Slashdot Mirror
MA Governor Wants More New Tech
turnitover writes "Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century,' Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney made a public call for more innovation in technology, reports eWEEK.com. He urged more investment and development and, yes, a move to OpenDocument, as reported previously on Slashdot." From the article: "Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years. He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia."
OK....here's what I took away from this article:
Asia would like us to become the France of the 21st century.
Wow...one statement that manages to offend both the Americans and the French. Well done, sir!
China and India have a population a multiple of ours.
While I'm certain this statement is factually correct (it can't help but be), I nevertheless find myself wondering just what multiple Romney is alluding to here. Three? Ten? Two-fiths? i?
In foreign policy he [Romney] said we must win the war against a "radical jihad," but that we must enable jihadists to become part of the global economy.
Ahh...there we go...I bet the Islamic fundamentalists were feeling left out by this point. Nice to see Romney managed to squirrel in a jab at the boogyman of international terrorism during his call for more tech innovation....at this point, his speech is sounding spookily like a platform for running for office...
Romney, a Republican, has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.
OK, now I'm scared.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yes, the US graduates fewer PhDs in math and physics. I'm trying to be one of them. But the quality of the US PhD programs are what brought me here (I'm not USian). You can graduate a million PhDs from a degree farm somewhere but if they haven't had the same level of education they aren't going to be as influential. I'm not saying that asian universities are bad, just that there needs to be a deeper insight into this than just raw numbers.
Greater Asia has over 3.5 Billion people! The US is just scratching 300 Million. So we are still doing better than them in Math/Science PhDs, percentage-wise.
Perhaps you should compare the base population of "greater Asia" to the base population of the US... then the figure would seem incredibly skewed towards the US.
Romney needed to act on this 3-4 years ago.
I've been part of the tech downturn at the time. Many of my ex-co-workers left the state because there were too few opportunities.
The state spent lots of money paying unemployment insurance, and the unemployed were effectively prevented from starting up their own companies because they would lose benefits the day they registered their company.
All these well qualified individuals could not use their skills during that time. Instead, they left for less costly pastures.
Massachusetts was the only state to lose population in 2004. And it wasn't losing those on the dole.
"Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century,"
Wouldn't a better analogy be, "the England of the 21st century". After all we do have troops in the same cities around the world (Baghdad, Kabul) as Britain at the turn of the 20th century. We did take the position of world power from the British. Much of our common law is based from British law. But hey, the sun never sets on the British Empire....
That's as may be, but it neglects the fact that the US produces virtually all of the world's Intelligent Design specialists. And that's where the future is, not in the witchcraft practices of math and science.
Make education possible for everyone at costs comparable to Asia/Europe/etc and you will have more PhDs.
But will people pay the taxes to do it?
The reality is that people simply don't want to pay for anything. They expect services from the government yes, but in the end, for a lot of things, they'd rather pay no tax than have some services.
Even if the US slips behind and loses its position as the worlds biggest economy and/or science nation, Americans will still not reform their education system. This is because in the end, beneath all the rhetoric, all the patriotism, all the pride, all the manifest destinies, there has been only one true constant in America. The Buck.
And more correctly "My Buck". And no american will fork it over without a danm good reason.
May the Maths Be with you!
"Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century"
It's only cryptic if you don't understand that France is a former world power that has been permanently eclipsed economically, technologically, culturally, and militarily, and it has an almost obsessive desire to act as if it is America's nemesis, complaining almost reflexively of most of America's moves on the international stage.
That's not to say that the French aren't nice people, nor that I wouldn't love to hang out on one of their topless beaches, nor watch Paris's nightly display of lights, but in the realpolitik world, France doesn't matter! Thus their desire for a strong, core European Union, which along with Germany, they hope to dominate, to unite Europe as a strong and meaningful entity on the global stage.
You will know that the US is screwed when it seeks to create a transnational government with Canada and Mexico.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Science, math, and engineering education and professions are disrespected by the educational system (we'd rather fund our sports teams), the government (your scientific results don't support our politics), businesses (your work is critical to us but we can't pay you more than your overseas competition), and media (entertainers are cool, geeks drool).
I doubt this will change until it's too late.
Moderation in everything, including moderation.
I have a relative in a chemical engineering program at a university in Georgia. He was saying that many of the other students studying for their masters and doctorates were not American. I think he quoted about 60% of them as being Asian, Middle Eastern or Indian. That is, people who came directly from such areas to study in America, not Americans of such descent.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
While I'm no fan of the decline of America's standing on the educational chart (word to you, Kansas), this guy is using an arbitrary number to jump on the bandwagon of "China's going to 0wn the US in a few years."
China makes, and for some time, has made its fortune making things...from cheap plastic toys to electronic components, circuitry, you name it.
The US (and several other advanced economies) have made their fortunes, for the most part in the last 30+ years, not from manufacturing (which has been in decline in the US since the 70s) but from the conceptualization, specification, packaging, marketing, and just moving the objects. The US will no more become a manufacturing powerhouse than China will start cranking out Google (granted, a lot of PhDs there), Madden NFL, G-Unit, and Spiderman 3. That's where the US is making its $billions these days.
Will China move up the food chain economically? Of course. Will they turn the US into a satellite economy? No. The US spends a lot because it makes a lot. There are a host of economic factors that can't be adequately explored here, but our money isn't going to up and fly away to China.
Perhaps, if this bandwagon jumper is so concerned about America's economic future, he should convince his fellow politicians that it's bad long term policy to create massive national debt that is bought up by the Chinese with all their new manufacturing profits. That's more of a financial danger than getting out-PhD'ed.
I have several Doctor Friends that were trained in Israel (as an example) and then quickly left Israel (after paying next to nothing for their MD) to come to the US to collect the big almight BUCK..
This has actually been one of the traditional reasons for the vibrancy of the US economy. As a lot of academic US workers are trained abroad, the US has not had to go to the expense of educating them. Other countries have.
This is the "Brain Drain" effect, where, it is argued, the US economy is buoyed by the educational expendature of less wealthy countries. There's a certain element of truth to this.
I wonder what will happen if US academic graduates begin to emmigrate overseas? Will the Brain Drain effect be felt in the States too?
May the Maths Be with you!
as long as they're freedom fries.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
No? You mean that the Ruling Class isn't flocking to the sciences? How many of Governor Romney's children has he convinced to make a future in science and technology?
Let me guess: his kids are being groomed for careers in law, finance, and government as befits their station in life and more realistic estimates of long-term prospects.
I wonder why he's not advocating more of the Great Unwashed go after those jobs in competition with his own ...
Oh, wait a minute!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Many would say that you don't get a doctorate degree for the money alone. It was not the main motivation for me either.
I live in MA, and Romney has been one colossal pain in the ass.
The man is a calculating, cold, arrogant, mean, power-brokering son of a bitch.
Please help metamoderate.
But I like my car -- I don't want it burned to a crisp!
Except along the way he was accosted by a bum who asked him if he was running for President or not (I'm dead serious) and was nearly attacked on one of the subway platforms by a woman who was in the news for keeping about a hundred cats in her house (a fair number of them dead, and a bunch of the dead ones in several freezers.) MBTA and State Police took care of both problems.
Adding insult to injury, a reporter asked him how much the fare was, and he said "a buck". Except the MBTA has been $1.25 for over a year. The MBTA comissioner became enraged when reporters made something of it. "The governor can't be aware of everything". Except it was a MAJOR issue in the eastern end of the state- the rate hike affected commuter rail, bus, and subway customers.
It pretty much proved that not only did he not give a shit about issues that affected citizens in his state, and that he could barely be bothered to take the subway for one stop- he didn't even pay for the fare himself.
Please help metamoderate.
What's more, it's not even tax deductable. By the time you get to the point where you even have enough after-tax income to pay for the schooling, you have enough income to be disqualified for the tax breaks -- the ceiling doesn't go up with number of dependents.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
1. It seems to be pretty much ignored thus far, but the U.S. definitely has state sponsored higher education. I claim this, because pick a state, put "University of" in front of the name, and wham, you have the name of a real university, which probably receives a lot of funding, grants tuition discounts to in-state residents, etc., etc.
2. The tax issue -- let's get this straight. If you have a Ph.D. in the maths and/or sciences area, let's just pull a number out of nowhere. You have a 'right' to command a wage near $75K, say (more or less, depending on the field, but yeah). Now, let's suppose you're Jimmy, the 'average' American citizen. Wait! You only make $45K. Why will you be excited to pay for some kid to go to college so he can make more with your money? That's going to be an exciting bill to pass... Why would you vote for someone who takes that kind of money from you?
3. The prestige factor -- let's suppose we jack up taxes so that anyone who wants to go to a PhD program can afford to. Well, that's a nice sentiment. Then what? The first response is probably that anyone without a PhD gets the shaft, both in finding jobs and in compensation, because now PhDs are a dime a dozen. Since they are a resource in greater supply, demand goes down, as does compensation. Suddenly, the average citizen has extra letters to put to their name, but their standard of living probably doesn't significantly change as a whole.
The wonder and curse of the free market system is that people will pay what a degree is worth for people who have it (compare all those jokes about engineers and liberal arts majors involving asking for wanting fries with that). If there was a huge shortage of qualified PhD holders, having a PhD would be like a ticket to big money, and there would be huge incentive to get them. I don't see that as being the case -- in our society, if you have one, you make more, but not a ton more (in fact, I remember being counseled when graduating with a BS in CS that pursuing an MS or a PhD full time was not cost effective, as you never made up the time * salary in terms of the difference in remuneration went).
If this was really an issue, it would correct itself. What we *should* be concerned about is if big tech companies bring foreign PhDs into the states to do their research, and I don't see that happening much, other than those that are in fact better and brighter than the American counterparts. Free market wins again.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
Oh, I forgot to shoot down a few of your other points in my last post. Allow me:
with the best weapons in the world when they turned on France
Actually, it's generally accepted that the French had better tanks. They just weren't forward enough thinkers to use them properly.
but they still fought against a vicious adversary until FORCED to surrender
Forced? The bulk of France was never invaded or occupied by the Germans. The Germans never touched their overseas empire. They didn't fight it out until the bitter end. They surrendered with Paris and most of the coast occupied. The interior of France was largely untouched. If Americans fought like that we would have surrendered when the British burned Washington.
To make matters worse after the French rolled over and surrendered a good number of them become active collaborators! The Vichy French Naval Forces stationed overseas (thus untouchable by the Germans) even refused to join their Allies in the fight against the Nazis. The British eventually had no choice but to destroy them to keep them from falling into the hands of the Germans. If that isn't French cowardice then I don't know what is.
Why don't you jizzbags ever call Japan sushi-eating surrender monkeys,
Because the Japanese fought until the bitter end and it took the combined blow of two atomic bombs and the intervention of the Russians to force them to surrender.
or the Germans spaetzle-eating suicide monkeys?
Actually the suicide monkeys part would be more appliable to the Japanese.... *duck* And see previous comment... the Germans fought until the bitter end. Germany was completely devastated. Tell me, was every major French city carpet bombed into oblivion when they surrendered?
Should the Vietnamese call us burger-chomping shrapnel-monkeys
I wouldn't blame them if they did ;)
It's even like this is unique to France. I've heard my fair share of jokes made at the expense of Italy because of their horrible performance during WW2. In fact, I recall reading somewhere that when the German ambassador told Churchill that the Axis had the Italians on their side, Churchill said "Good for you. We had them during the last war."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.