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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (56737)	3/24/2006 11:52:05 AM
From: UncleBigs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

America's best and brightest have no incentive to go into the sciences and engineering fields. That's hard work and you can't get filthy rich. The brightest young Americans now want to be hedge fund managers, real estate investors, investment bankers, bond traders, etc. This is a classic misallocation of resources. The sooner the credit bubble bursts, the better off our country will be. The longer it is delayed, the more disastrous the final outcome.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (56737)	3/24/2006 12:27:35 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Jim, if you were in a statistics class when you made that observation about Asian students, well... shame on you <g> In my undergrad engineering classes, there were Asian students, too. These students largely were the cream of the crop from their home countries. I.e. the way above average Asian students are mixing with the above average US students. Further, when I graduated in '83, the engineering market was very strong and the salaries attractive -- for US students. So the vast majority took jobs and left university. Because foreign students could not do that without an H-1b work visa which were controlled by quota, a significant majority went on to get a Masters or PhD. So the mix in grad school was above average US student with the cream off the top of Asian students. There were industry complaints about this then, as now no doubt, but the salaries lured away the US students just the same. My point here is that if you took the cream of the US and sent them to a good university in Taiwan, those Taiwanese students would think the Yanks were all incredibly brilliant. The pressure from about '85 through recently for US companies to hire foreign students via expanded H-1b visa quotas doesn't stem from the quality of the foreign engineer versus the US engineer. It was because they could hire them frequently for as little as 1/2, and keep their salaries low. Highly qualified US workers could not get these same jobs -- the US company would simply wait for a foreign worker because they were adamant about lowering (or putting a lid on) their cost structure. This behavior presaged the wholesale export of US jobs. Now we have a situation where engineers have never been a glamorous profession, and instead are lumped in as "professionals" with doctors and lawyers. We get the title, but on the flip side, we get 1/2 to 1/10th the pay, job exportation, unpaid overtime, can be fired at will, significantly higher unemployment or underemployment, frequent mergers that purge vacation/leave/retirements. The public thinks we're quirky nerds and we're never depicted on television accurately, if at all. Is it any wonder that the interest in pursuing engineering in the US has plunged? That said, I agree with you on the points you made about the likelihood of Taiwanese talent being more "motivated" and with fewer problems (e.g. addictions). I see a lot of complacency in our culture, with the latest up-and-comers being dubbed the "Entitlement Generation." For all I've done to fight this with my own kids, I can see it lurking within them. Nothing motivates a generation like witnessing their parents struggle. I picked beans and strawberries to help put food on the table when I was 11, paper route at 13, part time job at 14. In America, in place of working hard and being motivated, we have easy credit and the illusions of prosperity created by seemingly never ending financial bubbles. After our day of reckoning, we'll have a generation of parents who will experience hardship and misery, and the children born out of that experience will be motivated to created something better for themselves. Right now, we're resting on our laurels, tuned out to what's happening in the world and what we're doing to the world, and other countries, filled with people who have a vision for how to live a better life, are hungry and motivated and will eat our lunch. --Ben