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Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.
by JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.
- andix 6mo agoThe people decided that this sucks and have spoken. Dear god, make America stupid again!
- busterarm 6mo agoSo you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary. > opposing points of view should pick better candidates Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
- SiempreViernes 6mo agoProbably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing. You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
- loeg 6mo agoNo one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism," cut the hyperbole.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoStop freaking out at thought experiments. I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids? What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
- loeg 6mo agoTo clarify, you agree that the Trump admin / MAGA political movement isn't fascism and his election wasn't an overthrow of democracy? Your earlier remarks were just a thought experiment? That isn't really the sense I've gotten from your historical comments.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoI don't agree; it's simply irrelevant here. We either accept "there are some things you shouldn't be able to democratically vote for" like, say, the Holocaust or reinstating slavery, or we do not. You added Trump to the conversation, not me.
- just_some_guy_2 6mo agoIsn't that basically what a constitution is for? A constitutional monarchy limits the power of the king, and a constitutional democracy limits the power of the elected government?
- ryoshoe 6mo agoThe constitution isn't static. Amendments can be repealed. An elected government could appoint judges to overturn any previous precedents
- seanmcdirmid 6mo agoMaybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
- r2_pilot 6mo agoDon't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
- seanmcdirmid 6mo agoI lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi. Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
- greenie_beans 6mo agono, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
- unethical_ban 6mo agoThis is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three. Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy. Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes. The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment. So, I'm not sure what your point was.
- coryrc 6mo agoOur systems need to be MORE democratic! First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering. Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps. The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time. Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
- busterarm 6mo agoWe're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections. What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it? Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoDo you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it? Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
- coryrc 6mo agoIt's First Pass the Post that causes that. We have maybe 30% is the population that wants guns highly restricted and a different 30% that wants abortions highly restricted. We have something like 52% that want Medicare4All. But we just seesaw between gun grabber and pussy grabber because those M4A aren't the majority of either party primary. MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
- nkoren 6mo agoThere are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results: 1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win. 2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want. 3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal. 4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal. Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
- rangestransform 6mo agore:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist
- busterarm 6mo agoExcept that they can hold your coalition government hostage by making you concede on their pet issue or leave the coalition and force an election.
- andix 6mo agoI'm just stating an observation.
- nukedindia 6mo ago[dead]
- rexpop 6mo agoAre you trolling? Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.
- jryio 6mo agoA brain drain means the intelligent population emigrates to other countries. The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad. I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
- lokar 6mo agoI think they meant that in the past every other nation had a brain drain towards American research universities.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoI think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
- jryio 6mo agoIf you "drain" something the subject of the verb is what is being drained not where it is draining to.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoBrain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
- jknoepfler 6mo agoMonopolizing talent is a zero sum game. If your tally is in the negative, you're experiencing brain drain.
- chirau 6mo agoNo. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures. America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
- groundzeros2015 6mo agoIsn’t the brain drain people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US? To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- 1-more 6mo agoHighly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoThanks! Really appreciate the recommendation! > Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again. It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
- groundzeros2015 6mo agoThat’s not remotely similar.
- 1-more 6mo agoSimilar to what? Von Neumann was part of Europe's elite scientific brain drain to the US in the 20th century, that's all.
- slg 6mo agoHistorians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoEh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
- notahacker 6mo agoWe'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
- zamfi 6mo agoOn its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate. But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
- csoups14 6mo agoOf course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
- bigstrat2003 6mo ago
- seibelj 6mo ago[dead]
- taf2 6mo agoare there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
- lumost 6mo agoIt's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population. Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students. > Whether these slots should be finite or not They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.