A Poverty of Intelligence

This week, CBS News ran a series on India. In the first episode, the emigration of U.S. citizens to India was highlighted. Typically, Indian citizens return to India, and U.S. minorities are recruited to India, if they have technical skills now unrewarded in the U.S. This brain flow parallels similar developments in China and elsewhere in East Asia, which have seen a resurgence in the employment of repatriates in high technology.

I was not surprised that the undertone of American citizens now working in India - mostly U.S. minorities - is the promising careers they now have, which were unavailable to them in the United States. The grumbling of white, Nativist Americans about "foreigners" taking their jobs has been long and pronounced, especially since the Bandit grabbed power in Washington. The same grumbling occurs about U.S. universities, where white, Christian applicants have a hard time competing against the children of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Jewish and others having a more intellectually-oriented cultural background. For example, one of the surprising results of white American complaints about the Affirmative Action policies once applied at the University of California is that Asians now dominate the undergraduate and graduate schools. While American whites have been successful in eliminating blacks from the Universities, they also eliminated themselves. In the University environment, success results from hard, intellectual work, not from who you know or how you dress.

There is a technology boom going on all over Asia, and in parts of Europe, too. While this was intitially sparked by U.S. outsourcing, it now has its own life. The "technology bubble" moved out of the United States, and never ended elsewhere. For example, years ago, American economists and financial wizards declared the Chinese market an unsuitable and unstable investment. Now the Indian markets are too risky. Those pronouncements are based on the idea that the high growth rates of Asian economies could not be sustained. Despite warnings from America, China sustained growth rates of well over 7% every year of the last decade.

Those high growth rates are in part due to the low starting point. The standard of living in Asia was below poverty for most people for much of the 20^th century. Once things get going, there is always a fast take-off, as in the classical "S" curves of biological reactions. Eventually, things will slow down, after most of the demand for a better life is satiated. But when will that be?  Probably not any time soon. As a CBS News episode pointed out, there are still 300 million people in India making less than $1 a day. Those people represent the equivalent of another North American economy in the making.

In their racism or tribalism, Nativist Americans scoff and complain about the foreigners and minorities. But, those familiar with U.S. technology know those same foreigners and minorities have been increasingly responsible for most of the advances of the last few decades. The problem American companies have is losing those employees to emigration, which means they are losing their intellectual and competitive edge. There are a lot of smart American minorities who are just fed up with racism and discrimination in the United States, and have found a way out.

American technology companies are unable to fill their needs with white graduates of American universities. There are just too few of them. The number of white, Christian science and technology graduates from U.S. universities is actually declining every year. Chinese and Indian universities graduate more than 10 times as many scientists and engineers every year as the U.S., which is proportionately more than the population ratio. That is, the per capita investment in high technology education is 2-3 times greater in Asia than the United States. This same pattern applies as well in many European countries. I think the comparison simply reflects what is important to those concerned. In the United States, you can be white and Christian, or you can be educated.

The Romans were able to dominate the ancient world using their military might. The Romans were eventually unable to pay their armies because their economy collapsed, starting in the center and moving outward. The penultimate Ming Emperor declared the rest of the world irrelevant, prohibited foreign trade, and ordered the Chinese Navy to stay in port. Chinese merchants and sailors were following the path of the Europeans until that time. China, lacking a Navy and the mechanisms of foreign trade, soon found itself unable to defend against the inroads of Westerners bearing superior technology. So, in due time - a few centuries, Rome and China collapsed.

The modern United States follows the Roman example, as clearly illustrated in the present Bandit Administration. American men, as some recent studies show, are increasingly becoming stupid studs. Fortunately for the United States, American women still develop their brains, but they are not, by and large, in charge. If History has any lesson, it is that the United States, like Sparta and Rome, is destined to fail. If paleontology has any recent lesson, it is that those patient little rats and moles, twittering about in the night, bided their time until their lucky star landed. Then they ate frozen dinosaur until the asteroidal winter ended.