14th July 2005, 1 min read

Expert Opinion: U.S. losing lead in science and engineering?

I like Michael though I don’t always agree with him. This time, I entirely agree with his recent post of the US losing the lead in technology. Why are people predicting that the US will fall apart? Because of offshoring. Yeah. Right. Michael says it all:

So, the cost advantage of offshoring will be transitory: enough to jump start high-tech industries in developing countries, but insufficient to do permanent damage to the US engineering profession.

I’m not saying that the US economy will not fall apart in the next few years. It could. Our economies have become very unstable. We are clearly in a highly non linear system and making long term predictions is futile.However, claiming that the not-so-sudden lost of interest of your Americans for some technology topics will be the cause of the US downfall is just silly.

Back in 1990, there were predictions of serious shortages of Ph.D.s People were predicting that we may have to close universities.More than 10 years later, not only do we have no shortages, but we clearly have way too many Ph.D.s even in technology. I don’t have any numbers, but I’m sure we have many barely employed nanotechnology or biotechnology researchers in Canada.

Is the US going to lose its edge? Maybe. Will it lose its edge because all the good engineers will be abroad? Be serious!!!