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Brain Drain Across the United States

jec.senate.gov

171–180 of 213 posts

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#171
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little shocked at the proposition. The notion that 'you could feasibly make more money elsewhere, and therefore should leave' is not obvious to me, or I think to most people. Chicago may have more opportunity than Michigan overall, but that doesn't mean there are not great opportunities in Michigan. But that's within the context of your imperative. The real answer is that for most people, their job is not the d…

> but that doesn't mean there are not great opportunities in Michigan. Just because there are some great opportunities in Michigan does not mean there are enough great opportunities in Michigan for everyone who could find one in Chicago, SF, or Seattle, or NYC.

Again, for most people, life is not about some 'job opportunity'.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#172
post #51

Now, consider the "meta-brain-drain" of 1) increased assortative mating (people are increasingly more likely to marry someone of similar educational and professional achievement) and 2) college-educated women delaying childbirth and having fewer children than non-college-educated women. The net result is that more educated people tend to have fewer children than the less educated. If we assume educational attainment…

What we can basically dub the "idiocracy hypothesis" is becoming less true than it was in the past, not more true. Take a look at the second section for 1995-2010 changes: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-p... Yes, the less educated still have more children than the more educated, but that gap is getting smaller . ---------- In more current data: Teenage pregnancies are down by 55% since 200…

Further more, the "Idiocracy hypnosis" assumes that:

> educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence

For this we have no evidence. Quite the opposite in fact -- not that this should stop anyone from enjoying a hilarious movie :)

(Just keep in mind that Idiocracy is fictional)

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#173
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we can basically dub the "idiocracy hypothesis" is becoming less true than it was in the past, not more true. Take a look at the second section for 1995-2010 changes: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-p... Yes, the less educated still have more children than the more educated, but that gap is getting smaller . ---------- In more current data: Teenage pregnancies are down by 55% since 200…

Further more, the "Idiocracy hypnosis" assumes that: > educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence For this we have no evidence. Quite the opposite in fact -- not that this should stop anyone from enjoying a hilarious movie :) (Just keep in mind that Idiocracy is fictional)

> For this we have no evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#174
post #51

Now, consider the "meta-brain-drain" of 1) increased assortative mating (people are increasingly more likely to marry someone of similar educational and professional achievement) and 2) college-educated women delaying childbirth and having fewer children than non-college-educated women. The net result is that more educated people tend to have fewer children than the less educated. If we assume educational attainment…

“The poors are outbreeding us” is not a statement that is going to age well.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#175
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, Sweden has had problems in the past where the ambitious people leave the country.

And yet they’re not tumbling into nothingness, in fact, many reasonable people place Sweden as an amazing place in many metrics, stable in the top 10% for most lists I’ve seen—everything from happiness levels to GDP(PPP). Makes me question whether or not our (USians) shouldn’t push for a cultural change where we don’t worship so heavily at the alter of the hyperambitious.

Ambition is what makes things happen. Do you think Apple and the iPhone would have happened without the hyper-ambition of Jobs? It happened in the US, too, not in Sweden.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#176
post #154

There's a related drain on big university cities/towns. I stayed in Boston after CS-ish grad school, but pretty much all the other students left immediately/shortly after finishing. If they didn't go to professorships (the minority), it was usually SF or NYC. The reasons, besides job opportunities, were young nightlife (e.g., dating pool are frumpy nerds, bars/clubs/restaurants close up early by big city standards, s…

And affordable family housing close to work is suddenly in abundant supply in SF and NYC?

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More educated women having more children is not mutually exclusive to less educated women having more children.

How about educating everybody more ... instead making the breeding argument.

Educating people does not make them smart.. thats not the point here.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#178
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We" are not teaching. Everyone can see for themselves that raising kids is a thankless, difficult job which can hardly be reconciled with a successful career.

You need to connect more with other humans.

I did not get the above information from Mars, but rather from other humans and also from reading and becoming aware of current social topics.

I would have thought that it's a pretty well known thing nowadays that motherhood is at least a part-time job and in spite of the best intentions, fathers can only partly compensate for the additional effort. Furthermore, being a mother is not a respected "job", it's neither associated with a good salary, nor high status.

But perhaps you've connected with other humans or live in a different country. Would be nice to share those experiences instead of acting uppity.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like we as a society need to figure out a way to make "have children at a reasonable age" not be a low-status move for highly educated / driven / intelligent women. Isn't the obvious answer better maternity leave laws? Ambitious women in the US don't have kids because it fucks their career. The US is literally last among OECD countries, offering zero guaranteed maternity pay [1]. [1] https://money.cnn.com/…

One big part of this is that even if you have guaranteed maternity pay, it still hurts your career. In a highly competitive environment, I don't see how not working for X amount of time doesn't lead to being X amount of time behind in career growth. The answer is to have less competitive environments. In Sweden, jantelagen (a cultural sentiment that discourages overt personal ambition) is a huge part of what enables…

I would argue the answer is to offer both men and women the chance to have X time leave per child per Y time worked, that way there's no economic incentive to discriminate.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by intelligence and conscientiousness? If you are referring to IQ scores, yes it seems there’s a factor that’s inherited. For intelligence, I would like to know your definition and the research you are basing it on. Even for IQ scores it‘s not so clear, as our measure of IQ is variable and there are no longitudinal studies to my knowledge showing what you claim.

There are a bunch of longitudinal iq studies which show a large erfect. And by conscientiousness I meant the big 5 psychology measure which also has large longitudinal studies.

IQ is not intelligence. For the longitudinal iq studies, check how they measured IQ (spoiler: it changes ;) ).
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