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Brain Drain Across the United States

jec.senate.gov

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Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#91

Post by vkou »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #44
threatofrain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why should kids with the opportunity to leave choose to stay?

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.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#92

Post by mixedmath »

I think there are interesting things to say about brain drain, and I'm certainly under the impression that there is a tendency for people to move away from the middle of the country and towards the coastal cities (and apparently Texas, Colorado, and Illinois).

But I find the choices of units for these statistics to be very odd. For example, I look at Massachusetts Net difference in Absolute terms in 2017 (where stars indicate an option on the graph) and I see -16.41.

The article doesn't seem to say directly what -16.41 is, other than that it's the "excess of highly-educated share of movers over highly-educated share of entrants". So what is it?

Looking at the data they provide, I believe that they are subtracting two different percentages of two separate numbers. It appears they examine all the people who left and take the percentage of highly educated people in that group (call this X); and they examine all the people who entered the state and take the percentage of highly educated people (call this Y); and they return X - Y.

This appears to me to be a terrible statistic in practice, especially if the population of a state is either growing or shrinking.

For an example of an unbelievably misleading scenario, consider the fictional state Hackernewsyork, with a population of 100 people (30 of whom are highly educated). Say Hackernewsyork had exactly 1 person move away and she was highly educated (so X = 100) and 10 people move in but only 5 were highly educated (so Y = 50). Then they would report that X - Y = 50, a sign of massive brain drain per the article --- when in fact both the number of highly educated people in the state and the percentage of people in the state who are highly educated went up.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#94

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #10

I wonder why we consider “highly educated” to mean “college educated.” I know plenty of college educated people unfit to manage a lemonade stand and plenty of “lesser educated” people that own successful companies. Using a degree as a proxy for intelligence is a mistake.

[deleted]

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#95

Post by smashingfiasco »

myko wrote: post #19
taurath wrote: post #11

Brain drain within the US is just as frequently about cultural rather than economic issues. The culture wars the republicans have been running on since the 80s turns off thoughtful people - anti-intellectualism is killing these states. That said, it’s incredibly underserved and there’s tons of very capable and friendly people. Edit: maybe I didn’t get the intended point across - I’d ask though, how many people do you…

This is what I saw growing up in rural Ohio. Many HS classmates moved out of state and others moved into the major urban centers of Ohio.

I left Toledo last year and moved to the east coast. I was one of maybe three of my friends who was left at that point. It could be a really great state, but the dying lake and dying industrial economy really wrecked the place. The area needs serious investment, but I'm nowhere in the position to contribute back like that, so I made the jump.

A thing I like to say is that I am proud that I am from Ohio, but I'm also happy I'm not there now.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#96

Post by landryraccoon »

crazygringo wrote: post #26

Interesting... I've only ever heard of brain drain used in an international context. Which is where the US comes out as a winner, as we're gaining from all the highly educated Chinese and Indians who come here to work and start companies. I actually find the concept rather odd to use domestically, because it's generally used to show a contrast between a country paying for your college education, and then you reaping…

The problem is that local governments and communities acting in their own self interest will rationally underfund education.

Let's say that hypothetically all new science and engineering jobs are all in ScienceVille. In that case, any local government that doesn't receive some direct tax benefit from taxes collected in SV has negative incentive to teach their students anything about Science, since those students will just leave (after their education has been invested in by the local government) and move to SV to get a job. Those local government are now incentivized to teach their kids anything else (like religion and manual labor) since even if they can only do manual labor at least they're going to stay in their hometown.

Now there is a difference of incentives for the individual States verses the Nation. The Nation would prefer to have lots more engineers and skilled tech workers. The States would prefer to keep their best and their brightest, and if that means they are underutilized that's still a local maximum for the individual State.

Naturally, this is great for SV, but horrible for the rest of the nation. In this scenario, the entirely imaginary, hypothetical "SV" has to either give something back to incentivize the rest of the nation to keep teaching Science and Engineering, or the rest of the country continually subsidizes SV through education which is unsustainable.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#97

Post by kbrwn »

Xcelerate wrote: post #58
durkie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgia is an interesting outlier here: they introduced the HOPE scholarship in the 1990s to allow any in-state (already lived there for at least a year) student free tuition at a state school as long as they maintained a 3.0 GPA, all funded by the state lottery. And you have some pretty good schools to choose from here: University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State (which has improved a lot in the past 10 y…

> students aren't paying for their education, are going to school in the state where they likely grew up, and then are still leaving This was me. I grew up in Georgia and went to Georgia Tech on the HOPE scholarship, but there just aren't many tech jobs in the area (despite the fact that GT has one of the top ranked CS programs). I moved to the Bay Area a year ago. If Georgia would incentivize the tech industry like…

It seems like most of the incentives are tax waivers. Georgia also has lots of land for films to work with. Do you think it would work for tech? I'm not sure if Atlanta has the clout to bring skilled engineers from NYC/SF

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#98

Post by LeifCarrotson »

JamesBarney wrote: post #83
ausbah wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds exactly like the plot of "Idiocracy" - people who aren't 'smart' are having more children then those who are 'smart' so society is ruined. How about trying to make education and other opportunities more accessible to the less educated instead of bashing them for having a couple more kids?

Because educating people doesn't change their genetics. If as a society you care about basketball playing ability. And you find tall people are having less kids than short people no amount of basketball camps are going to make the next generation taller. Also what we care about is societal contribution which primarily happens through work and we're terrible at making people better at their jobs through the education…

Success is hardly a heritable genetic trait. Most of the education differences you see among families is environmental, and can be compensated for by improving public education.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#99

Post by pmiller2 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #72
defen wrote: 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…

We're probably less than a century away from having the capability to edit intelligence into the genome of embryos. Certainly not more than two, assuming we don't blow ourselves up. At that point in time, a child will not be shackled to the luck of their parents' genetic fortunes -- at least not because of our technical inability to break those chains. I doubt any hypothetical dysgenic effects will have become so acu…

We’re far closer to blowing ourselves up than 1-200 years, though. It could literally happen via nuclear war or metaphorically via irreversible climate catastrophe within 15 years, easily.

Re: Brain Drain Across the United States

#100

Post by threwawasy1228 »

warent wrote: post #17
Trias11 wrote: post #16

The article overthinks this. I been brain drained by being offered higher pay. You want to stop brain drain? PAY! Solved.

This is an oversimplification of a more nuanced issue. For example, perhaps the places that need it most can't afford it, and the places that can afford it can only do so because they already have the existing market for it.

At the same time when a company in my home state, offers pay at 55k for something that pays the equivalent of over double that on the coast there is something wrong. Software companies don't magically have smaller margins based on their geolocation if their user-base and contracts are global. In essence their offer of half what is reasonable is pure greed because they know they can get away with it in many cases.

There are lots of companies doing exactly this and driving costs lower in areas where they can get away with it. I think a non-trivial amount of brain-drain is simply paying people what they are worth regardless of how nuanced the issue actually is.

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