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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.
China and India have had massive, massive pushes to educate engineers, medical workers, technology workers, etc. The shift is the pay off.
A couple decades ago my brother, an engineer with Dow Chemical related the project he was managing - an project would be begun in North America, passed to a team in Japan or Oceana, then passed to India, before passing along to Europe and back to North America - each location meeting its objectives as part of the project. That was two decades back. So you can see there are people capable of engineering, research, medical discoveries and such in abundance by now. No doubt someone in Thailand is waking up about now and will correct any spelling errors I have made in this post.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If it is indeed so, get rid of any means to facilitate it - offshoring being the primary offender. No different than stopping blood from a wound versus allowing someone to bleed to death.
This is one of the better cases for why we should train our own instead of everyone else. If there's any spare room after the least capable citizen has been trained, only then should the US consider friendly internationals - for which are not generally found in Asia.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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?
The low U.S. share of global engineering degrees in recent years is striking
Americans don't want to learn science and engineering, because it's hard. It takes years of extremely hard work.
I went through university with a business major. I saw the kind of work he did because he was asking me for tutoring help; the "hard" things he was learning were unbelievably trivial. I'd estimate his degree was a factor of 50 easier than mine; I could have taken all his classes, not studied for shit, and come out with straight A's, all with less effort than I was spending on a single difficult engineering class.
Of course, he now makes more than I do. So why on earth would anyone want to go through what I did, when you could go through the far, far easier thing HE did, and be more financially rewarded for it?
In the end American's lack of interest in science, technology, math, and engineering will sink the ship. You cannot compete in today's global world unless you (as a people) understand how that modern world works, and Americans don't wish to understand, because it's hard work. You reap what you sow. I've been saying this for the last 30 years, and now here we are, going down in flames to better educated countries. Surprise surprise. I used to give a shit, but then I learned there was nothing I could do to make people care, so I just gave up. No point in getting upset over it. I'm resigned to my country falling out of its former place as the world powerhouse of science and engineering. In the 50's, 60's, it was very much the USA, and everyone else a distant second. Now, that's reversing. So be it.
I have a relative who works as a researcher for a major drug company. She had to move laterally in the company after they announced they were moving all new drug discovery work to China.
As a senior Computer Science PhD student, this has me worried. I also know of a few recent American CS graduates that have gone to China to work as researchers for a particular American software company because that company's US research offices weren't hiring. I still know plenty of other graduates who had no difficulty finding research positions in the US, but it seems that a few major players are shifting their work to Asia. Hopefully the rest won't follow.
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.
"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.
In my recent (and extensive) experience with interviewing people who are recent graduates, I am finding a very large percentage of people with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science who can't write even the most simple scripts in any language... people with "expert in TCP/IP networking" in their qualifications, or who have three years testing routers and switches listed as experience who don't know what NAT means or what a MAC address is... people who don't know how to list running processes on any platform. These are people who are graduates. They have their degree. And those degrees are worthless. We've had half a dozen positions open where I work for a long while, the bar just isn't set that high, but we're not finding qualified applicants.
It doesn't matter what nationality the school or the "graduate" is. Poorly-prepared graduates are a world-wide phenomenon. Sure, Asia is producing a large number of graduates, but the majority of them aren't going to be very useful. The U.S. is producing fewer engineering graduates, but they're just as useless.
Yes, the universities are to blame. I don't know what they're teaching but it has little to do with reality and doesn't prepare the students to be employable. But the students are also to blame. Surveys show that between 75 and 98% of students admit to cheating, and don't feel particularly bad about it; the universities also don't seem to think that cheating is anything to get worked up over either. No wonder nobody is learning anything.
All of this is why I don't think that it's a big deal that the US produces only 4% of engineering degrees; 4% of "nothing useful" is no worse than "35% of nothing useful". If those degrees actually meant something, or correlated in any meaningful way to success (both for the individual and for the employer), I'd be more concerned. My real worry is that Westerners aren't even interested in engineering any more; they all want to be in sales and marketing and other nontechnical fields (or "soft" majors like political science or humanities, followed by whining about how nobody will pay six figure salaries for their chosen field). I'm not sure why this is,,, given how little tech work someone with a tech degree seems to actually be required to do, it can't be because of academic workload. Mind you, the profound anti-intellectualism that is still the rule in Western society may have something to do with it.
-sigh- Kids these days.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
That would make some sense if "our own" actually wanted to be trained for technical careers. Very few of them do; you can see this by walking into any American university's engineering classes.
Of course, we can debate the causes for this (is it the jobs are unpopular because kids aren't interested in "hard" subjects? or is it that the jobs don't pay enough relative to the time and effort required and age discrimination is too common, so smart kids are avoiding these careers because the American companies have made them bad jobs, and they're going into finance and law positions instead?), but whether the cause is from the bottom or the top, or a combination of the two, it is what it is: Americans aren't interested in technical careers, while Asians are. The Asians aren't taking away anyone's jobs.
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?
Then why was literacy so long the domain of Monks? Who were not known for their richness...
Even back then an education was of limited wealth. A person needs a baker each and every day but how often do you need a letter written when you are a lumberjack or a small farmer?
Star Trek never touched upon the problem of what all those billions of people making up the rest of humanity were doing. It had some episodes with miners in them but they made no sense if you wondered why people would mine for stuff in a world with replicator technology. Count the number of episodes where they still desperately need a part despite a working replicator sitting in every cabin.
The simple fact is that the western economy post WW2 survived on the factory worker and the harvester (miners etc) when those jobs disappeared entire regions grew depressed and never really recovered. Meanwhile modern media kept showing "Friends" with people with jobs that never require them to simply be in from 9/5 doing just average not very interesting work. The entire economy (if you believe the media) runs on odd jobs paying enough to afford gigantic flats in the heart of New York and more time off then a Greek working for the state.
Walmart is celebrated by these people as offering very cheap goods without anybody wondering that if nobody local gets payed to make these goods and if the people selling them don't get payed much either... then who can afford these goods in the long run?
Go ahead, go to a store and try to buy western made goods... oh, they still exist, somewhat... e-reader. Name one made in the west. Tablets? MADE in the west? Where is the factory with the production line paying dozens if not of hundreds of people funding an entire large city producing iPads?
It isn't just about engineers who make iPads, it is about engineers who make brake pads. Just as most scientist end up working in a production facility doing the same tests over and over, most engineers do not make ground breaking tecnology, but keeping that development on break pads going with all the production know how, that can keep an entire town in business. Jobs for the average person, a reason for the highly educated to come back to their home town.
Remember a little game called SimCity? Fun game right? Do you remember how it was very easy to create slum areas by accident because there weren't enough jobs near by?
Okay... now enlarge SimCity to SimWorld and remove all the factory from that little corner of the world called the west and put all the work and housing the "Asia"... what happens? Do the endless living areas with only shops become an affluent area or ,,, do they become Detroit? Manchester? De Bijlmer (pure living area now being torn down in Amsterdam Holland, do you think bad planning are a US problem only?)
Douglas Adam spoke of three arks, what were the A and C arks again? And what ark are we keeping here? Think about it, we outsourced production (c ark) and now the research is following (a ark)... that makes us the B ark... better start collecting those leaves.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Baloney. The US is still the world's largest manufacturing nation.
China assembles iPhones, athletic shoes and similar consumer knick-knacks. The US makes airliners, CPUs, pharmaceuticals, heavy mining and earth-movers and food.
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/
Yes engineering has advantages when located close to manufacturing sites. That is not the same as R&D.
The US R&D spend rate is still very high. Even though it isn't as high as it should be it is still only barely exceeded by all of Asia combined as a percentage of the world, i.e. 31% vs 32%.
From: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-and-innovation-policy/finance/news/asian-countries-collectively-top-us-r-d-spend.html
The total science spend of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam rose steadily between 1999 and 2009 to reach 32 per cent of the global share of spending on science, compared with 31 per cent in the US. Per capital the US spends 10x Asia.
The US needs to up it's game, certainly. But dig into the stats and the picture is not at all what it is painted to be in sensationalized news articles.
Next time you use a USB device, google up who invented it.
Ok, right after I finish bitching about the stupidity of the connector design. What idiot thought it'd be a good idea to have a connector that can only go in one way, but that is symmetrical?
I just hope the guys who invented the electrical and software parts of the spec aren't the same as the moron who invented the mechanical part.
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.
No, absolutely not. Not until all American graduates in STEM actually receive good faith treatment by US employers, instead of having their resumes ignored. I'm a 2002, top quartile graduate of a top 20 school, in EE/CS. Sent out thousands of customized cover letters and resumes, only to receive, at best, a dozen responses over the years, and many of the phone interviews/inquiries weren't even in good faith (ie: it was obvious that at least a few were only intended to disqualify me). H-1B and guest workers have destroyed the industry, destroyed the job prospects of people in the industry, and destroyed lives like mine.