Why America Can't Make Squat
Jan. 5th, 2010 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsMaxine Udall has an interesting piece entitled The Price of Casino-Like Finance Is Higher Than We Think, in which she touches on many of the reasons why America is in so much trouble. Her thought processes are of a piece with Noam Schrieber's piece in The New Republic, Upper Mismanagement, and they dovetail nicely into my favorite boogeyman, the ongoing pressure by the Religious Right to destroy childhood incentives to go into the sciences.
Schrieber starts out by stating that for the past twenty years, the best minds in management have all been driven by business school ideals: not "make better stuff," but "make more money with the stuff we have." Converging with other threads of thought I've had over the decade, Schrieber points out that most upper managers come from business schools and know how to play the market game. No longer to CEOs (and even CTOs) come up through the engineering ranks, familiar with what the engineering departments are capable of producing; instead, they come from outside the business, full of knowledge about financial management, and are expected to figure out how to "leverage" what they can learn about engineering's "role" into financial success.
Udall goes deeper, and points out that engineering is probably full of mediocre minds who couldn't or wouldn't put their talents on the line for the hard-core stuff:
I'd like to add that ever since 1972, when the last Apollo mission returned to Earth, we have looked inward, looked downward. Hell, even the Space Shuttle rotates to face downward, toward the Earth, navel-gazing. Meanwhile, too much of America is scared that what science reveals makes the universe a scary place, a place without God or divine providence, and that the conclusions of biology are so unsettling its best that children not hear them. From an early age now, science curricula in pre-college classrooms has been dumbed down-- from the right, by fear of "naturalism," from the left, by fear that excellence by some will mean disappointment for others. We have relentlessly dumbed-down our curricula to the point where kids are entering college with no pre-calculus skills, no capacity to write a meaningful cover letter, no capacity to discern bias in a newspaper editorial.
Only the mathematics of finances is dually blessed: mathematical abstractions are sufficiently abstract that they seem free from having any impact on the "real world," and so are an acceptable pursuit to the religious. And it's about making money, which in some sense is divorced from the ethic of making good stuff. That might seem unChristian, but if it does, you're not hip to The Prosperity Gospel, which states that God provides material prosperity for those he favors.
All of these forces merge to create a situation where we've made "making money without getting your hands dirty" seem the only rational alternative. Nobody would go into the sciences in America: science is boring, hard, icky, unholy, and disruptive. And who wants that?
Frankly, I do.
Schrieber starts out by stating that for the past twenty years, the best minds in management have all been driven by business school ideals: not "make better stuff," but "make more money with the stuff we have." Converging with other threads of thought I've had over the decade, Schrieber points out that most upper managers come from business schools and know how to play the market game. No longer to CEOs (and even CTOs) come up through the engineering ranks, familiar with what the engineering departments are capable of producing; instead, they come from outside the business, full of knowledge about financial management, and are expected to figure out how to "leverage" what they can learn about engineering's "role" into financial success.
Udall goes deeper, and points out that engineering is probably full of mediocre minds who couldn't or wouldn't put their talents on the line for the hard-core stuff:
It will be from two powerful, long-standing price distortions that have distorted the composition of our labor force and the mix of human capital within it. The first distortion is the past diversion of some our best technical and mathematical minds away from physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and, yes, even economics, to financial modeling, risk analysis, and all the other marvelous tools of speculation and gaming.It's not just that management came out of business school and has no clue what engineering does, but that the talent management has to work with has been skewed downward by the immense seduction of money pulling talented engineers and scientists into studying financial alchemy rather than biochemistry or architectural engineering.
Maxine is thinking of all those bright, young, energetic people who came out of some of our best universities and opted to go to work for investment banks, not in technical jobs, but as traders, ratings specialists, analysts, again to support the conversion of trillions of dollars into chaff. Many of them might have gone on to graduate degrees in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, engineering, biology or medicine. Graduate work in psychology, sociology, English, history, political science, public health would have added more value than destroying wealth across the globe. Instead of a workforce that gained diverse skills that might one day transform the world in positive and substantive ways, we have a surfeit of MBAs with concentrations in finance and empty houses on overgrown lots.
I'd like to add that ever since 1972, when the last Apollo mission returned to Earth, we have looked inward, looked downward. Hell, even the Space Shuttle rotates to face downward, toward the Earth, navel-gazing. Meanwhile, too much of America is scared that what science reveals makes the universe a scary place, a place without God or divine providence, and that the conclusions of biology are so unsettling its best that children not hear them. From an early age now, science curricula in pre-college classrooms has been dumbed down-- from the right, by fear of "naturalism," from the left, by fear that excellence by some will mean disappointment for others. We have relentlessly dumbed-down our curricula to the point where kids are entering college with no pre-calculus skills, no capacity to write a meaningful cover letter, no capacity to discern bias in a newspaper editorial.
Only the mathematics of finances is dually blessed: mathematical abstractions are sufficiently abstract that they seem free from having any impact on the "real world," and so are an acceptable pursuit to the religious. And it's about making money, which in some sense is divorced from the ethic of making good stuff. That might seem unChristian, but if it does, you're not hip to The Prosperity Gospel, which states that God provides material prosperity for those he favors.
All of these forces merge to create a situation where we've made "making money without getting your hands dirty" seem the only rational alternative. Nobody would go into the sciences in America: science is boring, hard, icky, unholy, and disruptive. And who wants that?
Frankly, I do.
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Date: 2010-01-05 07:47 pm (UTC)I agree that the Business School is the worst thing that has ever happened to this country. Instead of people graduating with knowhow to improve sales and make a product people will pay for, they land in cushy 7 figure salaries with nothing but buzzwords to implement. And when the buzzwords make the company do poorer, why, it's never the 7 figure salary guy who gets laid off. it's the workers who build the product who get canned, eliminating the skills the company needs to recover. Finally the company implodes, and the manager parachutes to safety with his severance package. Then he goes to a new company and does it all over again.
It's a sad thing indeed that people in Cuba comprehend the free market better than our own people do.