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

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&hp

by goodwinb • 16 years ago

73 85 16 years ago

secret2• 16 years ago

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.

varjag3• 16 years ago

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.

secret2• 16 years ago

It is something to think about. Service jobs were appealing because they seemed impossible/impractical to outsource, but its not necessarily the case with many anymore. Doctors/lawyers/realtors and the like will always be protected by their professional associations creating a barrier to entry through licensing and legislation. Maybe we'll see a rise in these sorts of regulatory boards for other professions.

Maybe we'll see a rise in business creation when people can't get a job working for someone else. It happens during every recession. I wonder what the impact would be of corporate jobs becoming increasingly rare.

eru6• 16 years ago

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.)

sabat• 16 years ago

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

zwieback• 16 years ago

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.

matrix• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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. ;)

jedwhite• 16 years ago

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."

hyperbovine• 16 years ago

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.

dillydally• 16 years ago

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.

imp2• 16 years ago

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

melling4• 16 years ago

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

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

Good quote. It made a great scene in the HBO miniseries:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9f1miIDcDI

rysmit• 16 years ago

Mike Rowe spoke on this during his TED talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

nene• 16 years ago

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

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

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.

illumin82• 16 years ago

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?

lionheart• 16 years ago

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?

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

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'.

hristov5• 16 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane6• 16 years ago

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.

xentronium5• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, but you're so very wrong. US haven't ever grown any richer since ~1980s. They just borrowed more with each month. You should see US trade deficit and annual budget for proofs.

bfung• 16 years ago

here's the data about manufacturing from the federal reserve:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/default.h...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif

And other pretty charts in section G.17 Release Tables

hristov5• 16 years ago

Then I guess Brooks is wrong. But any way you look at it discussing that "americans are abandoning technical enterprise" without mentioning offshoring is missing the point (if you are being generous) or intentional deception (if you are a bit more realistic).

Regarding the statistics of manufacturing supposedly growing they are misleading. I don't have time to explain why they are misleading but if you dont believe me you can just visit Detroit, or Flynt Michigan, or even Philadelphia.

bmcnamara82• 16 years ago

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.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm)

We are accomplishing this productivity gain with less people. Increased productivity allows for companies to increase their output with less people.

As Peter Drucker predicted, if these productivity gains aren't matched in the service and knowledge worker sectors, then we'll see an increase in social tensions and class warfare. No one can deny the social acrimony that continues to surface in the news.

This will be the challenge of the 21st century. What to do with a nation that doesn't require a majority of its workforce employed in moving or making things.

tlb• 16 years ago

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.

sp332• 16 years ago

Offshoring is not magically cheaper. Why do you think manufacturing in the US might be more expensive? One quite possible reason is "some weird pretentiousness of the American workers".

billswift2• 16 years ago

And voters who don't want businesses in their area. Why do you think that since the early 1970s, first manufacturing, then new shopping malls, migrated out of the towns and cities? They were forced out, partially by economic costs, like land prices, but even more by galloping tax and regulation growth concentrated on any non-residential activity. They were forced out of the cities and eventually most manufacturing enterprises were forced out of the country by regulations.

"Pretentiousness" is a good term, especially given David Brooks's "did not want their children regressing back to the working class, so you saw an explosion of communications majors and a shortage of high-skill technical workers." But high-skill technical work is also much harder than teaching and the newer "high touch" "professions", so I think "wussiness" may be as good a term, depending on what influences predominated.

hristov5• 16 years ago

Or, if you try a furtive glance at the real world, you might find the reason is that the rest of the world is full of poor desperate and oppressed people willing to work for very little money and in bad conditions.

potatolicious3• 16 years ago

Or, maybe, just maybe, it's because the average per capita income in China is $6,567, compared to $46,381 in the US?

No, that can't be it. Surely the order of magnitude difference in living cost, lack of safety and labor law has nothing to do with it. Surely it is the "weird pretentiousness of American workers".

philwelch2• 16 years ago

Did you read the same article I did? He was talking about a lot more than manufacturing--the skilled trades and even engineering fit his argument pretty well.

knowtheory• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

johngalt• 16 years ago

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.

mechanician• 16 years ago

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.

anonquant• 16 years ago

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.

VladRussian3• 16 years ago

"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.

scotty79• 16 years ago

>> 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.

zeteo• 16 years ago

"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.

julius_geezer• 16 years ago

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

ancornwell2• 16 years ago

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.

blackguardx• 16 years ago

What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?

VladRussian3• 16 years ago

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.

ancornwell2• 16 years ago

I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

VladRussian3• 16 years ago

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

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

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

philwelch2• 16 years ago

Well, at least he has a job....

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

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