Originally posted by: Engineer
Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper
Originally posted by: soccerballtuxThere is no more wealth in manufacturing, we need to go get reeducated as engineers if we want to move forward.
Are you saying that if we re-educate everyone as engineers that we will have enough jobs for all of the new engineers? Let's make it simple and pretend that we merely double the number of engineers. If we double the number of engineers, will the number of jobs available for engineers at currently prevailing wage rates also double? In other words, will an increase in supply magically increase the demand at previous price point?
Let's talk about scientists. We already have a large oversupply of Ph.D. scientists, so would it make sense for us to produce even more scientists?
Also, in your view, do Americans have a monopoly on doing the world's engineering and science work? Is that something that only Americans do well or do the best job at? Wouldn't that be a rather racist notion--that only Americans can do that kind of work, at least at the highest level, and that engineers and scientists in other nations are inferior to American engineers and scientists?
To follow up on what Engineer said, let me point out that wealth has to be created and also that you cannot consume more wealth than you produce. That is to say that we as a nation cannot consume more wealth than we produce which means that we cannot sustain our huge trade deficit forever. As a nation, we need to grow up and focus on becoming self-sufficient instead of selling our hard assets (land and capital) to other nations in exchange for ephemeral consumer goods. This means that we need to address Global Labor Arbitrage and Population Explosion (aka Malthusian Forces). We also need to address the issue of the populace's Rationality Factor.
:thumbsup:
There's plenty of demand for engineers in this recession. No oversupply of engineers.
In my experience, yes, Americans on the whole are better engineers than Asians, Indians. Americans think outside the box. The Asians and Indians educated over there usually get confused because the problem does not fit with the style in which they learned (which is to say, they haven't seen a problem like it before, because they, overwhelmingly, learn by memorization and not problem solving). This only applies to Asians/Indians that were trained in Asian/Indian schools.
I completely agree on your wealth statement. I'm just saying that engineering is where any new wealth can be created-- we can't all be finance or business majors anymore. Engineering is where new solar panel tech is going to come from. Biomedical engineering is where new drugs and cheaper cures are going to come from. Nanotechnology, specifically in relation to biotech. Gene sequencing and engineering. There are plenty of market segments begging to be exploited, that we simply don't have the manpower to explore. And they're all directly related to the field of engineering or health. We have plenty of health tech to sell to the world but we seem hellbent on crippling the system that drives the research, simply because 15% aren't covered. Mark my words, the passing of UHC will be the start of the end of spending on research. All the money will go to curing known diseases, so people will call on the government to spend even more, on research, to pick up the lost slack. Anyways, health would have been the next big thing because prices don't spiral out of control endlessly, eventually the public would have figured out you could make a lot of money doing that, and they'd start to be willing to go spend 10 years of their life in post-secondary education for those paychecks-- it's all about incentives, and currently it's not worth it to us to spend a third of our lives in education to be a doctor. Why people think we should legislate the problem away (when every other country that has tried this has had to ration care and/or quality of services has fallen-- ex. being the USA's cancer survival rates being 50% higher than NHS's) is beyond me.
Best: get an undergrad in engineering. Work for 5 years, master your trade, go back and get an MBA. On the side, learn Chinese. Then you can employ those millions of Chinese engineers by looking at the problem and wording it and phrasing it in a way they can understand.
I'm serious. There's something fundamentally different about the way their children are raised, from the way ours are raised, that affects brain development and their abilities for their entire life. We have our kids solve puzzles, put the cube into the square hole and the prism into the triangular hole. They don't do this (yet). Pray they don't start learn to solve, for your sake; you'd rather them keep memorizing. Otherwise they might turn into big-picture-thinker engineers like we currently have.
Again-- best thing you can do is learn Chinese and think like an engineer; if you want to survive the next 50 years, that is. Of course, we could just blame our way out of it and keep electing people who will "stimulate" to keep us fed and watching TV. It's what every other superpower did on its way down.
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