Hi John, RE: "I don't know what you could have done about the textile jobs, and I don't know what you do about the tech jobs."
This is not specific to tech jobs -- that's my point.
RE: "Production will find it's way to the low cost producer when the cost of transportation is not a barrier."
Your equation is true, but it's missing one key variable: new work goes to the more educated country. What is the USA doing about increasing upper education so we get to the next level?
I'd like to see the gov't and corporations contribute grant money to NSF so it grows to 4500 fully paid recipients. The way I see it is, if IIT pays for 2000 students annually, so should we. Multiply 2,000 by 2 to include China and say another 500 for other countries.
RE: "But my original point was that the pain was just as significant to the folks that lost jobs in the Carolinas as it is to the folks losing jobs in SV. Maybe more."
I disagree. The Carolina worker could move up the food chain because the USA was probably investing in more research back then, as a %.
As a kid, I heard famous stories about how Amerian universities invested so much into RND and all of the resulting successful developments as a result. WS and probably investors too, including me with my option trading, have created an environment where quarterly results of the government's GDP or the corporate earnings, are more important than an investment into the future. We have become a very reactive society, compared to our more proactive and preventive folks of previous times.
Politicians (and even corporations) can't take preventive action, when the public (and shareholders) aren't even informed of the need to do so. On one D.C. trip I took, spent time with about 20 policy makers across all federal Departments (these are not the politicians, but the people that write the policies for the dept heads and politicians - they are like our marketers/engineering architects crafting the business case and design while the politicians are the salespeople selling the policy 'product' to the public. And to my surprise, some of their stories, which they only relayed in generic terms, were no different than our hightech stories - you know, the marketer frantically waving down the salesperson that says something wrong about a product during a presentation.
But the most significant thing I learned was how politicians can sometimes have their hands tied by the public. If the public isn't educated on a problem or if demographically there aren't enough voters for preventive action, politicians can have their hands tied - by the public and by our system. Of course, some politicians may not have been properly educated with an awareness as to what is going to smack them hard, or maybe their term is going to be done soon, or maybe they think it's the public's job to articulate their needs to them and the media's job to educate the public on potential needs.
Competitive education has always been our trump card, but we've gotten complacent in our govt and corp policies by not ensuring the appropriate funding level for PhD students and that needs to change. It's also bizarre not to have adequate post-doc funding for PhDs, especially during a recession, and then ask them to leave the country to boot because a recession doesn't yield post-doc funding or perm residency from a job. Do you want proof of the impact?
A Chinese ezine stated:
100,000 students left China to attend overseas schools last year, but only 10,000 Chinese students were interested in attending overseas schools this year.
Just searched for the link to the article, but the article has been taken down - very strange. Hopefully the numbers in this article were wrong.
Regards,
Amy J |
