Fareed Zakaria wrote about the immigration bit not long ago, writing "Every visa officer today lives in fear that he will let in the next Muhammad Atta. As a result, he is probably keeping out the next Bill Gates." But that's just one part of it. Even if immigration wasn't an issue, the rest of the world is coming up to speed alrmingly fast. My question is: is this necessarily a bad thing for the US?

Duance Ackerman says in the FT article that Dan linked to: "Innovation is the only sustainable driver for US productivity growth and higher standard of living for future generations.” But does this innovation have to take place inside the US? Isn't the US best placed to benefit from innovation that takes place anywhere? And isn't such progress, at the end of the day, a non-zero-sum game?

That is not to say that the US should not liberalize immigration or encourage research and development. Of course it should. But those are things that should be done for their own sake, and not because the US is "ceding its role as the world’s foremost economic power," which it isn't going to for a while yet.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Enjoy the time off. I shall enjoy the memories of your work. I hope you come back, renewed and reinvogorated.

i expect the reason that innovation may be slowing down is the Bush Administration. It's a backwards-looking group of people who seem to have no sense of what the country needs as we move into the future. They are all intent on maintaining their status and they have no time or space for fresh thinking in policy. Why would that be different when it comes to technology?

Happy Holidays to you and yours, Dan.

Merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new year to you and yours, Dan. Enjoy the sabbatical.

Happy Hols!

Happy Holidays and a Happy Gregorian New Year!

From the PDF: America is country of immigrants,

Da! However, I wonder how much of their desire to "reform immigration" is based on a desire to encourage innovation and how much is based on a more practical desire: that for cheap labor. And, one of the causes of the problems they point out is due to the mindset that we can import foreigners to do either high-tech or serf jobs.

There was an article in Science a few months ago, that outlined the decline of American hegemony in scientific publications. We are still on top in most fields (especially life sci), but others are catching up very quickly. Article in BusinessWeek last week detaling how China is now eating away at American technological advantage in manufacturing. I really don't have much hope that one of the most anti-science administrations in history will be able to do anything about this.

TLB, I think there is a difference between an H1B visa and a PhD candidate in Engineering or CS. There really is a shortage of qualified Americans to enter PhD programs in the sciences. This doesn't appear to be made up. H1B visas are probably an out-moded concept, any and all knowledge work doesn't require immigration any longer, just out source it.

Two points I would like to make;
1) The economical crash of 2000 has been the most sever since befor 1950. The crash of: 1974 was 30%, 1987 was 30%, 2000 was between 34% and 79%. So, there is/was a drastic decrease of money available for R&D.
2) In the 1980's -the Dole and someone Bill was passed that allowed certain people to patten certain research paid for by government funding. (See article in the Economist magazine). This would lead one to conclude that a big backlog of research was pattened for the next 10 years because of this change in laws.

These two points are probably what has squed the numbers. Thus, no mater who was in office at this/now, the results would still be the same.

As for the immigration of low wage earners, no politician has the guts to take on the logical correct reform of the immigration system. Those that make noise at the issue act for special interest groups or are very ignoant on the issue.

Spend some time outside of the USA and you will see what other countries have been doing for the last 50 and more years. America is very backwards on our immigration system.

Enjoy the rest. Short breaks are necessary to avoid longer ones later.

It was kinda silly for Zakaria to use Bill Gates as an example for how it's bad that it's hard for students to get visas to study in the US.

Gates dropped out of Harvard, after all.

Furthermore, I wouldn't expect the next Bill Gates to come to America as someone else's employee. The next Bill Gates will come to America as the head of his own company. That's kind of what it means to be the next Bill Gates, isn't it?

And, really, Bill Gates is not that much of a technological whiz. He *bought* DOS, after all. He's a shrewd businessman, but not a technical innovator. He's definitely not in the top 100, as far as personal technological achievements go. Maybe not the top 500. And he's definitely not a scientist of any sort.

I'd be more concerned about where the next Steve Jobs is going to come from. But there, too, another dropout, and more design/marketing-oriented than technical.

I'm not sure why foreign students in engineering or computer science would bother coming here, given that the American companies are doing all their hiring overseas.

Happy Holidays! Are you having any guestbloggers?

In the absence of guest bloggers, I suggest we all visit each others' blogs.

Oh, and Happy Last Part of December to every being!

Everyone needs to remember that it is all part of the swing of a big pendulum.

The upside of decreased immigration into US universities might just be a demand that the K-12 and higher ed institutions graduate EDUCATED U.S. students.
In the long run, that might not be a bad thing, after all.

No one forced to interact with the US government agencies responsible for immigration and consular affairs can easily escape the impression that these are among the worst-run organizations in the entire federal government.

They are that way because the deal primarily with non-citizens, so voting citizens and their representiatives have scant reason to care whether they work well or not. It isn't a philosophical issue or a reflection of public attitudes toward the world beyond our shores, but rather a matter of inertia unchecked either by executive branch leadership or congressional oversight.

With respect to education it might be appropriate to recognize a contradiction between the ideal of universal education and the practical goal of training the tomorrow's scientific leaders. For the brightest students much of public education today involves too much marking time and not enough hard work in the fields for which they have aptitude. We don't expect star athletes to just emerge after a fixed number of years in PE classes with everyone else. Why should we expect physicists or mathematicians to?

Adios for now.

It is, indeed, enough to make your head spin. Enjoy your sabbatical, and we'll look forward to your return.

Foreign students decided to goelsewhere.

Two points:

College students bright enough to do well in math and science classes are people bright enough to do well in business and law classes, leading to careers which generally offer higher incomes, greater influence in society, and larger amounts of individual autonomy than typical engineering and science jobs. It's RATIONAL for students to prefer managerial courses to engineering.

This can be changed overnight by raising engineering salaries, improving the employment prospects of engineers and science majors, and funding more cutting edge R&D, all in a big enough way. Remember the Apollo program?

-ms

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