Jesus 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.
Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it has - look at what kind of computer you could buy in 1980 and look at what you can buy now. Heck most smart phones have more computational power than a 1980 computer. So yes, the US has grown richer (money != wealth).
Unfortunately, a lot of this type of wealth generation isn't tracked by most economic measurements. Improvements in the quality of automobiles, entertainment systems, communication systems, etc. have been tremendous over the past decades, but almost none of that surfaces in statistics, mostly because to some degree such improvements are subjective and hard to measure quantitatively.
Too right. And not only that, but some of the goods and services we enjoy today didn't even exist not all that long ago.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#63Jesus 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.
What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#64well, women do like lawyers, doctors, VPs, CEOs, etc much more than say plumbers or programmers.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#65Is it irony that we have a guy whose degree is in history writing about the rest of us not going into technical fields?
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#66I work in quantitative finance, and I think that Brooks is working with slightly out-of-date statistics.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…
"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.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#67Jesus 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.
What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?
Shame on you for not knowing classic :) It is a "Wall Street", the first one. Should be taught to 6-graders together with Special Relativity.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wasn'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.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 us…
Right. The decline in manufacturing is a tricky subject. First off, in developed economies the manufacturing employee makes up less than 1/5th of the population. Let's be honest, manufacturing will never come back to developed nations like it was in the early 20th century. We aren't "declining" in productivity. We've continued to increased productivity at the same historic rate as previous industries. ( http://www.bl…
They can still cut hair. Or teach. Or spend time with children. Or do comedy.
Re: Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of your possessions are manufactured in the US? Not many of mine are. No electronics I can think of, and not my cars or my furniture or 95% of my clothes. When economic measures seem out of whack with observed reality, one should question what the numbers really mean.
You're forgetting intermediate goods - the fact that your computer monitor is made in China does not imply that all of its internal components are also made there. You're also forgetting that consumer products are but a portion of total manufacturing output - industrial goods are also an extremely large segment of the market, and one where we have not yet lost the lead to the Chinese.
Though perhaps `lost' to the Germans. They sell lots of capital goods.