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Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

nytimes.com

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Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#11

Post by imp »

jedwhite wrote: post #5

The 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,…

I love that quote because his son went on to study politics and war anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#12

Post by lionheart »

illumin8 wrote: post #10
todayiamme wrote: post #9

Wait. 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 U…

No, 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…

This 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?

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#13

Post by todayiamme »

illumin8 wrote: post #10
todayiamme wrote: post #9

Wait. 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 U…

No, 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…

Right now we are in a period of flux and I am willing to bet that 20 years down the lines. You will have USA based automated manufacturers that do just this. Right now, due to misalignment of interests manufacturing has shifted to other countries, but the world can't be a sweat shop too long. So, the reverse trend will start kicking in sooner or later to equilibrium.

Moreover, unilateral hegemony is something that no country will be able to maintain in this system. Earlier the British were "outsourcing" their work to the colonies and getting raw materials from them at substantially cheaper costs. Today, we have moved beyond that and instead you have entities existing in different pieces of land to get the optimal yield.

So, in this interconnected world those realities are harder to maintain. What lies ahead is anyones guess, but something fascinating is happening around us and we are witnessing the start of a huge shift that no one can predict right now. The times they are a-changin'.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#14

Post by dillydally »

hyperbovine wrote: post #8
jedwhite wrote: post #5

The 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,…

Funny, 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.

No, 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.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#15

Post by hristov »

I 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.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#16

Post by knowtheory »

The 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.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#17

Post by johngalt »

During 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.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#18

Post by InclinedPlane »

hristov wrote: post #15

I 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 o…

The "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.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#19

Post by illumin8 »

todayiamme wrote: post #13
illumin8 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 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…

Right now we are in a period of flux and I am willing to bet that 20 years down the lines. You will have USA based automated manufacturers that do just this. Right now, due to misalignment of interests manufacturing has shifted to other countries, but the world can't be a sweat shop too long. So, the reverse trend will start kicking in sooner or later to equilibrium. Moreover, unilateral hegemony is something that no…

I hope you are right. Ross Perot once said something like "globalization will equalize all countries at the same wages, about $6/hr." I think he might have been right. I'm not really looking forward to a world where high tech workers can only make $6 an hour, but I guess it really depends on what you can buy with $6.

Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

#20

Post by varjag »

lionheart wrote: post #12
illumin8 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 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…

This 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?

To specialize in design you have to have experienced engineers. You're not getting them in non-industrial kind of places.
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