-David Altig talks about the odd phenomena that sometimes the most anti-Keynesian people in the room are the New Keynesians.
-Gene Callahan talks about how crying wolf on state brutality can increase the brutality of the state.
-Evan points me to an article by Vivek Wadhwa on going into engineering vs. the liberal arts. Wadhwa is one of the more outspoken voices in the science and engineering workforce community, and usually he's very concerned about the brain drain and the sufficiency of the high skill workforce, so his perspective in this post was a bit of a surprise to me.
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I wonder why Bill Gates simply does not consider hiring self-taught geeks and giving them on-the-job training through the organization. Why does he focus so much on external educators to provide him with his required staff?
ReplyDeleteWhat is ironic is that Gates talks a lot about education, despite him being the man who forced Steve Ballmer out of business school and him being a man who was just too damn smart for Harvard (to the point that he left). He is the precise example of learning business by doing business, rather than learning business by doing education.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/09/11/counting-people-and-people-who-count/
"The capitalist response is to emphasize vocational skills, whether at the low level of shop and computer courses or on the high level of mathematics and science. Bill Gates, himself a model victim of American education, thinks that he can do some good by rewarding students for designing innovative technical projects before they have learned anything about who they are or why they are alive. The results are all around us: the technological barbarians who cannot even imagine the moral problems presented by cloning, in vitro fertilization, and the virtual reality in which young people are imprisoned.
Most of us, who are neither angels nor monks, would like to have money; sensible people would like to earn their money by pursuing an interesting and useful career. We all understand that an aspiring physician, lawyer, or engineer must receive specialized training, but what hardly anyone realizes is that money, career, and profession are, in most cases, only marginally connected to the serious purpose of education. The application of businesslike methods to politics or education is routinely disastrous, because the object of statecraft or teaching is quite different from the object of business."
The "brain drain" idea has always been rather disturbing to me; people aren't owned by the state after all.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that any assumption that people are owned by the state is implicit in the idea of a brain drain, Gary.
ReplyDeleteYou could theoretically have a brain drain from an anarchist society too.
"Brain drain" simply implies that high skill labor is leaving a particular labor market.
And it tends to imply that is a bad thing and that "we" ought to do something about it (I've never heard of Wadwha, so I have no idea how he uses it). You see that rhetoric all the time regarding developing world medical personnel practicing in the developed world.
ReplyDelete"You could theoretically have a brain drain from an anarchist society too."
Why would anarchists care exactly?
Indeed, an anarchist would applaud such probably; maximalized free choice, etc.
ReplyDeleteOK, well I'm just not sure what the state has to do with it - another instance where you bring it in inexplicably.
ReplyDeleteThe skill level of a society is closely related to progress in that society. I want to live around smart, creative, skilled, ambitious people. I have no idea what government has to do with it.
"OK, well I'm just not sure what the state has to do with it..."
ReplyDeleteBecause it is based on a presupposition that somehow or another the arbitrary borders we call nation-states should have something to do with where people travel.
Always in the back of these concepts are a priori concepts like that.
re: "Because it is based on a presupposition that somehow or another the arbitrary borders we call nation-states should have something to do with where people travel."
ReplyDeleteNation states?
Labor markets are not necessarily contiguous with nation-states, Gary.
I'd be the first to agree; the entire planet is one labor market. Brain drain though has a nation-state preconception to it.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, on the whole Wadwha thing, I wonder if he ever asks - is a university education really all that important to begin with?
I actually would have gone the other way - that labor markets are often sub-national. There is a pretty big monopsony labor market literature on this. Granted, higher skilled workers are going to have broader labor markets - although still probably not quite global. But certainly multi-national in a lot of cases.
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