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It's oddly ominous reading about America's rise on the back of textile patents taken from England and Europe, then poaching of German physics talent and scienti

It's oddly ominous reading about America's rise on the back of textile patents taken from England and Europe, then poaching of German physics talent and scientific talent from across the world. Germany was, by far, the pre-eminent power in theoretical physics at the turn of the 20th century, with Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck & Born about to be at the peak of their powers. Then the country decided to turn on intellectuals, immigrants, and minorities and turned its scientific prowess to war rather than peace. There's an old saying out there that history is merely a set of cycles. I suppose we'll see if that is true in the upcoming years. *one note I would add is that with recent policy uncertainty (i.e healthcare) the advantages of hiring around the world have come into starker relief. That's even more dangerous. Sure, the United States may become less competitive in the war for talent because of walls and tighter borders -- but it'll become less competitive, period, for companies relying on high-skill workers who by definition will be close to or at the peak of their physical and/or mental health.

pizzetta 10y ago
I don' think the situation is as dire as people think. Europe exported many technical people during the war years and one would be hard pressed to say they are backwards because they lost talent. Japan as well is not very friendly to labor migrants and they are at the forefront of science in technology despite their small population size relative to other geographies.
- EternalData 10y ago
  The United States is never going to decay to nothingness. However, whether or not it becomes the top place for technologists to congregate and build things will become an open question. That alone, while perhaps not dire to the nation as a whole, will be quite damaging. There, so far, has been an order of magnitude difference between the best technology ecosystem and the second best. Japan is also looking to open up permanent residency rules, and it has suffered through a nearly two decades long spurt of deflation-driven economic stagnation, with incredible debt/GDP, some of it due to demographic concerns and an inverting age pyramid. Just pointing out that might not be the best counter-example.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  It did, however, dramatically help the U.S. We got the atom bomb, moon landings, computer, and many other inventions out of European immigrants who fled the Nazis. The U.S. had a strong science program before the war, but its superpower status afterwards was just as much because we got all the brightest minds in Europe as because we bombed everyone else into rubble. I could see Australia, New Zealand, or Canada similarly benefitting if the U.S. turns towards xenophobia & warmongering.
  - neptunespear 10y ago
    One big problem is economies of scale. The U.S. has more than five times the combined population of these three countries. A similar problem affects the Nordic wundercountries. They are some of the richest and happiest countries in the world and have some of the best education systems in the world, but their small population sizes hinder their sheer economic potential. Finland's population is only 5.4 million and Sweden's is only 9.5 million, and yet they still gave birth to Colossal Order, Spotify, Supercell, Rovio among others. Imagine how many tech powerhouses would come out of the Nordic countries if they had larger populations and thus larger economies of scale. Same with Norway. For years its economy has been tied to O&G, but with the collapsing price in oil the Norwegian government is investing their oil billions into startups; in the coming years, Norway's startup scene will explode. And all with a population of 5 million. If their population was larger, I think Norway's startup scene could be so, so much bigger.
    - pizzetta 10y ago
      One possible issue with the Nordics usurping the US's lead is their Janteloven which can work against entrepreneurship. However, other European countries may be able to take advantage, the UK, DE, FR (to a lesser extent due to regulations).
  - pizzetta 10y ago
    It's interesting you bring up warmongering when it looks like some in the opposition party are concerned about the US receding from interventionism and seeking more effort from the other NATO countries. That the US is becoming more isolationist --which would seem to contradict the US becoming more interventionist.
komali2 10y ago
As a Texan it boggled my mind to hear people complain about immigration. Walk into UT, A&M, UH engineering departments, half the students are Chinese or Russian or Indian. In the grad programs it's even more. That means their best talent is here, paying US taxes, contributing to US companies, making the US more powerful, all the while contributing almost nothing to their home countries. How is that a bad thing! I don't get it!
- degenerate 10y ago
  You might want to take a step outside the academic setting every once in a while. Chat with a cop, ambulance driver, or immigration officer from a sanctuary city if you really want to "get" it. It's the illegal immigrants that suck the system dry, not the smart, diligent, legitimate ones working in academia and top companies.
  - vineetch 10y ago
    The Trump administration has stated it might cap H1B visas further. This move will directly impact academia and the Tech industry and the influx of top talent. By combining the issue of illegal immigration with legal high value H1B visas, the Trump administration and its supporters are not helping their own argument. There is a nuance there which the parent comment was correctly mentioning. You want the best of another country to come to the US as they have been or risk the slow spiral of insignificance that Germany faced.
    - sremani 10y ago
      H1B is currently randomized lottery, benefiting sweatshops cluttering the pipeline, Current administration is not eliminating it but at least from their talk its about restoring their original intent, to bring in extra-ordinary talent. Which might actually be good news for SV, depending on how it is implemented?
      - vineetch 10y ago
        Google, Microsoft, Netflix & Facebook benefit directly from H1B visas and are most certainly not "sweatshops". Even when you consider companies that pay less than the top tech companies, no one would consider them sweatshops. So hyperbole aside, and keeping in mind that H1B also brings academic talent to universities, the hate towards the H1B program seems more rooted in a hate of immigration than a worry of the program not realizing its "original intent". If you don't want 85,000 of the best talent in the world per year to power US companies' and academia's growth, that's fine. Go ahead and limit the visa program and risk that talent going elsewhere.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Germany waged two world wars over 20 years and tens of millions of people died because of that. Germany, even at its scientific height was racist and nationalist. Hitler didn't come to power in the 30s without generations of Germans being the foundation. The US is very far from that. I don't understand the massive overreaction. The United States in the 60s was a place where there were sundown towns that blacks dared not travel. In 2004 they were seriously considering a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Now? We can't lose sight of progress and we can't overreact to the sway of government. All progress has not been lost and the US is not in the dire state some act like it is.
- ythn 10y ago
  Take a look at your leader. He is figuratively Hitler and rapidly implementing full blown fascism. It wouldn't surprise me if Muslims are being hauled away by the trainload to secret labor camps before his term is done.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    They're unlikely to be secret in the information age. Not even the CIA's blacksite torture program could be hidden, thanks to casual plane-watchers noting unusual traffic around military airfields. No, the depressing thought is that it's far more likely to be out-in-the-open labor camps. Americans already interned their Japanese-American population during World War II; we get irrational when we feel threatened.
  - sctb 10y ago
    We've asked you before—this account and previous ones—to please comment civilly and substantively or not at all. We have to ban this account if you continue to violate the guidelines this way.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  I don't think it's a bad thing to bring up the negatives of what happens when nationalism is at its worst. I agree that we can't lose sight of our accomplishments -- not all is dire, and the United States is quite far from a Germany scenario as of now. But a bit of nationalism has crept up in the politics of the United States and several other European countries. Bringing up what happened when nationalism ran wild is relevant. After all, even with the current policies Trump enacted, it is not impossible that our nation will lose out on being the home of the next Einstein, just because they were born in the wrong place.
elastic_church 10y ago
Well you see, the lack of sanctions against US exports and the lack of the US relying on exports pretty much undermines the oddly ominous parallels. The US could benefit in the coming years by being more inclusionary again. It spans an entire continent and has a diversified portfolio of industries to sustain itself. It is unquestioned by its allies officially in wars that are remote and primarily benefit the industries within the US. It really could use an inclusionary policy to enhance its population wealth machine making selective immigration there to once again be a greater object of envy. You see where the parallels to Weimar and German fascism fail? There isn't enough to extrapolate outcomes just because you see the trendiness of dietary restrictions in the US and notice that the fascist german leader had one too SO OMINOUS.
qntty 10y ago
>There's an old saying out there that history is merely a set of cycles. I suppose we'll see if that is true in the upcoming years. "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."
toyg 10y ago
It's not an "old saying", it's the work of philosopher Giambattista Vico, a contemporary of Enlightenment. http://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
immigraway 10y ago
Current changes proposed to US immigration policy would cost the country a small number of high-skilled individuals from the Middle East (a few thousand) and a large supply of agricultural workers from Latin America (~10 million). It's a small impact on the overall competitiveness of the US, hardly equivalent to the Nazi brain-drain.
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  There are a lot of very smart people from Iran. Sure, the current travel ban is only a small portion, but Trumo has only been in power for just over month. There is no reason to think he and Bannon are satisfied.
- kibwen 10y ago
  I (U.S. citizen) personally know highly-skilled software engineers who emigrated to the U.S. from Anglosphere countries to work at U.S. companies, who have since resigned and gone back to their home countries explicitly because of Trump's election. These aren't Middle-Easterners or illegal immigrants, these are white people for whom a $200k salary wasn't enough to convince them to endure a rising tide of nationalism. Skilled foreign workers are already selecting themselves out of our economy, regardless of country of origin. Not equivalent to the Nazi brain drain, though in an amusing twist I also know one American software engineer who has moved to Germany to ride out Trump.
  - snovv_crash 10y ago
    Anecdote: I'm a US citizen working in Europe, but I'm not going back to the US until I know with better certainty where the country is going.
- Fomite 10y ago
  Beyond the policies, there's also a signaling problem. I know several people who have taken a pass on U.S. jobs because of the uncertainty and growing anti-immigrant rhetoric. And they definitely don't trust the average American not to lump them in with targeted groups by virtue of being brown.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
So the US poached Einstein from Germany?
kloncks 10y ago
Source for this textile patent claim? I want to read more on it :)
imgabe 10y ago
"Poaching" is an odd word for it when those people were fleeing for their lives.
mudil 10y ago
Enough of this fear mongering, and Nazi comparisons. Nazism, after all, was practiced by a majority of German population, and if everyone now in the US is forecasting it and fighting a what's to come, how can it really happen? I am much more concerned about our "soft hegemony", propagated by politicians (for politicians) and accepted by a wide populace. Namely, slogans and ideals that are passed as a public policy. Instead of delivering goods, these politicians deliver slogans. California governor would talk for hours about the environment, but nothing would actually be done about the Oroville dam or building a new reservoir to store the water, to actually improve the environmental impact of millions of Californians. Take any lingering issue, from inner city blight to terrible situation of African American males, it's all political talk and nothing is done to actually fix things. That's where hegemony is, in my opinion.

pizzetta 10y ago

I don' think the situation is as dire as people think. Europe exported many technical people during the war years and one would be hard pressed to say they are backwards because they lost talent. Japan as well is not very friendly to labor migrants and they are at the forefront of science in technology despite their small population size relative to other geographies.

EternalData 10y ago
The United States is never going to decay to nothingness. However, whether or not it becomes the top place for technologists to congregate and build things will become an open question. That alone, while perhaps not dire to the nation as a whole, will be quite damaging. There, so far, has been an order of magnitude difference between the best technology ecosystem and the second best. Japan is also looking to open up permanent residency rules, and it has suffered through a nearly two decades long spurt of deflation-driven economic stagnation, with incredible debt/GDP, some of it due to demographic concerns and an inverting age pyramid. Just pointing out that might not be the best counter-example.
nostrademons 10y ago
It did, however, dramatically help the U.S. We got the atom bomb, moon landings, computer, and many other inventions out of European immigrants who fled the Nazis. The U.S. had a strong science program before the war, but its superpower status afterwards was just as much because we got all the brightest minds in Europe as because we bombed everyone else into rubble. I could see Australia, New Zealand, or Canada similarly benefitting if the U.S. turns towards xenophobia & warmongering.
- neptunespear 10y ago
  One big problem is economies of scale. The U.S. has more than five times the combined population of these three countries. A similar problem affects the Nordic wundercountries. They are some of the richest and happiest countries in the world and have some of the best education systems in the world, but their small population sizes hinder their sheer economic potential. Finland's population is only 5.4 million and Sweden's is only 9.5 million, and yet they still gave birth to Colossal Order, Spotify, Supercell, Rovio among others. Imagine how many tech powerhouses would come out of the Nordic countries if they had larger populations and thus larger economies of scale. Same with Norway. For years its economy has been tied to O&G, but with the collapsing price in oil the Norwegian government is investing their oil billions into startups; in the coming years, Norway's startup scene will explode. And all with a population of 5 million. If their population was larger, I think Norway's startup scene could be so, so much bigger.
  - pizzetta 10y ago
    One possible issue with the Nordics usurping the US's lead is their Janteloven which can work against entrepreneurship. However, other European countries may be able to take advantage, the UK, DE, FR (to a lesser extent due to regulations).
- pizzetta 10y ago
  It's interesting you bring up warmongering when it looks like some in the opposition party are concerned about the US receding from interventionism and seeking more effort from the other NATO countries. That the US is becoming more isolationist --which would seem to contradict the US becoming more interventionist.

komali2 10y ago

As a Texan it boggled my mind to hear people complain about immigration. Walk into UT, A&M, UH engineering departments, half the students are Chinese or Russian or Indian. In the grad programs it's even more. That means their best talent is here, paying US taxes, contributing to US companies, making the US more powerful, all the while contributing almost nothing to their home countries. How is that a bad thing! I don't get it!

degenerate 10y ago
You might want to take a step outside the academic setting every once in a while. Chat with a cop, ambulance driver, or immigration officer from a sanctuary city if you really want to "get" it. It's the illegal immigrants that suck the system dry, not the smart, diligent, legitimate ones working in academia and top companies.
- vineetch 10y ago
  The Trump administration has stated it might cap H1B visas further. This move will directly impact academia and the Tech industry and the influx of top talent. By combining the issue of illegal immigration with legal high value H1B visas, the Trump administration and its supporters are not helping their own argument. There is a nuance there which the parent comment was correctly mentioning. You want the best of another country to come to the US as they have been or risk the slow spiral of insignificance that Germany faced.
  - sremani 10y ago
    H1B is currently randomized lottery, benefiting sweatshops cluttering the pipeline, Current administration is not eliminating it but at least from their talk its about restoring their original intent, to bring in extra-ordinary talent. Which might actually be good news for SV, depending on how it is implemented?
    - vineetch 10y ago
      Google, Microsoft, Netflix & Facebook benefit directly from H1B visas and are most certainly not "sweatshops". Even when you consider companies that pay less than the top tech companies, no one would consider them sweatshops. So hyperbole aside, and keeping in mind that H1B also brings academic talent to universities, the hate towards the H1B program seems more rooted in a hate of immigration than a worry of the program not realizing its "original intent". If you don't want 85,000 of the best talent in the world per year to power US companies' and academia's growth, that's fine. Go ahead and limit the visa program and risk that talent going elsewhere.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

Germany waged two world wars over 20 years and tens of millions of people died because of that. Germany, even at its scientific height was racist and nationalist. Hitler didn't come to power in the 30s without generations of Germans being the foundation. The US is very far from that. I don't understand the massive overreaction. The United States in the 60s was a place where there were sundown towns that blacks dared not travel. In 2004 they were seriously considering a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Now? We can't lose sight of progress and we can't overreact to the sway of government. All progress has not been lost and the US is not in the dire state some act like it is.

ythn 10y ago
Take a look at your leader. He is figuratively Hitler and rapidly implementing full blown fascism. It wouldn't surprise me if Muslims are being hauled away by the trainload to secret labor camps before his term is done.
- fixermark 10y ago
  They're unlikely to be secret in the information age. Not even the CIA's blacksite torture program could be hidden, thanks to casual plane-watchers noting unusual traffic around military airfields. No, the depressing thought is that it's far more likely to be out-in-the-open labor camps. Americans already interned their Japanese-American population during World War II; we get irrational when we feel threatened.
- sctb 10y ago
  We've asked you before—this account and previous ones—to please comment civilly and substantively or not at all. We have to ban this account if you continue to violate the guidelines this way.
soundwave106 10y ago
I don't think it's a bad thing to bring up the negatives of what happens when nationalism is at its worst. I agree that we can't lose sight of our accomplishments -- not all is dire, and the United States is quite far from a Germany scenario as of now. But a bit of nationalism has crept up in the politics of the United States and several other European countries. Bringing up what happened when nationalism ran wild is relevant. After all, even with the current policies Trump enacted, it is not impossible that our nation will lose out on being the home of the next Einstein, just because they were born in the wrong place.

elastic_church 10y ago

Well you see, the lack of sanctions against US exports and the lack of the US relying on exports pretty much undermines the oddly ominous parallels. The US could benefit in the coming years by being more inclusionary again. It spans an entire continent and has a diversified portfolio of industries to sustain itself. It is unquestioned by its allies officially in wars that are remote and primarily benefit the industries within the US. It really could use an inclusionary policy to enhance its population wealth machine making selective immigration there to once again be a greater object of envy. You see where the parallels to Weimar and German fascism fail? There isn't enough to extrapolate outcomes just because you see the trendiness of dietary restrictions in the US and notice that the fascist german leader had one too SO OMINOUS.

qntty 10y ago

>There's an old saying out there that history is merely a set of cycles. I suppose we'll see if that is true in the upcoming years. "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

toyg 10y ago

It's not an "old saying", it's the work of philosopher Giambattista Vico, a contemporary of Enlightenment. http://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

immigraway 10y ago

Current changes proposed to US immigration policy would cost the country a small number of high-skilled individuals from the Middle East (a few thousand) and a large supply of agricultural workers from Latin America (~10 million). It's a small impact on the overall competitiveness of the US, hardly equivalent to the Nazi brain-drain.

TorKlingberg 10y ago
There are a lot of very smart people from Iran. Sure, the current travel ban is only a small portion, but Trumo has only been in power for just over month. There is no reason to think he and Bannon are satisfied.
kibwen 10y ago
I (U.S. citizen) personally know highly-skilled software engineers who emigrated to the U.S. from Anglosphere countries to work at U.S. companies, who have since resigned and gone back to their home countries explicitly because of Trump's election. These aren't Middle-Easterners or illegal immigrants, these are white people for whom a $200k salary wasn't enough to convince them to endure a rising tide of nationalism. Skilled foreign workers are already selecting themselves out of our economy, regardless of country of origin. Not equivalent to the Nazi brain drain, though in an amusing twist I also know one American software engineer who has moved to Germany to ride out Trump.
- snovv_crash 10y ago
  Anecdote: I'm a US citizen working in Europe, but I'm not going back to the US until I know with better certainty where the country is going.
Fomite 10y ago
Beyond the policies, there's also a signaling problem. I know several people who have taken a pass on U.S. jobs because of the uncertainty and growing anti-immigrant rhetoric. And they definitely don't trust the average American not to lump them in with targeted groups by virtue of being brown.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago

So the US poached Einstein from Germany?

kloncks 10y ago

Source for this textile patent claim? I want to read more on it :)

imgabe 10y ago

"Poaching" is an odd word for it when those people were fleeing for their lives.

mudil 10y ago

Enough of this fear mongering, and Nazi comparisons. Nazism, after all, was practiced by a majority of German population, and if everyone now in the US is forecasting it and fighting a what's to come, how can it really happen? I am much more concerned about our "soft hegemony", propagated by politicians (for politicians) and accepted by a wide populace. Namely, slogans and ideals that are passed as a public policy. Instead of delivering goods, these politicians deliver slogans. California governor would talk for hours about the environment, but nothing would actually be done about the Oroville dam or building a new reservoir to store the water, to actually improve the environmental impact of millions of Californians. Take any lingering issue, from inner city blight to terrible situation of African American males, it's all political talk and nothing is done to actually fix things. That's where hegemony is, in my opinion.