Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise | Hacker News Reader

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

nytimes.com

73 pointsgoodwinb85 comments

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."

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

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

Downvoted, of course. I hope for my trouble a few more people get it.

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.

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

Anyways...

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.

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.

> in England you'd study whatever your father studied. If he was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith

The idea that England had (and has) no social mobility is quite wrong. People have been climbing the social ladder since long before the Industrial Revolution.

It may help you in some ways to think of the new America as opposed to everything Britain stood for, but I think that is mostly incorrect. The philosophies and values of the Age of Enlightenment came from a long history of European thought. America was far closer to a young son continuing and realising the father's long held hopes and ideas with fresh blood and the chance to start on its own feet.

Nonsense.

The UK had plenty of social mobility from the late 18th century onwards -- it's just that if you made it good, you did your damndest to copy the social manners and graces of your peers and make it look as if your family had always been well-off. And part of that process entailed hiding your humble roots. Hence the illusion of class immobility.

Wasn't England starting to industrialize around that time? They kicked off the biggest change in human life ever. (Or perhaps the second biggest. Agriculture was pretty big, too.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

They can still cut hair. Or teach. Or spend time with children. Or do comedy.

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

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.

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.

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

It means that the US is producing a lot of valuable stuff, but not much of it is durable consumer products like clothes or electronics. The US is, for instance, the world's number one aircraft producer by a significant margin, and one Boeing 747 is worth a lot of cheap Chinese t-shirts.

I used to work in US manufacturing. We built chips. The way it worked is that major fab operations, especially the ones that benefited from the close proximity of Ph.D.-educated senior engineers, were done in the USA. Then the parts would be shipped in wafer form to be diced and packaged in Asia because dicing, packaging, wire bonding and inspecting are human-intensive jobs that are hard to fully automate.

Hands-on work like sewing and hand assembly gets done in Asia where there is a good supply of cheap labor, but that doesn't mean that plenty of stuff doesn't get built in the USA, often with extensive help from robots and computers.

With the exception of Intel and TI, I think that "major fab operations" for most of the US semiconductor industry are now handled by TSMC, UMC and other foundries in Asia.

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.

Yes it has - look at what kind of computer you could buy in 1980 and look at what you can buy now.

Heck most smart phones have more computational power than a 1980 computer.

So yes, the US has grown richer (money != wealth).

Unfortunately, a lot of this type of wealth generation isn't tracked by most economic measurements. Improvements in the quality of automobiles, entertainment systems, communication systems, etc. have been tremendous over the past decades, but almost none of that surfaces in statistics, mostly because to some degree such improvements are subjective and hard to measure quantitatively.

Too right. And not only that, but some of the goods and services we enjoy today didn't even exist not all that long ago.

Alice got $95 in her pocket and $100 credit in the bank. Can you say that overall she's richer from state when she had $5 in her pocket and $0 credit?

The US has gotten richer, and has also borrowed more.

Since the 80s median family income has increased by about 1/3, adjusted for inflation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...

http://globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/214/44197....

Build a graph from that data and you'll be very surprised, I guess.

1980 -- $1.3 trillion

2006 -- $12.8 trillion

[edit]: Oh, there's a graph actually: http://globalpolicy.org/images/charts/SocialEconomicPolicy/t...

How does this contradict my point? The US has gotten richer, and it has also borrowed more. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Today Bob borrowed $100 from Alice and earned $5 on his daily basis. Bob thinks he became $105 richer while Alice doubts that.

Individual income vs. government borrowing/spending are not the same thing.

Your analogy, corrected:

Today Bob's parents borrowed $100 from Alice and Bob earned $5 on his own. Bob thinks he became $5 richer, Alice is owed $100, and Bob's parents now have more debt.

Two things: 1. Bob's personal debt rose over past years too. 2. Bob's parents are the money issuers. When they decide they can't return their debt they probably make this money worth zero.

Whatever, I'm done with that thread, as HNers don't seem to approve :)

I think the parent meant that the U.S. Government has borrowed more and more. It seems to me that you're talking about citizens being richer while parent is talking about the government being poorer.

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.

I wrote 88 words, could you please do me the favor of reading them all? Honestly, there's no need to skim. As I said, manufacturing output has been increasing, but that's in spite of (or perhaps even because of) manufacturing jobs diminishing due to increased efficiency. That can lead and has led to areas of the country that used to be heavily dependent on manufacturing jobs being left at a disadvantage if they fail to adapt to changing circumstances, but that's always true regardless of whether the economy or a particular industrial sector is growing or shrinking.

Moreover, the problems of Detroit and Flynt are not entirely encompassed by the decline of local manufacturing jobs.

Yeah I read your entire post. Nevertheless it is misleading. If you look at American manufacturing as percentage of American consumption of manufactured goods it is going down. The fact is that while manufacturing does get more efficient, the demand for manufactured goods increases, so that usually there is enough demand for the products of a factory even if its efficiency increases.

The fact that Flynt and Detroit and Philladelphia are empty shells of their former selves is not because the goods they made are still being made in America but more efficiently, but because the goods they made are being made somewhere else.

*"If you look at American manufacturing as percentage of consumption of American manufactured goods it is going down."

I cannot parse this, what is your meaning?

I meant "If you look at American manufacturing as percentage of American consumption of manufactured goods ..."

Edited in original.

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".

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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'.

I hope you are right. Ross Perot once said something like "globalization will equalize all countries at the same wages, about $6/hr." I think he might have been right. I'm not really looking forward to a world where high tech workers can only make $6 an hour, but I guess it really depends on what you can buy with $6.

I worked as a heavy construction laborer as a teenager for a lot less that $6 an hour; I would much rather spend my days writing software for $6 an hour than go back to that.

The Chinese are getting massively richer without the rest of the world getting poorer. So why should we arrive at 6$/hr?

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?

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.

"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.

To specialize in design you have to have experienced engineers. You're not getting them in non-industrial kind of places.

like an iPod?

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

>> 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.

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

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

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.

What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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. ;)

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