Brooks: America’s brightest minds have been abandoning technical enterprise

The Founding Fathers were aware of this. In fact John Adams saw it as an aspiration:<p>"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I have to say Brooks' ability of denial is quite impressive. He is so good at not seeing the elephant in the room, it is no wonder he has a prestigious job with the NYT.<p>He wrote an entire article about how Americans are "abandoning" manufacturing without ever mentioning offshoring. If you read his article you would think that the American decline in manufacturing has something to do with some weird pretentiousness of the American workers and nothing to do with the millions of manufacturing jobs leaving the country.

During the industrial revolution you had an explosion in manufacturing. Prior to that most people were employed in agriculture. I wonder if we looked at editorials from the time we'd find pundits bemoaning the loss of agricultural jobs/industry, or that the "best and brightest" weren't interested in animal husbandry.<p>The relative cost of turning a lump of metal into a car has only gone down over the years. This is the case with most manufacturing. The marginal value of "building stuff" decreases. This makes answering the higher level questions more valuable.<p>Perfect example would be YC. They could have made another technology startup with their various talents, but instead they produce more value by consulting and acting as the middle man between skilled kids that need funding and people with piles of money that don't know how to pick winners.

"Most people who lived in the year 1800 were scarcely richer than people who lived in the year 100,000 B.C."<p>From the perspective of a well-paid NYT journalist, maybe. But I doubt the average 18th century farmer would have traded his iron tools, draft animals and brick-built house for the flint axes and caves of his ancestors.

This topic seems to come up quite often. I personally don't know whether an investment banker contributes more to society than a motor engineer. However the expected income for the i-banker seems to be higher. I.e. this is an incentive problem. People can talk all they want about the intrinsic satisfaction in producing actual goods, but at the end of the day we all need to pay rent, eat, pay back student loans, and spring for the occasional round of drinks.

I work in quantitative finance, and I think that Brooks is working with slightly out-of-date statistics. The financial crisis has been very rough on the headcount and morale of most financial institutions, and has impacted quant funds particularly roughly.<p>It was fairly easy to view finance as a safe and socially acceptable career in 2007, and that was reflected in the recruiting numbers at the time. The past 3 years have disabused many of us of that impression, and the effects are being seen right now in the career decisions top students and people already in finance are making.<p>20% of the people in my little corner of quant finance have left for tech jobs or startups in the last 4 months, and I'm hoping to follow them as soon as I get enough traction on my side project. I hope for their sake that current students have also figured out that the game has changed and are directing their ambitions toward tech.

The answer to this is pretty clear.<p>You can make billions of dollars in the business (particularly in finance), screw people over with little or no consequence, and you can't do that as easily as an engineer.<p>But i disagree that our best and brightest aren't trying. There are still engineers, and there are still people going out and becoming doctors, regardless of the difficulties in their fields.<p>The problem is that to do interesting and innovative things in tech, you have to go up against the regulatory and entrenched business interests in the US. The Obama Administration is having to contend with this, and Google has tried and failed to contend with this (look at the Nexus One experiment, and their whitespace wireless efforts).<p>It sucks to try and disrupt in the US.

Upvoted because its a good starting point for discussion, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the premise. Why should anyone go into a productive industry (by which it sounds like he means anything in which there is an end product) as we move into a service economy and production continues to be off-shored? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding/missing the point. It seems like people at all levels should go where the money and jobs are.

Mike Rowe spoke on this during his TED talk. <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...</a>

Wait. When did making more and more stuff become a gauge of national production? Just because something is intangible doesn't mean that it isn't wealth.<p>Moreover, the 1800 Britain he talks about in which technology roamed free was a horrifying place to live in if you didn't belong in the right categories. It was a time when the world of Charles Dickens wasn't a fantasy.<p>The problem over here isn't the fact that the USA is moving from technology or innovation. It's just that the shape of it has changed. Instead of dashing off a patent for a new harvest machine. Today, people apply themselves in creating digital enterprises(not just software, this includes algorithms, hardware, AI, media, etc). Yet, the metrics that plug those super policies don't take this into account; if there was a measure of the total lines of code written in the USA then they might start taking things differently.

The MBAs get to lay off the engineers. The engineers' kids figure this out.

&#62;&#62; How did this growth start? In his book “The Enlightened Economy,” Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University argues that the crucial change happened in people’s minds.<p>Or you could just say that they invented and started using steam engine that removed the cap on physical work output of any given population. They just needed to dig some coal, so they did. Rest is history.

Is it irony that we have a guy whose degree is in history writing about the rest of us not going into technical fields?

Jesus you can't make a buck in this market, the country's goin' to hell faster than when that son of a bitch Roosevelt was in charge. Too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The worst mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard.

well, women do like lawyers, doctors, VPs, CEOs, etc much more than say plumbers or programmers.

Define "brightest minds." I don't agree with their implied definition.

Hey, you can't post a link to Hacker News starting with "Brooks:" when it's not Fred Brooks. Seriously! Who is this David?

Pure link bait; the actual article does not say anything of the sort. The article is, in fact making the point Americans as a whole no longer "make things", and are avoiding getting their hands dirty.I'm not sure if the premise is true - it would be nice to see some hard data to back it up.