5 ms·

America’s Real Dream Team

66 points by raju 17y ago

holdenc 17y ago
A few unrelated thoughts: I've seen some of the brightest people get shipped back to their home country after their "practical training" (the year allowed for work after a foreigner's college graduation). This is the worst type of protectionism, bordering on xenophobia. Our country was built by great immigrants, period. Secondly, most emerging economies emphasize math and sciences much more than America. If the awards were for art and literature we'd likely see more diversity here. And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs, or some job that pays well but is provincial and soul crushing.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - drhodes 17y ago
    don't forget music.
  - silverlake 17y ago
    I (asian) won several English and history essay contests in my midwestern state. Most of the winners were asian immigrants. Also did well in speech and debate. Me no speaky english too good as boy, but teacher spend time and long study to talk american.
  - bbgm 17y ago
    There's more than enough Indians whose command of English is masterful. Many of us end up reading advanced prose as kids, and even in technical institutes spend a lot of our time engaged in literature-related extracurricular activities.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
- marshallp 17y ago
  The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian. The spelling bee champions nowadays tend to be indian. Once hard working societies like india/china catch on that there's money in arts, I'd bet that to be overtaken as well. "And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs" I'd bet wall street gets more top notch work done than academia or productive industry. If only they'd get incentives worked out like wall street has, you might get a new industrial revolution going.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    I always thought there is a serious problem with our country when the best and brightest go to work in the financial sector.
    - marshallp 17y ago
      I don't. There is massive misallocation of capital still going on by government and unsophisticated businessman (such as your local businesses or small venture capital) that wall street could fix. The current problem on wall street is that there is too much money chasing too few deals (government regulation/ownership prevent many asset classes from being tradeable) and bailouts (which defeat the incentives in capitalism - incentive to not fail). Both problems are caused by government.
  - dgordon 17y ago
    "The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian." Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction? Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses (or do you mean a different book by Rushdie?) besides the fact that it pissed off some religious dictator?
    - marshallp 17y ago
      Midnight Children edit: won the "booker of booker" prize (the best book out of all the booker prize winners over the past 40 years)
- anamax 17y ago
  > A few unrelated thoughts: I've seen some of the brightest people get shipped back to their home country after their "practical training" (the year allowed for work after a foreigner's college graduation). Much of America sees "import more low skilled workers" as a bad idea. This is relevant because the tech industry and most other folks interested in importing more brains has joined forces with the folks who want to import low skilled workers. Since most of america is willing to import brains, the wisdom of this pairing from the "import brains" side is unclear.
- fghjkkjuhg 17y ago
  Don't worry we will make sure they stay on the bottom rung of the ladder - safely managed by guys called Chester from Yale or Havard who have never seen a public school. After all these are just geeks.
henning 17y ago
One thing that's interesting is to track where these child prodigy/overachiever types wind up later in life. Some of them can't be found in a Google search, which probably means they didn't start any companies, publish any papers, or anything like that. Others wind up leading very distinguished careers, like Terence Tao.
AndrewO 17y ago
> If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it... And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. Have you actually done that, Tom? Or are you just reselling us your same old fantasy story about how easy it is to coordinate a bunch of companies from a bunch of different countries and actually bring a product to market? I can't even remember all of the other stories I've heard about multiple rounds of prototypes, production problems, sub-standard end products, etc (some of which requiring extensive travel to sort out). Or perhaps a partner company dissolves its relationship with you and decides to market the product on its own. Sure, it has to work out some of the time, but stop presenting this idea that international business is somehow this miraculously effortless process. I know this wasn't the central point of a piece nominally about immigration and youth achievement, but the fact that he had throw in the same stale scenario that he's been writing about for over a decade makes it entirely impossible for me to take this guy seriously anymore.
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  For anyone interested in a real story about small-scale remote manufacturing (circa 2000) read "The Mouse Driver Chronicles" http://amzn.com/0738208019 http://amzn.com/0738208019 . I suspect Joey Roth ( http://joeyroth.com http://joeyroth.com ), as a one-person design shop, might also have some real, hard-earned, and even more current, insights into this space. I simply can't trust the opinion of a billionaire journalist (through marriage) who's never tried to earn a living using these strategies to bring a real product to market.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- oldgregg 17y ago
  Notice something about all those kids? They live in AMERICA. Cultural context does matter. I was working for a company a few years ago and the president read Tom's damn book. Without any input or understanding of how software is made he bought me a plane ticket and said go open an office in India. It turned into a two year long clusterfuck. All of this outsourcing bullshit would be more credible if it came from someone who actually wrote code and not some jackass in his manhattan penthouse. I'm all for importing great talent- it's one of the reasons the US has been so successful. But that's completely different from his overplayed world-is-flat delusion.
lispm 17y ago
Strange, for me that would be a sign of alarm when immigrants take ALL the top positions in competitions. Kind of a ponzi scheme, where here the scientists of the next generation are all imported. As long as people are will to come, the system appears to work - but it really does not. Those who look at the surface will be blinded by the achievements, without seeing that the achievements are based on imported brains and there is a structural problem. It's not that the US is a small country - it should be possible that some of the not so recently arrived families have competitive children, too. Let the families live two generations in the US and they are no longer competitive or no longer motivated enough? How attractive is it really to be in the US, when the 'dream team' is all imported from 'hungry' countries... what is with the rest of the people? The need education, too. Jobs. Well paid jobs.
- bh23ha 17y ago
  Kind of a ponzi scheme, where here the scientists of the next generation are all imported. It's so much worse, except for a very few native Americans ALL others were imported, the scheme goes back hundreds of years!
  - lispm 17y ago
    Sure that's funny. But what's with the generations that are in the US long enough? There was a huge brain import during and before the second world war. Lots of jewish scientist found a new home in the US. They had a reason to leave their home. Chinese people may want to leave their country, because it is based on a communist one party dictatorship... But the US now has 300 Million people living there and it still has to import 'brains'? There may be less 'brain' import from Europe - since Europe now has lots of competitive science (LHC, ...). Now the current generation are immigrants from China. But what next?
    - bh23ha 17y ago
      But what next? Same as always, people who have good reason to prefer the states over their country of birth will try to come here. Some will succeed. Most of those will be run of the mill folks. Some will be great, some will be tragic.
hristov 17y ago
Good old Tom Friedman. Even when I actually agree with his point, his writing is so godawfull I want to strangle him. The real competition is between me and my imagination? Really? How do I and my imagination compete exactly? This man should not be allowed to make metaphors.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I was reading a political piece in Reason this morning and found Tom described thusly: ..Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the human one-sentence-explanation dispenser... (link: http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/18/the-obama-narrative-narrative http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/18/the-obama-narrative-na... ) I like Friedman -- in small doses.
  - jpcx01 17y ago
    Haha, Friedman belongs nowhere near the New York Times. He'd be better suited as the whacky Social Studies teacher somewhere in the midwest (ok, he reminds me of my old social studies teacher). Another funny article where Jonah Goldberg has at Mr Friedman: http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZTMzZTc3YWQ5MTgzN2I1MTIwN2QyYWFlYTY4NDg5NmY= http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZTMzZTc3YWQ5MTgzN2I...
- cloudkj 17y ago
  Couldn't agree more :) I cringed through many pages of "The World Is Flat" in the same manner. The book was quite insightful and was a worthy read, but his treatise of technologies was unbearable at parts.
- marshallp 17y ago
  You're just saying that because you don't like the man. The real competition IS between YOU and YOUR IMAGINATION, nothing could be truer. There's an ongoing struggle between your lazier and baser instincts and your imagination. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" Napoleon Hill
jimbokun 17y ago
"The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea." That's probably the most easily commoditized part, actually. A "spark of an idea", before all the actual work needed to turn it into something viable, is close to worthless.

66 points by raju 17y ago

A few unrelated thoughts: I've seen some of the brightest people get shipped back to their home country after their "practical training" (the year allowed for work after a foreigner's college graduation). This is the worst type of protectionism, bordering on xenophobia. Our country was built by great immigrants, period. Secondly, most emerging economies emphasize math and sciences much more than America. If the awards were for art and literature we'd likely see more diversity here. And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs, or some job that pays well but is provincial and soul crushing.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- drhodes 17y ago
  don't forget music.
- silverlake 17y ago
  I (asian) won several English and history essay contests in my midwestern state. Most of the winners were asian immigrants. Also did well in speech and debate. Me no speaky english too good as boy, but teacher spend time and long study to talk american.
- bbgm 17y ago
  There's more than enough Indians whose command of English is masterful. Many of us end up reading advanced prose as kids, and even in technical institutes spend a lot of our time engaged in literature-related extracurricular activities.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
marshallp 17y ago
The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian. The spelling bee champions nowadays tend to be indian. Once hard working societies like india/china catch on that there's money in arts, I'd bet that to be overtaken as well. "And lastly, I've known a few foreign science prodigies who get PhDs from tops schools only to end up on the model validation team at Goldman Sachs" I'd bet wall street gets more top notch work done than academia or productive industry. If only they'd get incentives worked out like wall street has, you might get a new industrial revolution going.
- protomyth 17y ago
  I always thought there is a serious problem with our country when the best and brightest go to work in the financial sector.
  - marshallp 17y ago
    I don't. There is massive misallocation of capital still going on by government and unsophisticated businessman (such as your local businesses or small venture capital) that wall street could fix. The current problem on wall street is that there is too much money chasing too few deals (government regulation/ownership prevent many asset classes from being tradeable) and bailouts (which defeat the incentives in capitalism - incentive to not fail). Both problems are caused by government.
- dgordon 17y ago
  "The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian." Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction? Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses (or do you mean a different book by Rushdie?) besides the fact that it pissed off some religious dictator?
  - marshallp 17y ago
    Midnight Children edit: won the "booker of booker" prize (the best book out of all the booker prize winners over the past 40 years)
anamax 17y ago
> A few unrelated thoughts: I've seen some of the brightest people get shipped back to their home country after their "practical training" (the year allowed for work after a foreigner's college graduation). Much of America sees "import more low skilled workers" as a bad idea. This is relevant because the tech industry and most other folks interested in importing more brains has joined forces with the folks who want to import low skilled workers. Since most of america is willing to import brains, the wisdom of this pairing from the "import brains" side is unclear.
fghjkkjuhg 17y ago
Don't worry we will make sure they stay on the bottom rung of the ladder - safely managed by guys called Chester from Yale or Havard who have never seen a public school. After all these are just geeks.

henning 17y ago

One thing that's interesting is to track where these child prodigy/overachiever types wind up later in life. Some of them can't be found in a Google search, which probably means they didn't start any companies, publish any papers, or anything like that. Others wind up leading very distinguished careers, like Terence Tao.

AndrewO 17y ago

> If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it... And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. Have you actually done that, Tom? Or are you just reselling us your same old fantasy story about how easy it is to coordinate a bunch of companies from a bunch of different countries and actually bring a product to market? I can't even remember all of the other stories I've heard about multiple rounds of prototypes, production problems, sub-standard end products, etc (some of which requiring extensive travel to sort out). Or perhaps a partner company dissolves its relationship with you and decides to market the product on its own. Sure, it has to work out some of the time, but stop presenting this idea that international business is somehow this miraculously effortless process. I know this wasn't the central point of a piece nominally about immigration and youth achievement, but the fact that he had throw in the same stale scenario that he's been writing about for over a decade makes it entirely impossible for me to take this guy seriously anymore.

bonsaitree 17y ago
For anyone interested in a real story about small-scale remote manufacturing (circa 2000) read "The Mouse Driver Chronicles" http://amzn.com/0738208019 http://amzn.com/0738208019 . I suspect Joey Roth ( http://joeyroth.com http://joeyroth.com ), as a one-person design shop, might also have some real, hard-earned, and even more current, insights into this space. I simply can't trust the opinion of a billionaire journalist (through marriage) who's never tried to earn a living using these strategies to bring a real product to market.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
oldgregg 17y ago
Notice something about all those kids? They live in AMERICA. Cultural context does matter. I was working for a company a few years ago and the president read Tom's damn book. Without any input or understanding of how software is made he bought me a plane ticket and said go open an office in India. It turned into a two year long clusterfuck. All of this outsourcing bullshit would be more credible if it came from someone who actually wrote code and not some jackass in his manhattan penthouse. I'm all for importing great talent- it's one of the reasons the US has been so successful. But that's completely different from his overplayed world-is-flat delusion.

lispm 17y ago

Strange, for me that would be a sign of alarm when immigrants take ALL the top positions in competitions. Kind of a ponzi scheme, where here the scientists of the next generation are all imported. As long as people are will to come, the system appears to work - but it really does not. Those who look at the surface will be blinded by the achievements, without seeing that the achievements are based on imported brains and there is a structural problem. It's not that the US is a small country - it should be possible that some of the not so recently arrived families have competitive children, too. Let the families live two generations in the US and they are no longer competitive or no longer motivated enough? How attractive is it really to be in the US, when the 'dream team' is all imported from 'hungry' countries... what is with the rest of the people? The need education, too. Jobs. Well paid jobs.

bh23ha 17y ago
Kind of a ponzi scheme, where here the scientists of the next generation are all imported. It's so much worse, except for a very few native Americans ALL others were imported, the scheme goes back hundreds of years!
- lispm 17y ago
  Sure that's funny. But what's with the generations that are in the US long enough? There was a huge brain import during and before the second world war. Lots of jewish scientist found a new home in the US. They had a reason to leave their home. Chinese people may want to leave their country, because it is based on a communist one party dictatorship... But the US now has 300 Million people living there and it still has to import 'brains'? There may be less 'brain' import from Europe - since Europe now has lots of competitive science (LHC, ...). Now the current generation are immigrants from China. But what next?
  - bh23ha 17y ago
    But what next? Same as always, people who have good reason to prefer the states over their country of birth will try to come here. Some will succeed. Most of those will be run of the mill folks. Some will be great, some will be tragic.

hristov 17y ago

Good old Tom Friedman. Even when I actually agree with his point, his writing is so godawfull I want to strangle him. The real competition is between me and my imagination? Really? How do I and my imagination compete exactly? This man should not be allowed to make metaphors.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I was reading a political piece in Reason this morning and found Tom described thusly: ..Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the human one-sentence-explanation dispenser... (link: http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/18/the-obama-narrative-narrative http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/18/the-obama-narrative-na... ) I like Friedman -- in small doses.
- jpcx01 17y ago
  Haha, Friedman belongs nowhere near the New York Times. He'd be better suited as the whacky Social Studies teacher somewhere in the midwest (ok, he reminds me of my old social studies teacher). Another funny article where Jonah Goldberg has at Mr Friedman: http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZTMzZTc3YWQ5MTgzN2I1MTIwN2QyYWFlYTY4NDg5NmY= http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZTMzZTc3YWQ5MTgzN2I...
cloudkj 17y ago
Couldn't agree more :) I cringed through many pages of "The World Is Flat" in the same manner. The book was quite insightful and was a worthy read, but his treatise of technologies was unbearable at parts.
marshallp 17y ago
You're just saying that because you don't like the man. The real competition IS between YOU and YOUR IMAGINATION, nothing could be truer. There's an ongoing struggle between your lazier and baser instincts and your imagination. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" Napoleon Hill

jimbokun 17y ago

"The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea." That's probably the most easily commoditized part, actually. A "spark of an idea", before all the actual work needed to turn it into something viable, is close to worthless.