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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Software engineering and finance have completely sucked the air out of the STEM room.

I'll be surprised if in a generation anyone in the US knows how to build anything other than JavaScript apps and swap agreements.

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Software engineering is well on the way to normalizing, IMO. The job market has not been great for the past two years. The margins in finance are getting squeezed too by tech. If you’ve been investing for a decade or two, you know how much lower fees are now.

Software will continue to eat the world. There's a massive push to cut costs right now and hence the software job market is under considerable pressure, but companies are burying themselves in tech debt and low quality solutions. This will catch up to them very soon.

We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.

It's also why this will be the Chinese century.

> It's also why this will be the Chinese century.

Modulo how important AI turns out to be.

25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.

China's population peaked in 2022, 8 years ahead of schedule. It's a massive challenge and no country in history ever managed to reverse a trend in births of this sort.

PRCs aggregate births from 2000-22 is like ~350m, around a US worth with 60% and rising tertiary enrollment, disproportionate going STEM + technical. They're going to be drowning in talent (hence youth unemployment problem), multiple times than US can match with domestic+immigration. This is more than enough talent (and cheap due to supply/demand) to compete/dominate in strategic industries until 2060s+, especially with emphasis on driving brains into hard sciences vs finance or excess software. Yeah there's going to be challenges dealing with the pyramid but not with domains driven by skilled talent. All the catchup PRC has done in past 20 years was fueled by fraction of skilled workforce relative to what they'll generate in next 20-30.

The high youth unemployment is an indicator that their industries haven't caught up with providing jobs - there's no way for those people to utilise that talent.

All that when China's fertility rate has been below replacement since at least the early 90s. This is the generation of "little emperors", who were heavily invested in.

Japan went that route, complete with a real estate bubble which is also present in China. Didn't go well for them.

OECD combined STEM talent generation = high more indicator of surplus / overcapacity in generation = cheaper talent. It's about not having SHORTAGE of talent while catching up, even if some excess ends up driving cabs. Eitherway, youth emplloyment high, but not crippling high and overall unemployment is like 5% which means youths finds jobs eventually, just not right away.

The goal of family planning / investing in 1-2 kids is explicitly so resrouces can be pooled to throw them into tertiary - little educated emperors - so they can compete in advanced sectors instead of having 10 kids make widgets.

Japan is basically a US Satrap whose economy can be easily coerced via US influence (i.e. US killing JP semi / forcing it to appreciate FX to kill competitiveness). PRC insulated from that / doesn't have to comply. Also JP's talent is why it's still competitive DESPITE having such shit TFR, same with SKR. The issue witht those are relatively small countries is that they've already maxed out their human capital (80% skilled work force). They're running to stand still from bad demographic trends. PRC is still transitioning from 20% skilled to 80% skilled, they still have so much substantial room to accomodate 100s of millions of new skilled workforce and milk productivity gains current driven down by massive pool of under productive / undereducated labour will slowly be replaced (really die, since that cohort leans old). That's the problem comparing JP with PRC demographics... their skilled demographic/workforce composition not remotely comparable.

Almost. They’re already fantastic at manufacturing and to a certain extent improving on technologies but we haven’t seen a lot of new breakthrough come from China yet. I don’t doubt it will start happening, it’s just a matter of when.

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