Interesting discussion on the crisis in higher education

[Pyrrhus]

Dude, did you even read this article? There is one sentence about how Brazil wants to become an international science destination. Then it says, and I quote:

Though its own bright graduates still head to Europe or the United States for PhDs or post-doctoral fellowships, nowadays that is more because science is an international affair than because they cannot study at home. The country wants more of them to return afterwards, and for the traffic to become two-way.

Brazil is no longer a scientific also-ran. It produces half a million graduates and 10,000 PhDs a year, ten times more than two decades ago.

So, according to this article, most of Brazil's graduates leave for Europe or the US. And it graduates 10X what it did 2 decades ago. This is exactly the issue we're talking about happening here in the US.

Please explain to me the evidence in that article that indicates that most new positions will be won't be primarily staffed by local candidates and it will amount to anything more than a drop in the bucket.

You're seriously basing your argument on the statement that FAPESP advertised fellowships at a few universities? Whatever you're smoking, it must be pretty good.

Read the next article, and obviously Brazil WANTS to, it has not achieved it yet, but is INVESTING to become so. How is this a problem against my argument? Isn't investing more in Research & Development the point of this discussion? While USA and other countries cut funding?

 

[Pyrrhus]

Ahh... I see. Argument by anecdote.

So let me try, shall we? I have a tenure-track STEM research position. So that means there isn't any problem in science, right?

How is your argument by anecdote superior to my argument by anecdote?

 

[carlgrace]

Read the next article, and obviously Brazil WANTS to, it has not achieved it yet, but is INVESTING to become so. How is this a problem against my argument? Isn't investing more in Research & Development the point of this discussion? While USA and other countries cut funding?

First, you added the second article while I was replying to the first. And yes, it is investing, but my point is they have the same issues we do. They are obviously graduating more people than they can accommodate if they most of their graduates go overseas. And poaching a few people from the US isn't a long term solution to the overproduction of PhDs.

So you have a postdoc. Is there a career path at your institute in Chile?

 

[Pyrrhus]

twofistquant,

Yes, I take it back they are not "closed", but they are not willing to give a chance to this system. I have not researched this on my own, but your explanation seems plausible to me. There is more friction between China and the West, than South America and the West. Also, Singapore is very much an pro-expatriate country, so no surprise there.

 

[Pyrrhus]

First, you added the second article while I was replying to the first. And yes, it is investing, but my point is they have the same issues we do. They are obviously graduating more people than they can accommodate if they most of their graduates go overseas. And poaching a few people from the US isn't a long term solution to the overproduction of PhDs.

So you have a postdoc. Is there a career path at your institute in Chile?

I didn't take the position, and the path was faculty in a University in Chile, or somewhere else if I choose to.

 

[carlgrace]

How is your argument by anecdote superior to my argument by anecdote?

I was sarcastically pointing out that your argument by anecdote is not helpful because the outcome of one individual doesn't matter when we are talking about very large number of individuals. I was using irony as a rhetorical device, which is quite prevalent in the English language (in case you are not a native English speaker).

To spell it out for you:

Obviously the fact that I've been supremely lucky in no way means there is not a crisis. Just as the fact that you have a postdoc in Chile in no way means that the crisis can be solved by overseas institutes. There is an overpopulation of PhDs all over the world.

 

[Pyrrhus]

I was sarcastically pointing out that your argument by anecdote is not helpful because the outcome of one individual doesn't matter when we are talking about very large number of individuals. I was using irony as a rhetorical device, which is quite prevalent in the English language (in case you are not a native English speaker).

To spell it out for you:

Obviously the fact that I've been supremely lucky in no way means there is not a crisis. Just as the fact that you have a postdoc in Chile in no way means that the crisis can be solved by overseas institutes. There is an overpopulation of PhDs all over the world.

You didn't understand. I meant your argument that you worked in Brazil.

In addition, if you look at the salaries for professor in Brazil. They are fine. I wouldn't call USD 90k for a professorship a low wage.

You do realize, of course, that the problems with not enough spots for PhD graduates is much more acute in South America. I worked for a company that opened a design center in Argentina because there were so many well educated graduates (PhD and MS) who had nowhere to go.

There's a reason why there are far more foreign PhD holders working in the US (and I mean they earned their PhDs from foreign universities) than there are American PhDs working overseas.

I wish an American PhD good luck getting a job with a Brazilian defence agency when there are so many talented Brazilian PhDs wiling to work hard for low wages.

 

[carlgrace]

In addition, if you look at the salaries for professor in Brazil. They are fine. I wouldn't call USD 90k for a professorship a low wage.

I agree that isn't a low wage. For a full professor it is less than in the US, but I don't know what the cost of living is in Brazil.

You didn't understand. I meant your argument that you worked in Brazil.

You do realize, of course, that the problems with not enough spots for PhD graduates is much more acute in South America. I worked for a company that opened a design center in Argentina because there were so many well educated graduates (PhD and MS) who had nowhere to go.

There's a reason why there are far more foreign PhD holders working in the US (and I mean they earned their PhDs from foreign universities) than there are American PhDs working overseas.

I wish an American PhD good luck getting a job with a Brazilian defence agency when there are so many talented Brazilian PhDs wiling to work hard for low wages.

Point taken. But I do think the fact that our company opened an office in Argentina because of the availability of cheap labor has slightly more weight than a couple of fellowships offered through Nature.

Maybe you're right, and soon we'll be getting brain drain FROM the USA instead of the brain drain TO the USA we've gotten used to.

 

[StatGuy2000]

There's another factor. In the US, being a scientist or engineer isn't particularly highly respected, but in China it is, so for most Chinese Ph.D.'s, you are going to end up with a higher standard of living in China than in the United States.

One problem with the US is that if you live outside of the US, you can't ignore the US. The US is overwhelmingly powerful, and you have just *feel* how powerful the United States is when you are outside. Conversely, people that live in the US are sometimes quite shockingly unaware of how things are in the rest of the world.

And then China is big (and so is India) so you have a large numbers effect. Probably only the top 10% of the people in China live at the standard of living as people in the US, but that's 100 million people, we are either close or have reached the point where the number of people in China and India that have standards of living similar to America is larger than the number of people in the US.

I'm more worried about the long haul. China got out of the economic crisis partly by building 10,000 km of high speed rail, and now that rail is in place, you can see the economic impact. There are massive government incentives in things like solar cells and biotech.

One of the reasons that China is able to provide such massive incentives is because of its access to funds from state-owned banks where millions of workers (primarily rural, but now increasingly urban workers as well) keep their savings, primarily due to feelings of insecurity about loss of their land or home. However, it should be worth keeping in mind that as salaries rise and standards of living rise, so too would spending, so the individual worker may end up saving less.

This, combined with an eventual contraction of the working population due to the low birth rate (due to the one-child policy, which, even if repealed, will have little impact as a generation of Chinese families are accustomed to and desire small families) and a massive number of retirees , will mean that China will fairly soon have less flexibility in providing massive stimuli to their economy.

 

[twofish-quant]

Why are you worried? I'm honestly curious.

Because one of the other major events in my life was Tiananmen. What caused the Soviet Union to collapse was when people figured out that Communism wasn't creating economic prosperity. There are things that I like about the American political system (i.e. the fact that the US can run a political system without political prisoners).

If we get to 2030, and it looks like China has obviously superior economic performance, then there will be less pressure for China to adopt what I think are the good parts of the US political system (i.e. free elections and freedom of speech), and some pressure to have the US adopt what I think are the bad parts of the Chinese political system.

Standard of living is not a zero-sum game. Sure, the American standard of living will suffer relative to the rest of the world (because we were the only game in town in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Actually, no. The Soviet Union had extremely impressive growth rates in the 1950's.

My worry is that without heavy investment in science and technology, I worry that there will not merely a relative decline, but that growth will go negative. Something that worries me greatly are the economic ideas of Vladimir Popov. His argument was that the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980's was due to lack of infrastructure investment in the 1960's. The idea was that in the 1950's, the Soviets were able to completely redo their economic infrastructure as they recovered from World War II. Because central planning made it impossible to undertake new capital investment (i.e. if you shut down a factory, your quotas got killed), there was no new investment in industry, and starting in the 1970's, this caused big problems as the Russians were stuck with obsolete technology. My worry is that the lack of infrastructure spending is going to cause the US to go down the same road.

The conventional wisdom is that China is massively overinvesting, but I wonder if that is wrong and the problem is that the US underinvesting. It's worth going back to the 1990's, and seeing that the example which economists were using of a place that had bad economic policies was Singapore, and Singapore is doing pretty great now. One problem is that a lot of current economic thinking puts too much emphasis on efficiency. Investment in new technology is inherently inefficient because you spend money now, but you don't see any benefits for ten to twenty years. Conversely, if you cut investment now, your numbers look great, but there will be heck to pay in ten to twenty years.

I'm not convinced that this has to be a game to be "won".

I think that maybe there should be. Last person that makes it to Jupiter is a rotten egg.

Something that has a big impact on my thinking is "Space, the Final Frontier." If you look at what caused Europe to develop the frontier, it was national competition. England *had* to set up colonies, because the French were doing it, and the French were doing it because Spain did it. Conversely, the reason that China didn't colonize America was because there was no political necessity to do so. The one exception was Taiwan. For several thousand years, China basically ignored Taiwan, but in the 17th century, you suddenly had a massive effort to colonize Taiwan, and that was when the imperial government realized that if they didn't, the Dutch or the Portuguese would.

If we want to get off this planet, then there has to be some national competition. Hopefully, it will be "friendly competion" in which no one gets killed.

I have lots of nightmares. My big nightmare isn't that China makes it back to the moon before the US. My big nightmare is that China makes it back to the moon before the US, and no one in the US cares. One of the worst things that happened to the Space Race was when the US won it, and one of the worst things that happened to science funding was when the Cold War ended.

Right now a lot of people are taking advantage of cheap overseas labor, but the countries are developing quickly.

And that changes the distribution of power. True story. Multinational corporation has a meeting about hiring people. One realizes that this means more jobs for Ph.D.'s in country X and fewer jobs for Ph.D.'s in the US. Someone at the meeting wants to object because that's bad for the US, but realizes that this is a stupid argument because he happens to be the only American in the room.

The thing about multinational corporations is that they are multinational. In the 1950's, you could get a multinational corporation to act in the American interest since all of the important people in the MNC were American (Europe didn't get up and running until the 1960's). You can't do that today, because most MNC's are multinational.

The other thing is that it's not just cheap labor. It's cheap labor + good infrastructure. Why do companies create jobs in China rather than Haiti? Labor in Haiti is even cheaper than China.

You're quite right that America has chosen against investing in infrastructure. Shame on us.

It's not a matter of shame, but of economic survival. One other thing that worries me is that no one in the US seems to be thinking longer term. The financial crisis is causing a lot of pain, and when you are in pain, you don't think ten to twenty years ahead. If you aren't capable of thinking ten to twenty years ahead, then things like high speed rail and money for public universities are just a useless waste of money.

In China, the economic crisis ended in 2008, and so people are thinking strategically about what things are going to look like in 2022, 2032, and 2042.

 

[twofish-quant]

However, it should be worth keeping in mind that as salaries rise and standards of living rise, so too would spending, so the individual worker may end up saving less.

1) As long as spending rises less quickly than savings, then you still have a big pool of money. It's a virtous cycle. Huge pools of capital -> investment in new technology -> more $$$$ -> even bigger pools of capital.

2) One thing about Chinese investment is that most of the increase in savings has come from state owned enterprises. Corporations are in China are making huge profits. Some of those profits are fake, but some of it is real.

3) A lot of the money that is in the Chinese banking system goes into what is effectively social welfare. What happened in 2008, was that the Chinese government was faced with the prospect of tens of millions of unemployed workers, which is not good. So the Chinese government basically ordered the banking system to approve any sort of project which kept people busy. A lot of those projects made zero economic sense, but that wasn't the point. What you ended up with is a ton of debt that the government has to pay off, but there is enough funds to cover that.

One problem with economic theories is that they tend to overabstract things. For example, in most economic models, it doesn't make any difference if someone just gets a check from the government to do nothing, or if they get a check for doing something "non-productive." In reality, it makes a big difference. If you just get a check from the government, you are a "welfare queen." If the government hires people to move rocks from point A to point B, and then hires people to move rocks from point B back to point A, that's inefficient, but it's very different, because by moving rocks, you prove that you are not a lazy bastard.

This, combined with an eventual contraction of the working population due to the low birth rate (due to the one-child policy, which, even if repealed, will have little impact as a generation of Chinese families are accustomed to and desire small families) and a massive number of retirees , will mean that China will fairly soon have less flexibility in providing massive stimuli to their economy.

Unless you increase productivity, partly through the use of science and technology. Which is why the Chinese government is rolling out the red carpet for physics Ph.D.'s. The idea is that scientists and engineers are going to increase productivity so that China doesn't get stuck in the middle income trap.

 

[twofish-quant]

One thing about these conversations is that you may not be able to save the world, but you can at least try to save yourself.

I happen to be a very big fan of Karl Marx. Sometimes people wonder how someone who is a devotee of Karl Marx ended up in investment banking. It's actually quite simple. Marx argues that capitalist societies ultimately end up in a situation in which a small group of people end up screwing over everyone else.

Suppose he is right. And suppose, you can't change the situation. At that point, if you have given up saving the world, and your first priority is to save yourself, what do you do? You do what you can to end up with the screwers rather than the screwed. (There are some very interesting game theory aspects to this.)

Similarly, if you end up with the conclusion that the US is hosed, and there isn't anything you can do about it, then the logical thing to do is to get out of the US while you still can.

 

[Vanadium 50]

This is all very interesting, but can we get back on topic, please?

 

[StatGuy2000]

One thing about these conversations is that you may not be able to save the world, but you can at least try to save yourself.

I happen to be a very big fan of Karl Marx. Sometimes people wonder how someone who is a devotee of Karl Marx ended up in investment banking. It's actually quite simple. Marx argues that capitalist societies ultimately end up in a situation in which a small group of people end up screwing over everyone else.

Suppose he is right. And suppose, you can't change the situation. At that point, if you have given up saving the world, and your first priority is to save yourself, what do you do? You do what you can to end up with the screwers rather than the screwed. (There are some very interesting game theory aspects to this.)

Similarly, if you end up with the conclusion that the US is hosed, and there isn't anything you can do about it, then the logical thing to do is to get out of the US while you still can.

All of your discussions earlier seem to operate under the assumption that spending in China will rise less quickly than savings (btw, spending refers not just to savings at the individual level, but also spending at the national level), or that China's economy will clearly become superior in the future -- an assumption that is dubious at best.

 

[Vanadium 50]

This is all very interesting, but can we get back on topic, please?

 

[twofish-quant]

This is all very interesting, but can we get back on topic, please?

Some people in this thread have expressed the idea that the problems in academia are a symptom of general problems in the economy.

If that's the case then we *can't* discuss problems in academia without discussing the general world economy.

Now, we *can* discuss whether or not we can discuss problems in academia "separately". If you think it's *possible* to do this, I'd be very interested in understanding why this is.

 

[twofish-quant]

All of your discussions earlier seem to operate under the assumption that spending in China will rise less quickly than savings (btw, spending refers not just to savings at the individual level, but also spending at the national level), or that China's economy will clearly become superior in the future -- an assumption that is dubious at best.

If you don't know what's going to happen, one logical thing to do is to go through all of the possible outcomes and then come up with "what happens if..." The Chinese economy could blow up next year, but if it does, then we go into the "mad max" world.

And sometimes you just have to make a decision. They are about to spin the roulette wheel of life, and you have to figure out what number to put your chips on.

1) Savings has been constant or increasing since 1978. Since 2000, the savings rate has actually increased. Household savings are constant, but now that the state-owned enterprises are profitable, they are generating a ton of cash.

2) From where I am, China's economy is superior *now*. The Chinese government made some critical decisions in 2007, and the financial crisis is a distant memory. (Essentially they prevented a bust by creating a new bubble, and then they deflated the bubble).

It's been argued that this is just a flash in the pan, and that the Chinese economy will blow up next year. I just don't see this happening.

So the assumption that the Chinese economy will continue to chug along isn't a crazy one. Yes, it has a dozen problems, but every time someone points out a problem with the Chinese economy, people step back and fix the problem. I'm worried about the US economy, because there isn't this "we have a problem -> let's fix the problem" mentality.

Going back to "if you can't save the world, then save yourself" mentality. One big problem with this is that one has this tremendous amount of guilt. If you leave some place that you love because you think it's going downhill, there are very strong feelings of guilt and betrayal.

One way of dealing with those feelings is to just try to convince yourself that you did everything that you could do. If you tried to save the world, and no one listens to you, then this removes any guilt that you feel when you save yourself.

 

[Vanadium 50]

And we're done here.