

Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise - goodwinb
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&hp

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jedwhite
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, tapestry, and porcelain."

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

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melling
Not to pick on you because 90% of the time people say anyways. Anyway, my
point is don't say anyways.

<http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/anyway-or-anyways.aspx>

~~~
imp
Despite the down votes from others, I appreciate the correction. I didn't know
that it's anyway, not anyways. I appreciate the help. Thanks.

~~~
melling
I used to say it too. Roommate in college broke my habit. As a former addict I
notice people saying it all the time. :-)

~~~
melling
Anyways...

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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.

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InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
tlb
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.

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potatolicious
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.

~~~
eru
Though perhaps `lost' to the Germans. They sell lots of capital goods.

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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.

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zeteo
"Most people who lived in the year 1800 were scarcely richer than people who
lived in the year 100,000 B.C."

From the perspective of a well-paid NYT journalist, maybe. But I doubt the
average 18th century farmer would have traded his iron tools, draft animals
and brick-built house for the flint axes and caves of his ancestors.

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mechanician
This topic seems to come up quite often. I personally don't know whether an
investment banker contributes more to society than a motor engineer. However
the expected income for the i-banker seems to be higher. I.e. this is an
incentive problem. People can talk all they want about the intrinsic
satisfaction in producing actual goods, but at the end of the day we all need
to pay rent, eat, pay back student loans, and spring for the occasional round
of drinks.

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anonquant
I 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 have disabused many of us of that impression, and the effects are being
seen right now in the career decisions top students and people already in
finance are making.

20% of the people in my little corner of quant finance have left for tech jobs
or startups in the last 4 months, and I'm hoping to follow them as soon as I
get enough traction on my side project. I hope for their sake that current
students have also figured out that the game has changed and are directing
their ambitions toward tech.

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VladRussian
"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.

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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.

~~~
cal5k
That's silly. The vast majority of technological innovations still come out of
the US. So whatever it is you're doing poorly, the rest of the world is
clearly doing that much worse.

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secret
Upvoted because its a good starting point for discussion, but I don't know if
I necessarily agree with the premise. Why should anyone go into a productive
industry (by which it sounds like he means anything in which there is an end
product) as we move into a service economy and production continues to be off-
shored? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding/missing the point. It seems like people
at all levels should go where the money and jobs are.

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varjag
When it's finally explained how service economy can be sustainable long-term,
I suspect many people would have no problem with outsourcing production
whatsoever.

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eru
You sell investment banking advice, software and self-help books to the
Chinese, the Chinese sell you cars and dish washers. What's not self-
sustaining about this?

(Of course, the USA still produces lots of stuff you can kick. Don't worry.)

~~~
varjag
How many Americans are fit for working as investment bankers? OK, you would
also need a handful of plumbers, hairdressers and real estate agents to
accommodate for the needs of Wall st. Is that it?

Also, where the confidence that Chinese would continue to need American
investment advice comes from? If they get the majority of capital and trade
along with industrial base, wouldn't these jobs simply follow the money?
Americans certainly didn't need any external help back in the day.

~~~
eru
Investment banking was just a silly example.

America did use lots of foreign help back in the day. The British helped
finance the railways. But America did not rely on foreign finance forever.
After the First World War there were the greatest creditor nation.

The rise of America has not dented the European standard of living. And
neither should the rise of China curb the American living standards. Relative
decline is not absolute decline.

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rysmit
Mike Rowe spoke on this during his TED talk.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html)

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todayiamme
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 USA is moving from technology or
innovation. It's just that the shape of it has changed. Instead of dashing off
a patent for a new harvest machine. Today, people apply themselves in creating
digital enterprises(not just software, this includes algorithms, hardware, AI,
media, etc). Yet, the metrics that plug those super policies don't take this
into account; if there was a measure of the total lines of code written in the
USA then they might start taking things differently.

~~~
illumin8
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 that store all those digital bits?

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lionheart
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?

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amh
Designs are easily copied, physical widgets are not (until we get nano-
replicators anyway).

Innovations in design and manufacturing tend to dovetail and drive each other.
Doing both under one roof reaps more of a benefit from that dynamic.

There is also a historical argument. The most prosperous, successful countries
have had a large industrial base. That doesn't necessarily mean one requires
the other, but it does suggest a strong linkage.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_"Innovations in design and manufacturing tend to dovetail and drive each
other."_

That's Andy Grove's current argument too. I would have thought it to be
obvious, self-evident even, but apparently not.

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julius_geezer
The MBAs get to lay off the engineers. The engineers' kids figure this out.

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scotty79
>> How did this growth start? In his book “The Enlightened Economy,” Joel
Mokyr of Northwestern University argues that the crucial change happened in
people’s minds.

Or you could just say that they invented and started using steam engine that
removed the cap on physical work output of any given population. They just
needed to dig some coal, so they did. Rest is history.

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patrickgzill
Is it irony that we have a guy whose degree is in history writing about the
rest of us not going into technical fields?

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philwelch
Well, at least _he_ has a job....

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ancornwell
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.

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blackguardx
What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?

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VladRussian
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.

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VladRussian
well, women do like lawyers, doctors, VPs, CEOs, etc much more than say
plumbers or programmers.

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sabat
Define "brightest minds." I don't agree with their implied definition.

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zwieback
Agree. He goes from "elite" to "Ivy League" to "Harvard" and stops there. I'd
like to see numbers from a broader spectrum of universities.

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nene
Hey, you can't post a link to Hacker News starting with "Brooks:" when it's
not Fred Brooks. Seriously! Who is this David?

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matrix
Pure link bait; the actual article does not say anything of the sort. The
article is, in fact making the point Americans as a whole no longer "make
things", and are avoiding getting their hands dirty.I'm not sure if the
premise is true - it would be nice to see some hard data to back it up.

~~~
nostromo
It's a direct quote from the article, "America’s brightest minds have been
abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but
less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism."

Btw, he should have added "pundit" to the list of non-productive fields. ;)

