever. Manufacturing is not low tech; it is high tech, and requires extreme amounts of innovation in technologies like robotics, chemistry, automation, etc. You can say everything will be digital and that's fine, but until we have nano machines replicating material goods, who's going to make the things we use every day, or the things that store all those digital bits?
- lionheart 16y agoThis is slightly toungue-in-cheek but why can't all of the actual manufacturing be outsourced? Why not? Corporations do it successfully, why can't countries specialize in design just like they used to specialize in certain crops?
- varjag 16y agoTo specialize in design you have to have experienced engineers. You're not getting them in non-industrial kind of places.
- amh 16y agoDesigns are easily copied, physical widgets are not (until we get nano-replicators anyway). Innovations in design and manufacturing tend to dovetail and drive each other. Doing both under one roof reaps more of a benefit from that dynamic. There is also a historical argument. The most prosperous, successful countries have had a large industrial base. That doesn't necessarily mean one requires the other, but it does suggest a strong linkage.
- hristov 16y agoI have to say Brooks' ability of denial is quite impressive. He is so good at not seeing the elephant in the room, it is no wonder he has a prestigious job with the NYT. He wrote an entire article about how Americans are "abandoning" manufacturing without ever mentioning offshoring. If you read his article you would think that the American decline in manufacturing has something to do with some weird pretentiousness of the American workers and nothing to do with the millions of manufacturing jobs leaving the country.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThe "American decline in manufacturing" is a myth. American manufacturing output has been on a continued uptick, the peak of output for the US was... 2006, and will likely exceed that shortly as the economy recovers. The US contributes fully 1/5th of the world's entire manufacturing output. What has changed is that US manufacturing has grown much more efficient, so there are far fewer manufacturing jobs than there used to be. Also, the US has grown much richer so we continue to import more and more goods.
- xentronium 16y agoI'm sorry, but you're so very wrong. US haven't ever grown any richer since ~1980s. They just borrowed more with each month. You should see US trade deficit and annual budget for proofs.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThe US has gotten richer, and has also borrowed more. Since the 80s median family income has increased by about 1/3, adjusted for inflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...
- _pius 16y agoI think the parent meant that the U.S. Government has borrowed more and more. It seems to me that you're talking about citizens being richer while parent is talking about the government being poorer.
- knowtheory 16y agoThe answer to this is pretty clear. You can make billions of dollars in the business (particularly in finance), screw people over with little or no consequence, and you can't do that as easily as an engineer. But i disagree that our best and brightest aren't trying. There are still engineers, and there are still people going out and becoming doctors, regardless of the difficulties in their fields. The problem is that to do interesting and innovative things in tech, you have to go up against the regulatory and entrenched business interests in the US. The Obama Administration is having to contend with this, and Google has tried and failed to contend with this (look at the Nexus One experiment, and their whitespace wireless efforts). It sucks to try and disrupt in the US.
- cal5k 16y agoThat's silly. The vast majority of technological innovations still come out of the US. So whatever it is you're doing poorly, the rest of the world is clearly doing that much worse.
- johngalt 16y agoDuring the industrial revolution you had an explosion in manufacturing. Prior to that most people were employed in agriculture. I wonder if we looked at editorials from the time we'd find pundits bemoaning the loss of agricultural jobs/industry, or that the "best and brightest" weren't interested in animal husbandry. The relative cost of turning a lump of metal into a car has only gone down over the years. This is the case with most manufacturing. The marginal value of "building stuff" decreases. This makes answering the higher level questions more valuable. Perfect example would be YC. They could have made another technology startup with their various talents, but instead they produce more value by consulting and acting as the middle man between skilled kids that need funding and people with piles of money that don't know how to pick winners.
- mechanician 16y agoThis topic seems to come up quite often. I personally don't know whether an investment banker contributes more to society than a motor engineer. However the expected income for the i-banker seems to be higher. I.e. this is an incentive problem. People can talk all they want about the intrinsic satisfaction in producing actual goods, but at the end of the day we all need to pay rent, eat, pay back student loans, and spring for the occasional round of drinks.
- anonquant 16y agoI work in quantitative finance, and I think that Brooks is working with slightly out-of-date statistics. The financial crisis has been very rough on the headcount and morale of most financial institutions, and has impacted quant funds particularly roughly. It was fairly easy to view finance as a safe and socially acceptable career in 2007, and that was reflected in the recruiting numbers at the time. The past 3 years have disabused many of us of that impression, and the effects are being seen right now in the career decisions top students and people already in finance are making. 20% of the people in my little corner of quant finance have left for tech jobs or startups in the last 4 months, and I'm hoping to follow them as soon as I get enough traction on my side project. I hope for their sake that current students have also figured out that the game has changed and are directing their ambitions toward tech.
- VladRussian 16y ago"quantitative finance" is a technical specialty. What you describe is a typical situation of tech people, quants in this case, trapped by unfavorable turn of economic conditions in their, over saturated during boom-times, corner . That is exactly the kind of trap the brightest minds are avoiding by not going into tech.
- scotty79 16y ago>> How did this growth start? In his book “The Enlightened Economy,” Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University argues that the crucial change happened in people’s minds. Or you could just say that they invented and started using steam engine that removed the cap on physical work output of any given population. They just needed to dig some coal, so they did. Rest is history.
- zeteo 16y ago"Most people who lived in the year 1800 were scarcely richer than people who lived in the year 100,000 B.C." From the perspective of a well-paid NYT journalist, maybe. But I doubt the average 18th century farmer would have traded his iron tools, draft animals and brick-built house for the flint axes and caves of his ancestors.
- julius_geezer 16y agoThe MBAs get to lay off the engineers. The engineers' kids figure this out.
- ancornwell 16y agoJesus you can't make a buck in this market, the country's goin' to hell faster than when that son of a bitch Roosevelt was in charge. Too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The worst mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard.
- blackguardx 16y agoWhat? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?
- VladRussian 16y agoShame on you for not knowing classic :) It is a "Wall Street", the first one. Should be taught to 6-graders together with Special Relativity.
- ancornwell 16y agoI am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.
- VladRussian 16y agowell, women do like lawyers, doctors, VPs, CEOs, etc much more than say plumbers or programmers.
- patrickgzill 16y agoIs it irony that we have a guy whose degree is in history writing about the rest of us not going into technical fields?
- philwelch 16y agoWell, at least he has a job....