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US Losing R&D Dominance To Asia?
bednarz writes "U.S. companies are locating more of their R&D operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board said in a report released this week. The number of overseas researchers employed by U.S. multinationals nearly doubled from 138,000 in 2004 to 267,000 in 2009, for example. On the education front, the U.S. accounts for just 4% of undergraduate engineering degrees awarded globally, compared to China (34%), Japan (5%), and India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand (17% collectively). 'The low U.S. share of global engineering degrees in recent years is striking; well above half of all such degrees are awarded in Asia,' NSB said in its report."
And most of that 4% in the US is Asian anyways. Just hope we can keep them here in the US after graduation instead of shipping them back to China because our fucked up immigration policy.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
This is simply the race to the bottom that corporate America is pursuing writ large. When we traded our democracy for a corporatocracy, this was the inevitable result.
I personally know people in industry who have been warning of this for the last 20 years. The "new economy" of that era promised to reduce costs by moving manufacturing overseas while keeping R&D in the USA. People who knew how R&D worked said that the manufacturing was, if nothing else, necessary to the local support (machinists, PWB fabs, etc.) that support R&D.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with Asia having well above half of the world's population.
Of course this has nothing to do with the anti science movement that took over when W was in office and is still a matter of fact for half the population.
Half the american public are against "intellectuals", against evolution, deny climate change and think that investing in science is against God or is far to great a burden on the economy and you're surprised at this?
We need a new standard for what a company has to be like to call itself a U.S. company and be eligible for any the benefits of such title. Multinationals with little U.S. corporate responsibility need not apply. If corporations are people, then let them take a citizenship test.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Most American parents can't or can hardly afford to send their children to University anymore.
That's what college loans are for: so that you can start your working life far enough in the hole that you could have bought a house with the money. It saves you from buying a house, freeing you to pay rent on top of the loans until you can finally buy a house later for your grandchildren to visit you.
Or at least that seems to be the theory. Me, I paid for all of mine so they can start out clear. That's more important to me than retiring to a place within golf cart distance of the clubhouse.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
They shouldn't be here in the first place if they're taking slots that belong to our own citizens.
I'm not from the US, so I don't really know, but I always understood that a "slot" at a university in the US is reserved for the person that pays. If the citizens can't pay it, than the universities will just fill these slots by foreigners who can, no?
No sense in not training our own versus helping the enemy.
In light of what I said above, you might want to consider Ferengi aquisition rule N 177: "Know your enemies ... but do business with them always."
"Enemy"?
I happen to believe that there is no sense in paying the Chinese to build products that we are going to buy. Especially when we're just supporting the mistreatment of their workers.
On the other hand, there's every reason to have Chinese and Indians and Iranians and Nigerians, etc come to this country to learn. Because they raise the average.
My daughter coasted through high school, even though both of her parents are professional academics. She had little ambition and little direction. Her interaction with foreign students who actually place a very high value on their education has had a great effect on her. When she got to college, she saw how hard some people work as opposed to some of the kids she hung around with in high school. She saw students helping each other with study groups, tutoring, even sharing books. It took her a while but now she studies with a group of kids that includes Chinese and Korean and Eastern European students, and in Mathematics, when you hook up with smart people, it's a big help, as opposed to many American students who come in as big swinging dicks and think they've got an A coming as a birthright.
National borders are artificial. Cultural borders are not. There may not be a reason to see research and development as some grand competition, or the moral equivalent of war, but there is every reason to start spending a lot more money, public money, on R&D. Not because we have to "beat" the Chinese, but because we have to beat a whole lot of problems right here at home, and over-come the increasing anti-intellectualism of many Americans. Of course, I don't think that's going to be an applause line at the South Carolina Republican debate tonight.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They shouldn't be here in the first place if they're taking slots that belong to our own citizens.
I'm not from the US, so I don't really know, but I always understood that a "slot" at a university in the US is reserved for the person that pays. If the citizens can't pay it, than the universities will just fill these slots by foreigners who can, no?
No sense in not training our own versus helping the enemy.
In light of what I said above, you might want to consider Ferengi aquisition rule N 177: "Know your enemies ... but do business with them always."
Universities, as far back as I can remember, have been thrilled to take on best qualified entrants, no matter where they come from. They do pay for the honor, however, often as much as three times the tuition of an in-state resident. If you don't like it, bother your public university Trustees about limiting availibility or raising the Out of State/Out of Country tuition rates to your satisfaction.
That said, the US has benefited tremendously from foreign-born university graduates, who have started companies who employ american citizens and enrich investors.
Perhaps there'd be less xenophobia if American youth didn't feel being "cool" and "fitting in with the crowd" was more important than cracking a book open on the weekend. How often in a Monday class have I heard people in the back row parroting what was said on some show, or in some film, or how the 49ers did, rather than how they think they have the material for the class well covered.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Indeed. I've made this point several times.
Generally people who think of the 'innovation' economy are largely ignorant colonial thinkers. They lurk in academia or places like Silicon Valley and by in large live in a bubble.
They tend to think like 'I'm working on high-tech and it's a great living' so if everyone was as educated as me, everyone could have a good educated job! Of course it eventually hits home that there's no demand for so many educated people.
It's great to be educated... but that doesn't mean people are going to pay you lots of money for it.
The progressives especially have pushed the idea that education leads to jobs. Which is true... so long as there aren't that many educated people.
But as more and more of the world becomes educated, in reality you run into the same problem that manufacturing hit. Its a commodity. Just like how being the only literate person in a village hundreds of years ago probably entitled you to a reasonable living. But today, in a Western country where pretty much everyone is literate... it means nothing.
And yes a portion of that means that with free trade and globalization, R&D work will get pushed to the country with a lower standard of living. This is not just in terms of pay, but also in terms of quality of people. For example, given the pay scale in North America, a decent software engineer might make 100k. That's not going to attract the best and brightest. They've learned and now go into finance, law, medicine...
Compare imagine what quality engineer you could buy in India/China for 100K? You're talking the best and brightest... and they're motivated.
And people who now worry about high-tech moving offshore face a huge moral dilemma. They've spent the past 50 years with the following mentality.
- farm work? let migrant workers do it.. our people will find other jobs
- textiles? we can do it cheaper overseas. who cares about the western textile worker's job.
- manufacturing? we can do it cheaper overseas. who cares about the western manufacturing worker.
Now suddenly, their 'educated labor' is a commodity and can be done overseas... now suddenly you see people worrying.
Why should the manufacturing worker or service sector worker should have to pay higher prices for western made R&D or pay taxes to support Western R&D?
Yes, I'm educated and work in high tech, but I do get pretty annoyed at educated people be they coworkers or those in the public sector who seem to think education entitles them to a high standard of living. It's going to hit home pretty fast.
What is the point of cracking open a science textbook when you are going to be competing with people in Asia who can produce the same level of genius for pennies on the dollar?
I don't care what you can learn here in America, someone in China can learn the same thing and apply that knowledge for far lower wages than you.
These people are willing to live in cages. Literally. Look.
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/11/21/hong-kong-citizens-living-cages-literally/
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Try moving to China to get a job. I dare you. Good luck with that. Then come back and tell me how artificial those borders are.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Admiration is nice, but sadly it doesn't usually pay the bills. While I'd definitely be flattered if someone copied one of my designs and it got mega popular, if I don't get money from it, it doesn't really help me. I still have to eat.
Why would we want dirty manufacturing and industry in the US??
Better that we have lawyers and doctors and movie directors and investment bankers and graphics artists and social workers and compliance officers and other good clean people like that.
What makes you think that the world wants to buy the services of our lawyers? Or the doctors? Are you expecting the lawyers to sue the world to support the movie directors, even when the movies are made overseas (to save costs, if nothing else)?
American investment bankers are not in great demand either lately. The world seems to value Japanese graphics artists more than American ones. The Government is cutting back on the social workers -- we need to save money. The rest of the world doesn't seem to want American compliance officers, either.
However, the rest of the world does pay for American coal. We have the largest proven coal reserves on the planet, and if we don't manufacture finished goods to ship overseas to pay for our imports we'll just have to export coal. Well, that and cut our standard of living back to the level that we can afford as a country whose primary enterprise is digging holes in the ground.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If the production (now), design (mostly now), and basic R&D (very soon) are all done in some part of Asia, how long before the shareholders realize that they can temporarily bump the stock price even more by paying some Asians 10% of the compensation that the American executive team is getting?
Uh, how about you and your company try the novel idea of TRAINING people how to do their job, instead of expecting them to do your job for you by training themselves. If companies would quit expecting their employees to walk in already trained on their specific skill needs and actually get down to taking 1-2 months of training their employees, they might actually solve the problem of not having enough skilled candidates. Use their major and them having a degree as a screening criteria for work-ethic and overall ability to accomplish tasks put to them under a deadline, but don't expect them to be tailor made to suit your field. -rs
This is simply the race to the bottom that corporate America is pursuing writ large. When we traded our democracy for a corporatocracy, this was the inevitable result.
You are mistaken. It is Consumer America, not Corporate America, that is responsible for the race to the bottom. Corporations do not care where things are made or who makes them. All things being equal they would have things made locally by locals. There are coordination and transportation costs when you move manufacturing or development to some distant place. These additional costs would have to be offset somehow.
Corporations primarily care about sales, costs are secondary to sales. Cost cutting is only desirable if it (1) generates new sales or (2) preserves existing sales but increases the profit margin. Now consider who controls the sales, it is the consumer.
Consumers are responsible for the current situation because the consumer preference is for the lowest priced product or service, the consumer does not care where manufacturing or development takes place. **If** consumers did care where manufacturing or engineering took place and **if** this preference was reflected in buying decisions then corporations would not engage in off-shoring since it would hurt sales.
In other words the U.S. experienced a lot of off-shoring because consumers rewarded those companies that off-shored with sales. **If** consumers had punished those companies but buying domestically manufactured/engineered products from competitors then off-shoring would have been a failed experiment and not have become a major trend. It was all in the hands of the consumer, it still is.
While much manufacturing has moved off-shore the web has made it easier than ever to find domestically manufactured products. If consumers start showing a preference for such goods then off-shoring can be reversed. The power is in the hands of those making the buying decisions, the consumer, not the corporation.
A lot of times, if you get a TA or RA assistanceship, your tuition is paid and you get a monthly stipend, in effect paying you to go to school. Yes, you'll have to do research (more likely do grunt work for your prof) or teach undergrad classes (more likely do grunt-work homework grading and study sessions), but it's better than tripling your student loans.
The downside is that you're stuck in school for 2 more years, making no real money, while you could be going into industry and getting real-world experience while making close to 6 figures. You probably also would be building up more interest on those undergrad loans, though you can usually defer payment. Once you get out, you will get a higher salary generally for an MS degree, but not so much more that it makes it worth it, most likely (this is debatable). But for a PhD, it's much worse; it takes even more time than the MS (compounding those interest and no-pay factors), and you don't get any more salary for it except for a few select disciplines, and in fact it'll disqualify you from a lot of jobs because they'll think you want more money (which you will), and they don't want expensive workers, they want cheap ones. Generally, PhDs in engineering fields (and most others) are only useful if your career goal in life is to become a university professor.
Be able to solve practical problems. More and more frequently, employers (like my company) are using quizzes as a filter. I can't speak to other industries; I'm in QA at a networking products company.
Don't claim to be an expert in something you can't back up. If your resume says "Expert in TCP/IP networking", I'm going to be asking for more than just "describe the handshake at the start of a TCP session". If you claim to know Python, I'm going to ask you to write some code on the whiteboard that will involve process management, recursion and exception-handling. If you claim to know regular expressions, you're going to need to know how to extract phone numbers. If you say you know Linux, be prepared to tell me what the /proc filesystem is. And no matter what, I'm going to ask about the implications of the GPL in coding.
Know what the company does and what its main products/services are. When I ask someone if they're familiar with what we do, there's little that is going to be more off-putting than "I didn't bother to find out".
If you have a serious mad-on against Apple, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, or whatever, leave it at home. All operating systems suck. All phone suck. All database servers All business practices suck. They just suck in different ways, and I don't want to have doubts raised about whether someone is going to be disruptive, argumentative, or less than enthusiastic when they're asked to work on a particular port of a product. The more opinionated someone is, the less they actually know.
For the love of Celestia, please spell-check your resume. Communication is important, and if someone can't be bothered to get it right on their application/resume, I'm pretty sure they're going to be even worse on the job. Resumes loaded with errors go straight into the trash can.
In short, be able to demonstrate coding skills, initiative, and enough platform skills to convince folks of your basic competence. You do that and you're above about 80% of the folks out there right away.
Ask questions. Remember, you're interviewing us right back! There are quite a few companies out there that you want no part of (stress-monkey coworkers,
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.