That Giant Sucking Sound
How refusing visas to foreign grad students and researchers, blocking stem-cell research, and privileging 19th century industries over 21st are creating a creative brain drain away from the U.S.
We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other’s knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment in southern California, new financial instruments in New York, computer products in northern California and Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington, D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology in Boston. […]But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step—or if you will, the first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects of what we consider brainwork—writing computer code, analyzing X-rays—are being lured away by countries like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs and educated workforces large enough to do the job. Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn’t happened.
What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition—the other pincer of the claw—as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They’re doing it through a variety of means—from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States’ province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world’s leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle.
I know I’m applying for Irish citizenship .
(Via The Null Device )
Something that keeps occurring to me as I see all these articles about the aging of Europe's population, and its declining numbers...
Europe is going to need more productive citizens in the near future. Being modern, developed countries, they will have a need for highly educated and skilled workers as well as the unskilled sort. Over on the other side of the pond, a large number of Americans are finding themselves at odds with some of their fellow citizens' ideas of just what this country is all about. Americans have ancestral ties to Europe, and Europe has a need for workers and a political climate that some will find more congenial.
Could this lead to a "Back to Europe" movement among some segments of the American population? (And wouldn't some extreme left-wingers get quite a laugh out of the exquisite irony?) I must admit that the concept seems far-fetched to me, but stranger things have happened.
Posted by Jimcat on January 23 2004 09:24
But surely it's extremely good idea that the rest of the world is getting richer, better educated, stronger industry, better living standards? Surely no moral person who isn't a super-chauvinist thinks that much of the world should be held, long-term, at one-twentieth of the earning power of America (or whatever)? This is simply inevitable in a developing, growing richer, world, that inequities become fewer.
Posted by Gary Farber on January 24 2004 20:45
"I know I’m applying for Irish citizenship ."
I read, since Clinton, US citizens who give up citizenship have their assets forfeited. Or did I just halucinate that?
Posted by Drp on February 17 2004 10:05
I think you're thinking of this. It's nothing so severe as forfeiting all assets, just measures to tax people trying to renounce citizenship as a means to dodge taxes.
'sides, since the U.S. formally doesn't recognize dual citizenship, neither to permit nor to forbid it, I could get my Irish citizenship (and even, if I chose, move to Ireland, use an Irish passport, pay taxes in Ireland and look fairly indinstinguishable from an Irish citizen, my surname notwithstanding) without renouncing my U.S. citizenship.
Posted by Zed on February 17 2004 11:18