America’s Real Dream Team
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Have you actually done that, Tom? Or are you just reselling us your same old fantasy story about how easy it is to coordinate a bunch of companies from a bunch of different countries and actually bring a product to market?
I can't even remember all of the other stories I've heard about multiple rounds of prototypes, production problems, sub-standard end products, etc (some of which requiring extensive travel to sort out). Or perhaps a partner company dissolves its relationship with you and decides to market the product on its own. Sure, it has to work out some of the time, but stop presenting this idea that international business is somehow this miraculously effortless process.
I know this wasn't the central point of a piece nominally about immigration and youth achievement, but the fact that he had throw in the same stale scenario that he's been writing about for over a decade makes it entirely impossible for me to take this guy seriously anymore.
I suspect Joey Roth ( http://joeyroth.com ), as a one-person design shop, might also have some real, hard-earned, and even more current, insights into this space.
I simply can't trust the opinion of a billionaire journalist (through marriage) who's never tried to earn a living using these strategies to bring a real product to market.
I'm all for importing great talent- it's one of the reasons the US has been so successful. But that's completely different from his overplayed world-is-flat delusion.
When you outsource to another country you have to change your tactics and communication style. The fact that you failed at outsourcing is more indicative of your refusal to smarten up than anything else.
Secondly, most emerging economies emphasize math and sciences much more than America. If the awards were for art and literature we'd likely see more diversity here.
And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs, or some job that pays well but is provincial and soul crushing.
The spelling bee champions nowadays tend to be indian.
Once hard working societies like india/china catch on that there's money in arts, I'd bet that to be overtaken as well.
"And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs" I'd bet wall street gets more top notch work done than academia or productive industry. If only they'd get incentives worked out like wall street has, you might get a new industrial revolution going.
The current problem on wall street is that there is too much money chasing too few deals (government regulation/ownership prevent many asset classes from being tradeable) and bailouts (which defeat the incentives in capitalism - incentive to not fail). Both problems are caused by government.
Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction?
Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses (or do you mean a different book by Rushdie?) besides the fact that it pissed off some religious dictator?
edit: won the "booker of booker" prize (the best book out of all the booker prize winners over the past 40 years)
The postmodernists call it "post-colonial magical realism", because they can't admit that it's just fantasy written by a good author (who writes very pretty prose) who likes character development more than sword-fights.
Think of "the literary establishment" as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Don't let their posturing put you off.
Much of America sees "import more low skilled workers" as a bad idea.
This is relevant because the tech industry and most other folks interested in importing more brains has joined forces with the folks who want to import low skilled workers.
Since most of america is willing to import brains, the wisdom of this pairing from the "import brains" side is unclear.
After all these are just geeks.
It's not that the US is a small country - it should be possible that some of the not so recently arrived families have competitive children, too. Let the families live two generations in the US and they are no longer competitive or no longer motivated enough? How attractive is it really to be in the US, when the 'dream team' is all imported from 'hungry' countries... what is with the rest of the people? The need education, too. Jobs. Well paid jobs.
It's so much worse, except for a very few native Americans ALL others were imported, the scheme goes back hundreds of years!
But the US now has 300 Million people living there and it still has to import 'brains'? There may be less 'brain' import from Europe - since Europe now has lots of competitive science (LHC, ...). Now the current generation are immigrants from China. But what next?
Same as always, people who have good reason to prefer the states over their country of birth will try to come here. Some will succeed. Most of those will be run of the mill folks. Some will be great, some will be tragic.
Actually if we look far enough back all those natives came from Asia as well.
That edge disappears later on, when they are more established. Then they loosen up a bit, and start using their abilities to innovate as well as achieve.
So not all gloom and doom for white America. Yeah the children of immigrants were over-represented with respect to their numbers here in the US, but if you step back and look at the global picture, then they are just about proportional. And I think its a good sign that the US is still an attractive place for the worlds intellectual elite to come and raise children.
I like Friedman -- in small doses.
Another funny article where Jonah Goldberg has at Mr Friedman: http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZTMzZTc3YWQ5MTgzN2I...
The real competition IS between YOU and YOUR IMAGINATION, nothing could be truer.
There's an ongoing struggle between your lazier and baser instincts and your imagination.
"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" Napoleon Hill
Others wind up leading very distinguished careers, like Terence Tao.
That's probably the most easily commoditized part, actually. A "spark of an idea", before all the actual work needed to turn it into something viable, is close to worthless.