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The US is losing its initiative in technology. The best and brightest are not studying technology because there is no future in it here in America.
We are going to have a nation of lawyers (if we don't already).
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<p>Hey, we can't afford to pay people doing actual important jobs well when professional athletes need their millions.</p>
<p>The US is losing its initiative in <fill-in-the-blank>. The best and brightest are not studying <fill-in-the-blank> because there is no future in it here in America.
We are going to have a nation of lawyers (if we don't already).</fill-in-the-blank></fill-in-the-blank></p>
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We are going to have a nation of lawyers (if we don't already).
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Nah, legal jobs are going overseas too. Many firms are finding it is far cheaper to have routine drafting, research, etc. done offshore instead of by expensive associates and then having a partner review the work before sending to the client. With lexis/nexis and all the other web-based services, you can have instant access to all the legal research you need from anywhere in the globe. Companies are getting into the act too, with their in-house counsel. GE is a big pioneer (guess they have to cut costs somwhere to pay for Jack's apartment and other perks).</p>
<p>see <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2004/10/14/news/economy/lawyer_outsourcing/?cnn=yes%5B/url%5D">http://money.cnn.com/2004/10/14/news/economy/lawyer_outsourcing/?cnn=yes</a> or <a href="http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/pubarticleCC.jsp?id=1090180413835%5B/url%5D">http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/pubarticleCC.jsp?id=1090180413835</a></p>
<p>Job prospects in IT, computer sciense, EE, compter programming are non-existent for Americans right now and there is little indication this will change. Outsourcing, H1B visas and the even worse L1 visas have wiped out tens of thousands of jobs. Why would a kif rack up 150,000 in bills to study something that he is not going to be able to get a job in?</p>
<p>It is not much better in the other hard sciences where the graduate departments are overwhelmingly foreign PhD students. Even medical school has problems. We only graduate enough medical students each year to fill half the hospital residencies. Employers prefer cheap foreign or imported labor. Knowledge work is not where the USA is going to find a competitive advantage in the new global economy. We are going to have to rely on geographic, cultural, and political advantages to remain competitive.</p>
<p>Aw, thanks, Mommy_Dearest (said from engineer-turned-law-student). </p>
<p>I do think that a lot of engin. will INVOLVE bio, but I don't think that bio will dominate it. A lot of cutting-edge work in materials involves biomimicry, but you don't need to know much about bio for it. The spider silk projects are another example. Just me - but I think that the profession is headed towards more integrated disciplines.</p>
<p>Of course, someone needs to patent all that technology. ;)</p>
<p>I think the people who really shine in bio in the future will be the people with strong math backgrounds, and many of those people are receiving their primary and secondary educations in countries outside the United States. Bio is AT LEAST as easy to offshore as physics is.</p>
<p>I think the lesson here is that everything can be "outsourced." Now, if you're a libertarian economically, you say good, let it go. </p>
<p>I challenge anyone to do my job better than me. If they can, and I have to change my career, fine. But until then, I challenge anyone to do it better than me.</p>
<p>The problem is they don't have to do the job better they just have to do it cheaper. You can hire three PhDs in India for the price of the office receptionist in New York.</p>
<p>Well, if we can't stand the capitalist heat...</p>
<p>An anecdote that was related to me on a Brand X discussion board about four years ago was of a company, based in the United States, that did some kind of major engineering projects. It had two project planning centers, one in the United States, and one in China. The center in China consistently produced project plans that were more creative, more varied (e.g., the plan had subplan A, subplan B, etc. to meet various continencies), and, especially, more economically feasible than the plans produced by the American center. The real killer in international competition is getting something that is BETTER for less money, and people from poor countries have personal experience in how do better for less that they are happy to sell to people from rich countries.</p>
<p>Y'know, it sucks to lose your job. But protectionism is bad. It's always bad.</p>
<p>This thread is really scaring me. I have a freshman D right now whose heart seems set on Physics and Mathmatics (a double major). I can't think of a worst nightmare than the one of her graduating from her very expensive private college with no meaningful job prospects in her fields of study (outside of teaching high school---something I can guarantee you she has no interest whatsoever in doing). </p>
<p>Outsourcing and lack of job security on every level seem to be the inevitable bedevilment of more and more American workers. How is our economy supposed to continue to thrive if all the jobs (including a goodly many in the service sector) are being carried out by cheap overseas labor? It seems to me that this problem goes waaaay beyond a projected lack of engineering jobs. I've got a S set to enter college in another three years. What kinds of fields should I encourage him to study with a view toward meaningful future employment? What should I be advising my freshman D now?</p>
<p>Yes protectionism is bad and if India and China would stop practicing it - and by the way maybe get a legal system that actually protects intellectual property - I'd be all for free trade with them.</p>
<p>Anyone want to guess how long it takes to get a case through the Indian civil courts? And when you are all done a decade or two later what the chances are you will actually be able to colect on a judgement?</p>
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How is our economy supposed to continue to thrive if all the jobs (including a goodly many in the service sector) are being carried out by cheap overseas labor?
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<p>Everyone becomes wealthier, in actual buying power for obtaining the goods and services they want, if goods and services are produced by the most efficient producers. This is a daunting issue to me, as my child too has a strong interest in mathematics or computer science (and hardly has a college admissions hook, besides), but I encourage my children to pursue their passions. The best job-market "protection" I can think of for them is that they do their best at whatever they do--and I make sure to refer to international standards in judging what is "best."</p>
<p>India is a country trying to go directly to a knowledge economy--i.e. where the US is today. They are trying to be innovative in a number of fields, and avoid the massive pains of industrialization a la China.
This is why you have Indian films (Bollywood), Indian pharma (Ranbaxy, Cipla), India IT (Wipro, Infosys), Indian financial analysts, Indian medical professionals (you'd be surprised at things like health tourism, outsourced lab work, or the importation of nurses to other countries with shortages), famous Indian universities (the IITs, something like 200,000 kids for 2,000 slots), etc.</p>
<p>from a new scientist article:
"Science too has its role to play. Critics of India's investment priorities ask why the country spends large sums on moon rockets and giant telescopes while it is still struggling to find food and water for millions of its citizens? The answer is that without science, poverty will never be beaten. "You cannot be industrially and economically advanced unless you are technologically advanced, and you cannot be technologically advanced unless you are scientifically advanced," says C. N. R. Rao, the prime minister's science adviser."
<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524876.800%5B/url%5D">http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524876.800</a></p>
<p>That being said, to get back on topic, I think there will always be a role for people taking the challenge of the hard sciences in this country. Yes, while it is difficult to engage in something like physics theory research, a physics major is still, in my opinion, a valued commodity.</p>
<p>At the very best, you can become a professor, work in a corporate lab (for more $ than professorship if thats your thing), consult, etc. At the very worst, your physics degree prepares you excellently for other fields--the best major to get into law school, I believe, is physics. Additionally, the math skills picked up through such a major can quickly make one employable on Wall St, if that is one's desire. The most advanced models are developed and handled by physics and math PhD's (e.g. the Black-Scholes formula). And have you ever heard of econophysics?</p>
<p>And while biotech may be the "hot" thing, research like bioinformatics, physical modeling of biological systems, developing the technology to study small-scale things, and otherwise applying the techniques of physics and computer science to biology is perhaps just as hot.</p>
<p>And other subjects like nanotechnology might become more and more valid to the products of the future.</p>
<p>While the US faces a relative erosion in its leadership, thats more a consequence of some 3 billion people entering the world economysome of them are bound to be intelligent, and not all of them will want to follow the brain drain path and move to the US.</p>
<p>Here, not only is there a kind of cultural stigma for these fields, most kids find they really are hard, and they really do require long term commitments. And if a cushy i-banking job is perhaps available after four years instead, well, I think many kids will say, why not?</p>
<p>Like some of the posters have said, the best way to succeed is to be the best, in whatever you do. Thats kind of hand-waving, but I believe bright, determined, dedicated people will find a way, and if you love the subject, you should make it yours.</p>
<p>Sorry for the long post.</p>
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What kinds of fields should I encourage him to study with a view toward meaningful future employment?
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The news is not necessarily as grim as it sounds (nor is it encouraging, I should add).</p>
<p>First things first. If you are trying to pick a field with an eye to the outlook 5, 10, 20 years down the road then you are attempting the near-impossible. Who knows what shifts will happen in demand due to a million and one factors such as big as offshoring, immigration, exchange rates, wars, and even such prosaic things such as inventions that make current jobs obsolete? I can imagine a sturdy lad (maybe not college material, but hard-working and reliable) being advised to study bookkeeping because businesses would always need them like they had for 200 years, and yet the computer has pretty much eliminated these manual data-entry jobs as well as dozens of others. To my eye, BTW, this is an argument for a liberal-arts education and flexibility, so that a person has the training and experience to adapt to circumstances however they may be.</p>
<p>Now to sound the darker note. It is my belief that in the year 2200 when historians are reviewing US history they will write about a golden period in history from roughly the 1940's thru the early 1970's. Coming out of WWII those lucky enough not be be wounded/killed in the war faced a golden economic time of rising wages and living standards. People from families of lifelong renters bought houses, nice houses, as well as cars and other goodies. Much of this prosperity based on the fact that all the industrialized competition had been pretty much bombed out of existence. For those with just a HS education life was better than they could have imagined, and those with a college degree entered that happy situation where there were more jobs for college grads than there were college grads! The US was the last power left standing, and it shows. The movie Animal House, while not exactly a documentary, was written by a Dartmouth grad and shows the story of so many kids who just had to get a piece of paper no matter what they did/learned in college.</p>
<p>Vietnam and swelling college enrollments signalled the beginning of the end. Today I think we are in the middle stages of the end, and worse is probably yet to come. For good reason economics is called the dismal science; one of its theorems (put forth by Samuelson, author of that best-selling economics textbook) is called factor-price equilibrium. Prices for factors will come into equilibrium, and one of those factors is wages. Ok, its a little more complicated than that; if you've taken econ you learn about a nice term called marginal revenue product of labor. What this means is that a worker standing in front of a million-dollar machine at place A can produce more with one hour of his labor than some other worker in a dirt-floor shack at place B. Since the machine can't instantly move from place A to place B this creates a friction in the factor-price adjustment and the worker in place A has a higher MRP, so the employer can afford to pay more. And in the 40's we started from an era in which the machines in other countries were literally blown to bits, to say nothing of the workers who were killed. Our workers were far more productive. Wages and standards of living in the US rose accordingly.</p>
<p>The problem today that is not just that those destroyed factories have been replaced, we are now living in an era in which capital is far more mobile than before. One reason is factories can readily be built in 3rd world countries. But, even more importantly, for many jobs knowledge and access to information replaces that million-dollar machine physically sitting in a factory to making a worker productive. An engineer sitting at a $2000 Linux PC can use a network to access a $500,000 finite-analysis program (for mechanical engineering) or ASIC synthesis program (for electrical engineering) as easily someone sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley. Everyone can get a $2000 linux box no matter where they live. A factory may take months/years to ship and setup; you can install a software license in 5 minutes. Chinese, Indian, Russian, and so on, workers are not dumber than Americans. But they work for far less. Almost any job that can be exported probably will be exported until US wages fall in accordance with that factor-price equilibrium model. To the other countries its a boom; wages will rise significantly. Unfortunately the counter-point is that US wages will fall to meet those wages.</p>
<p>In the end the argument is this; from the time of Ricardo economists have believed in factor-price equilibrium. Until relatively recently world events (such as WWII) or technology problems have prevented workers in all countries from being equally productive. But today we see these barriers rapidly falling, and the trend is accelerating if anything. 10 or 20 years out I wouldn't be surprised to see the US similar to one of those banana republics we sneer at today. There will be the very rich, and the rest will be the poor. Already Bush and his friends are working to destroy the safety nets like Social Security, and to eliminate any checks on the transfer of inherited wealth like the estate tax. There will always be a privileged few to whose benefit this works. Even if you offshore all legal work at GE there will still be some lawyers left at the top to review the work; its all the layers below that have lost their jobs. Even if you ship all the actual engineering work overseas, Cisco will still have some managers left to decide what to build. These people are wealthy today, and if anything their wealth will increase. As for the rest, welcome to the "ownership society" in which you own nothing, in which you have no guarantees, in which Dicken's "surplus population" encompasses most of us. Lets not forget the lenders that can hound you to your dying day due to bankruptcy "reform", the despoiled environment courtesy of environmental laws written by the polluters, and the companies that escape legal liability for their intentional acts due to limitations on class-action lawsuits.</p>
<p>You want to see the future, poetsheart, go visit Sao Paolo in Brazil. Roll the clock ahead 20-30 years, that's most of us.</p>
<p>I couldn't keep my son from being an engineer if I wanted to. He was putting together machines when he was 6, designing robots when he was 10, building a car at 14, and building an LED disco dance floor at 18. There's is no doubt in my mind that my son is in it for the love of engineering, and in my experience, enthralled engineers invent stuff and play with new ideas, and build new companies. Why, exactly, should I worry?</p>
<p>The only thing to worry about is whether or not he'll be so dedicated that he'll forget to shower somedays, as some of my friends did. GROSS.</p>
<p>Other than that, let the soothsayers soothsay.</p>
<p>"The news is not necessarily as grim as it sounds"</p>
<p>Ok, where is the new "not necessarily as grim as it sounds?"</p>
<p>You know, I clearly remember the early 80s. Our first house came with a mortgage at 14.25%. I'm serious. I think we were the only ones who bought a house that year. Everyone was talking about how bad things were. My mother was horrified when I left my big company (long since bankrupt) to work for a little startup (long since acquired by a bigger company--long since bankrupt). The unemployment rate was 10 or 11 percent in Massachusetts. Engineering was dead.... Does everyone remember when IBM was "doomed?"</p>
<p>Except around then, Gates and Co., along with Jobs and Co., started making computers "for the rest of us."</p>
<p>And when that industry started to slow, in the early 90s, along came the internet. The very industry that made outsourcing of skilled labor possible.</p>
<p>I find myself wondering if the new Indian middle class (made possible by outsourcing) will be the customers for "the next big thing" and make some American engineers rich... </p>
<p>In the early 80's people were predicting the demise of the automotive industry, and no one wanted those jobs. Yet, we still have automotive engineers, and we still have cars. </p>
<p>And in the late 70s, Boeing was dead....</p>
<p>Yes, Indians and Chinese will take "American" jobs, just like the Japanese did (remember when "Made in Japan" meant it was junk?). And they will buy American goods, too. Somehow, I think we'll adapt.</p>