The U.S. is risking an academic brain drain

If you don't care about brand name then work in other parts of the country, even remote. Easily pull down six figures and live like a king compared to Europeans. Typing this from Europe.

At the time, I really believed our system was the best. Had a few life hiccups, and realized my great country, really had some serious flaws. And no--the wealthy look over the flaws, or don't ever experience them, or buy them away.

It's beyond the free/low cost college. It's the culture. It's just so many, common sense, stuff we just assumed we were stuck with. I was watching a movie the other night.

Employees in the French picture were inflamed over being surveiled by video while at work. I was confused. Here--I just assumed I'm being recorded.

Anyways--just curios?

1. was he deficient in some way that makes him unsuitable for the job?

2. did the university not provide the needed skills for the teaching positions he was applying for?

3. is the supply of qualified applicants so high that many receive no offers?

4. is there just not enough funding to employ every qualified academic?

5. is the regulatory environment such that we force many qualified jobseekers to look elsewhere?

...and so on. these seem to be the more pertinent questions in this case, not the political "trump is xenophobic and his policy sucks" slant of the article (whether you agree with that sentiment or not), because the uncertainty around imiigration policy doesn't seem to have had direct bearing in this situation. li didn't get a job in the US, so he's going to china, where he did get a job. pretty straightforward.

with that said, i believe we should allow much more immigration, not less (contrary to trump's position), but the light and disjoint reasoning in this article was a head scratcher.

The difference was that, back then, if we were to go back to Taiwan, there wasn't a guarantee that a US-trained Ph.D. would get any sort of employment.

It is similar, yet different with China: in the past 5 years, I have seen China, flushed with cash (from, you know, Americans) aggressively investing. Infrastructure investment is the most obvious -- for example, ambitious rail plans that not only stretch across China, but also into Europe and Africa. There is also an aggressive investment in cultural influence as well. (For example, trying to get Wushu recognized as an official Olympic sport).

And then there is advanced research. There are two teams in the world that researches quantum tunneling communication, and one of them is a Chinese team who was a protege of the PI of the only other team trying to pull it off. There is massive investment into AI/ML, into space, into military (both a carrier program as well as asymmetric military technologies such as drone carriers).

A postdoc in America doesn't really get much respect, not in the way the Chinese and Taiwanese do. You could struggle here in America, writing research grants, and your family doesn't know or doesn't even care. Or you could be offered being a director of a lab with a lot of funding. Family members and neighbors might not know the science behind what you do, yet they admire and respect you.

I remember this documentary about the creation of the Three Gorges Dam and the displacement of some families along that river. They showed a girl in a family who was sent off to work on the cruise ships for tourists who wanted to see the Three Gorges before it got flooded. The family needed money so they sent their daughter off -- a very Chinese things to do. The girl didn't want to work and the mother is telling her, sorry, this is for the family. You know what dream the girl was giving up? It wasn't an entertainer, or an entrepreneur. She wanted to become a scientist. She saw scientists as the heroes.

That's something I never hear in America.

I think a lot of people in the West forget that (despite the Cultural Revolution), the Ming dynasty Chinese at its ascendent had more reach, technological prowess, and industry of any other society ... and they deliberately turned inward: completed the Great Wall of China, recalled the exploration fleets, shut down their massive network of steel foundries, just before the time the Europeans were starting to explore and to colonize. China has had many cycles of empire expansions, consolidations, and fragmentations.

And I see America making the same mistakes ...