States which retain and attract highly-educated adults stand to reap substantial economic benefits. At the same time, those that bleed much of their homegrown talent will see their economic fortunes decline if they fail to replace the leavers with highly-educated out-of-staters. Yet even if they do manage to offset their losses, these states are still losing a vital source of social capital.
What is more, the outmigration of highly-educated adults has almost certainly played a role in the deterioration of civil society in struggling communities across the country. And to the extent that the geographic mobility of the highly-educated has increased social bifurcation, it has likely exacerbated distrust of and intolerance toward people who hold different beliefs. One need only glance at today’s polarized political environment to see these attitudes on display.
Our research finds that states that are doing the best—low gross brain drain and net brain gain—generally cluster along the Boston-Washington corridor and on the West Coast: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, Oregon, and Washington. Other brain gain states are regional hubs—Hawaii, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Illinois. Several of these states experienced high gross brain drain and net brain drain in 1970, but have reversed course; others have seen continued good prospects or improvements on one or both measures. For the most part, these states are home to what Richard Florida would describe as “winner-take-all cities.”
On the other hand, states in the Southeast, in the Rust Belt, and in other parts of the country tend to fare much worse when it comes to retaining and attracting the highly-educated. Several states in the Southeast—West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—had low gross brain drain and net brain gain in 1970, but today generally experience high gross brain drain as well as net brain drain. Most Rust Belt states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—have done poorly on these measures in both 1970 and 2017. Perhaps unsurprisingly, states that defy these regional trends (for example, Illinois in the Rust Belt, and Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia in the Southeast) seem to be attracting highly-educated out-of-staters to their dynamic metropolitan hubs.
Brain drain has significant consequences—economic, yes, but also political and cultural. By increasing social segregation, it limits opportunities for disparate groups to connect. And by siphoning a source of economic innovation from emptying communities, brain drain can also lead to crumbling institutions of civil society. As those natives who have more resources leave, those left behind may struggle to support churches, police athletic leagues, parent-teacher associations, and local businesses. State and local policymakers are understandably focused on the economic consequences of brain drain. But anyone concerned about the health of associational life in America should worry that what this report has mapped out, to some extent, is the geography of social capital drain.
"As those natives who have more resources leave, those left behind may struggle to support churches, police athletic leagues, parent-teacher associations, and local businesses."
Huh... churches are the first thing that come to mind. Yep, this was definitely written by a Utah senate staff.
I was out driving in rural Kentucky one day, along a long narrow gravel road with sparse houses, and came across a church. The church had a sign advertising a get-together with shotguns. I think it was skeet shooting, possibly as a fundraiser.
I don't even go to church or have a shotgun, but I suddenly wanted to live there and be a part of that community. I guess you could say that that sort of genuine community made me envious.
Some may. I certainly don't agree. Those "brain-drain regions" are the places where kids can afford to raise grandkids. Aside from weather, they are generally nicer places to live.
Young people certainly know this. And they're making the free, informed decision to forego raising children in return for living somewhere where they can both maximize their career potential and socialize with people more compatible with themselves.
I'm not saying that applies to everyone. I was "brain-drained" despite those things. But I know others who couldn't just pick up their lives for a job on the other side of the country.
The notion that 'you could feasibly make more money elsewhere, and therefore should leave' is not obvious to me, or I think to most people.
Chicago may have more opportunity than Michigan overall, but that doesn't mean there are not great opportunities in Michigan. But that's within the context of your imperative.
The real answer is that for most people, their job is not the defining artifact of their life, it's a means to support their families, and maybe give them an opportunity to engage with their communities, have hobbies, friends.
I think for young people, in their 20's the notion is a little big different, because moving is exploring and liberating in some ways, but that's only one phase of life.
> but that doesn't mean there are not great opportunities in Michigan.
Just because there are some great opportunities in Michigan does not mean there are enough great opportunities in Michigan for everyone who could find one in Chicago, SF, or Seattle, or NYC.
Michigan is awful for a LGBT person and the state isn't approaching modern lifestyle for the young since I've last been there; it's more of just a catering state for the age-group approaching retiring or already retired. The outdoor activities "the only thing it has going for the state" become tiring and when any decent city in a non-brain drain state has YMCAs that are built to facilitate fun social/active activities. The winters are awful as well.
I was surprised to see Illinois still look like it's attracting people from the graph (I'm not entirely sure, it's a little hard to understand which direction it's going from their visual and labeling choices). Illinois has more people leaving the state than coming into the state since at least 2014, and our tax burden is the highest in the country.
You’re 100% correct and it is why I’m generally very bullish on America despite the gloom and doom on the right and late stage capitalists on the left. It’s the competitive advantage of being a nation bound by ideas and common purpose than a monarch or ethnicity or religion.
As someone who grew up in Ohio, went to an Ivy, and left the US (but working remotely when I come across interesting projects for companies), I want to offer a different perspective.
>It’s the competitive advantage of being a nation bound by ideas and common purpose than a monarch or ethnicity or religion.
I think the US has become very ossified in this belief (which people fool themselves that the nature of this belief is any different from any other belief), you can see global capital flight to (parts of) the US and brain drain into the US, but in market speak, its a crowded trade, driven out of fear of the current downsides and not future upsides. However the nature of crowded trades is that they have the most tail risk, that some people (like me) cannot stomach.
I'm of the mind that things will get more complicated soon within the next year (well at least for those who have been oblivious all along despite the warning signs), and that people will start to realize that value can be found anywhere if those are willing to seek it out, though it may not be as simple as what we are used to and have come to expect.
It’s a flight to safety for trillions of sovereign funds, amidst worldwide recession (except US) and emerging market collapse. Plenty of future upsides for US, since all the capital is there.
Hardly surprising. As has been mentioned else where unless you follow a particular political dogma then you are anti intellectual and therefore to be excluded.
It's amusingly ironic how exclusive the politics of inclusion can be.
Jesus Christ. Sometimes you get downvoted. Sometimes you get upvoted. Either describe the damned concept or stop wasting our time lamenting how much we'll express our dislike.
I googled this and it was a complete waste of time. Charles Murray essentially argues that heritability plus assortative mating makes it so that the gap between the smart and the not so will grow larger. The smart will come from the upper middle class who are already going to college because they're going to marry other upper middle class people who go to college and make kids who will be upper middle class and go to college.
He also strongly argues that your ability to succeed is a measure of your innate intelligence. (perhaps this is the part that user/yasp thought would be considered abhorrent?) and that combines with the earlier parts to say that there will be increased stratification and it will be on intelligence as well as on money.
This whole thing is a waste of time because I gained nothing novel from having chased this vague-ass comment. Ugh.
Imagine what the effect of this is in the EU, where average income can differ up to 5-10 times between the poor and rich countries. Freedom of movement means they can still work in any of the EU countries.
I very much question the validity of PPP in this case. Things are no doubt cheaper in Bulgaria, but I'm fairly certain that electronics, cars etc are going to cost roughly the same, because there's a free flow of goods. People just make do with less.
Also keep in mind that people might move abroad to work there, but still come back home once in a while. The effect on the economy is still going to be similar. The median equivalised net income is just too different inside the EU: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=ilc_...
PPP only fully matters if you a) insist on living a local-typical lifestyle and b) intend to live there forever. Immigrants to Germany do not run out and get nearly-new Golfs and rent townhouses; they tend to be content with somewhat nicer than where they came from for at least the first few years, presumably saving up the difference, often with plans to head home someday.
German is also widely taught in Eastern European schools, so the language barrier isn’t as high as Americans think it is.
(Sample: Romanians, Poles and Croatians I know through work)
I wonder why we consider “highly educated” to mean “college educated.” I know plenty of college educated people unfit to manage a lemonade stand and plenty of “lesser educated” people that own successful companies. Using a degree as a proxy for intelligence is a mistake.
Level of education is a decent proxy for intelligence, in anything resembling an academic context. More education is usually better.
It's why companies prefer hiring people with more education.
That said, I think many roles should not require a college degree for application.
That one single thing might make a big difference - because as you hint there are tons of otherwise great people who don't specifically have the education.
Is the IQ of a person with a masters degree in sociology higher than the IQ of a non-degreee naval nuclear power technician? Yet the non-degrees nuke tech would be considered “less educated” by the measures being used in this discussion. A journeyman electrician often doesn’t have a degree, but they do more intellectually challenging work/calculations than some Master of Social Work person working at a local non-profit.
I deal with “highly educated” people in the mental health field on a daily basis and some can barely write grammatically correct sentences: the support tickets I get from people with PhDs and MA mental health professionals are frequently atrocious. But my “uneducated” dad worked as a precision machinist for NASA projects as well as teaching graduate students metallurgy. He’s considered not highly educated, but only because he didn’t get a degree. His education has zero to do with intelligence. That story isn’t an outlier either. My point is that higher education attainment often has nothing to do with intelligence beyond a base level, but more of class, financial resources and desire. A naval fighter pilot with a bachelors degree, in my experience is far more “educated” than someone with a masters in education, sociology, poetry or whatever. Highly educated as a proxy for “desirable worker” is a folly. Ambition, drive and work ethic are more valuable to a society than simply someone who checked the boxes and got a university degree. Using a university degree as a proxy for “desirable” worker is just snobbery and intellectually lazy.
Considered by whom? OPM - who sets the contractor pay-rate for these positions? The classification system is very detailed and carefully calibrated and it considers professional experience, certifications, and postsecondary and graduate degrees, and the PhD or MA is not always necessarily higher than an experienced technical engineer.
Brain drain within the US is just as frequently about cultural rather than economic issues. The culture wars the republicans have been running on since the 80s turns off thoughtful people - anti-intellectualism is killing these states.
That said, it’s incredibly underserved and there’s tons of very capable and friendly people.
Edit: maybe I didn’t get the intended point across - I’d ask though, how many people do you know that moved for cultural reasons, especially from hometowns? I’m in the LGBT community where almost every single person I meet has moved for cultural reasons.
I left Toledo last year and moved to the east coast. I was one of maybe three of my friends who was left at that point. It could be a really great state, but the dying lake and dying industrial economy really wrecked the place. The area needs serious investment, but I'm nowhere in the position to contribute back like that, so I made the jump.
A thing I like to say is that I am proud that I am from Ohio, but I'm also happy I'm not there now.
How can you be proud of where you are from? You had no choice in being born there, and as you said it’s a state without a lot of opportunity, and in any case, you didn’t personally contribute to anything to make the place better. So why be proud of that?
I’m from Florida but it’s not something I’m proud or not proud of. I’m proud of my kids. I’m proud of my work. I’m proud of my multi decade relationship with my wife. Those are things to be proud of.
When a class I belong to does something great, I feel I can only be proud to be a member of that class to the extent that I contributed to the great thing and that we worked together to achieve something greater than ourselves. Even then I’m proud that “we did that thing” not that “I’m a member of that group.”
Just a thought. I know many people are proud of where they are from but it’s irrational to me.
This is an entirely fair point—there's a fair amount of brain drain that can be attributed to "I don't want to live in a red state."
The LGBT thing is anecdotally true in my experience, and in particular, leaving your home state for college is a good socially-acceptable excuse to leave your home state and meet others you suspect are like you at exactly the same time that you're no longer a minor under your parents' control.
Sick leave, parental leave, legal marijuana, assisted suicide, non compete bans, better environmental protections, pro choice, are all desirable to the young people I know and red states go the other way on those policies.
That's percentage growth, not numeric growth. So while their population increase was largely due to national migration, those migration numbers didn't need to be very high because they don't have huge populations (except Florida).
Even in FL, anecdotally I know many people who moved there from CA or CO or NY not because they disliked the place they came from, but because they were forced out by influxes of _other_ people who made more money, drove cost of living up, etc. The sentiment is basically "Florida isn't as nice, but its cheap, so we make do because we have to." The brain drain from much of the rest of the country into a few small metro areas is forcing lots of middle-income people from those areas to migrate to cheaper places, and this would seemingly skew the numbers when you're looking at overall population migration.
> pro choice [...] are all desirable to the young people I know
Interestingly, unlike the other issues you've listed, pro-choice support does not vary a whole lot by age. 63% support from 18-29, 59% for 30-59, and about 57% for everyone older than that (https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-aborti...) Whatever causes the difference on that issue is not due to age.
I think it's partially cultural and partially economic. I left my home state (which scored poorly in this Senate report) because I couldn't get a great education in the state system, nor were there any prospects for the kinds of careers I was interested in (and there still aren't today). I love visiting where I grew up, and most of my family is still there, but the jobs I want are not and will not be there for any foreseeable future.
Seeing your edit, I can understand why you think it's mostly cultural rather than economic, but I definitely think it's both.
> The culture wars the republicans have been running on since the 80s turns off thoughtful people
You accuse "republicans" of running a culture war on a board that you know will never downvote you or moderate you... while announcing you're part of the LGBT community.
Real quick: can you name one country throughout history where LGBT lifestyles aren't promoted or endlessly sustained by massive, massive, massive media effort/high-level cultural/religious/military infiltration? Your "community" is a living, breathing culture war artifact that is 100% artifical and is, literally, made in advertising board rooms.
Imagine the amount of people who intentionally avoid anywhere your fake culture infiltrates and how much brain power refuses to help you out.
If you look at the 2017 Net Brain Drain it shows the following top gainers:
- Texas
- Virginia
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Colorado
- California
- New Jersey
- New York
- Massachussets
Georgia and North Carolina also showed strong gains (along with many other states). That may be blue-leaning but it's not a landslide.
It's more like people are concentrating in the biggest cities generally, and to the degree that there's a blue-shift its that states dominated by their urban population lean democrat and states dominated by a rural population lean republican, so the cultural change follows the demographic shifts rather than driving them.
My point is that all cities tend to be blue. Look at the electoral maps by county in the last several elections and it’s pretty stark: little blue islands in an ocean of red - but the blue dots are the big cities where about half the country lives.
How is it not a landslide? Of the 9 top gainers you listed, only one leans republican (Texas) [1]. All others lean democratic.
Of course as pointed out by a sibling, it’s kind of an irrelevant point anyway. The brain migration is away from rural areas (which are red, regardless of state), to big cities (which are blue, regardless of state). That only reenforces the parent’s hypothesis that intellectuals resent the anti-intellectual bent republicans have taken in recent times.
I left Utah many years ago for exactly these reasons. Salt Lake City is a lot more progressive now than it was then but every time I go back I’m reminded of how much I still feel estranged from that culture. If anything people there seem to be doubling down on their more intransigent beliefs lately.
> The culture wars the republicans have been running on since the 80s turns off thoughtful people - anti-intellectualism
There was plenty of anti-intellectualism in the US in the 70s. The movie "Revenge of the Nerds" wasn't made in a cultural vacuum. Neither was "Animal House". Sports heros have always been worshiped, not so with intellectuals (other than Einstein).
Much of this changed with Bill Gates. He was derided for being a nerd for years, until he made so much money people stopped laughing at him.
“Nerds” were derided as being relatively single-minded and unsocial, where to be successful in the business world at the time (and still now) meant communication and being able to easily form relationships. The nerds formed a new ladder from which to be successful and thereby respected - they’re powerful enough to take down the not-nerds.
You’re not wrong about anti-intellectualism always being a thing though, point taken!
This is an oversimplification of a more nuanced issue. For example, perhaps the places that need it most can't afford it, and the places that can afford it can only do so because they already have the existing market for it.
"Can't affordness" comes as a result of a lack of a resources/budget.
Which means decision makers or ultimately state/federal government think that funding of certain things at certain geographies is not important. (Or alternatively not offering any stimulus such as reducing taxes).
Article misleads reader by claiming "what is" without explaining the driving force behind the dynamics of skilled market.
At the same time when a company in my home state, offers pay at 55k for something that pays the equivalent of over double that on the coast there is something wrong. Software companies don't magically have smaller margins based on their geolocation if their user-base and contracts are global. In essence their offer of half what is reasonable is pure greed because they know they can get away with it in many cases.
There are lots of companies doing exactly this and driving costs lower in areas where they can get away with it. I think a non-trivial amount of brain-drain is simply paying people what they are worth regardless of how nuanced the issue actually is.
Interesting... I've only ever heard of brain drain used in an international context. Which is where the US comes out as a winner, as we're gaining from all the highly educated Chinese and Indians who come here to work and start companies.
I actually find the concept rather odd to use domestically, because it's generally used to show a contrast between a country paying for your college education, and then you reaping the benefits in a different, richer country -- which can seem unfair.
But in the US, students 1) generally pay for their own college education, and 2) often go to college in a state different from where they grew up and different from where they'll settle down later. So it doesn't seem to have any "unfair" aspect.
I mean, complaining about brain drain domestically feels like complaining about free trade domestically... it doesn't make sense to me. People have the freedom to move to areas of better economic opportunity and that's a good thing in a dynamic, ever-changing country like America. Complaining about brain drain domestically really just sounds like wishing more people lived in the country instead of in big cities... no thanks.
Georgia is an interesting outlier here: they introduced the HOPE scholarship in the 1990s to allow any in-state (already lived there for at least a year) student free tuition at a state school as long as they maintained a 3.0 GPA, all funded by the state lottery.
And you have some pretty good schools to choose from here: University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State (which has improved a lot in the past 10 years).
There are plenty of fair criticisms that can be leveled against the HOPE scholarship, but it seemed clear to me that it would reduce brain drain in the state, simply because students could get a high quality education at almost no cost. But these data show that the drain ratio increased from 1990 to 2010.
So this is a situation where students aren't paying for their education, are going to school in the state where they likely grew up, and then are still leaving.
> students aren't paying for their education, are going to school in the state where they likely grew up, and then are still leaving
This was me. I grew up in Georgia and went to Georgia Tech on the HOPE scholarship, but there just aren't many tech jobs in the area (despite the fact that GT has one of the top ranked CS programs). I moved to the Bay Area a year ago. If Georgia would incentivize the tech industry like it has with filmmaking recently, I bet a lot more people would stay.
It seems like most of the incentives are tax waivers. Georgia also has lots of land for films to work with. Do you think it would work for tech? I'm not sure if Atlanta has the clout to bring skilled engineers from NYC/SF
The problem is that local governments and communities acting in their own self interest will rationally underfund education.
Let's say that hypothetically all new science and engineering jobs are all in ScienceVille. In that case, any local government that doesn't receive some direct tax benefit from taxes collected in SV has negative incentive to teach their students anything about Science, since those students will just leave (after their education has been invested in by the local government) and move to SV to get a job. Those local government are now incentivized to teach their kids anything else (like religion and manual labor) since even if they can only do manual labor at least they're going to stay in their hometown.
Now there is a difference of incentives for the individual States verses the Nation. The Nation would prefer to have lots more engineers and skilled tech workers. The States would prefer to keep their best and their brightest, and if that means they are underutilized that's still a local maximum for the individual State.
Naturally, this is great for SV, but horrible for the rest of the nation. In this scenario, the entirely imaginary, hypothetical "SV" has to either give something back to incentivize the rest of the nation to keep teaching Science and Engineering, or the rest of the country continually subsidizes SV through education which is unsustainable.
Japan has an interesting approach to this problem. I don’t remember the details but they have some mechanism to funnel tax revenues from big urban areas to the smaller cities that provide a lot of their educated workforce.
Its implementation is flawed though, citizens can freely pick any city even if they have no relation to it, and cities are allowed to give gifts to citizens who choose the city, resulting in cities competing to offer the best kickbacks.
"Whereas conservatives promote policies that empower parents with the freedom and resources to choose what works best for them and their families, harnessing the power and problem-solving capacity of civil society and the free-enterprise economy, Democrats prefer government-run, one-size-fits-all programs."
"Conservatives do not claim to have all the answers when it comes to early education policy. But the available research and the lessons of experience teach us that massive government investments to scale up early education programs into a single formula that applies to everybody simply don’t work. At best, they are a waste of money. At worst, they are harmful to our children, families, and communities."
"The EEOA would expand school choice to all parents, regardless of socio-economic status or zip code, by allowing federal “Title I” K-12 support funds to follow low-income students to any public or private school of their choice."
"The HERO Act would accomplish this by changing the way schools are accredited. The HERO Act would enable each state to accredit any institution that provides post-secondary education. With this new accreditation power, states would be able to authorize innovative new education options (for example, massive online open courses, competency-based offerings, and certification exams) for students in any learning situation."
But please do read it all yourself, read the lines, between the lines, make up your own mind about where you think Senator Lee truely stands on this issue.
If you’re wondering where the downvotes are coming from, it’s probably because ad hominem attacks (attacking the person making the argument, rather than directly refuting their arguments; what you’re doing here, basically) are generally considered a logical fallacy.
I know where the downvotes are coming from, I have no concern about karma.
That's his voting record, and links to his webpage, and the words are his. I said nothing negative about the man. All I asked is that people read it. You think this brain drain article with his face on it is logically disconnected from his politics?
Speaking frankly, I don’t see what anything that you posted has to do with brain drain. All you’re doing is pointing out unrelated things which you think makes the senator look bad.
In short order the Supreme Court will decide on whether or not to include a citizenship question on the upcoming census.
The result of including the question will sow fear in non-citizens, fully entitled to be counted (the census requires "whole persons", not just citizens) and is projected to cause an undercount of many, many millions of people in "brain gain" states.
This will directly effect the amount of federal money, by many billions of dollars, that goes to states for education. You think this article is somehow disconnected from that? That maybe some of the senators that sit on the Joint Economic Committee might have something to gain from this?
This is not about bad choroplethy and bogus metrics, this is American politics.
You’ve just made what seems like a reasonable argument about how a citizenship question on the census affects education funding. But the only way you’ve connected this to the brain drain argument is by pointing out that some of the same people are involved.
If the census can ask any questions at all other than “how many people are in your household,” then certainly a question of citizenship is relevant. Many, many countries include citizenship in their census, it’s not at all unreasonable. Citizenship is far more relevant than race. France for example, forbids asking race and ethnicity however they do, in fact, ask about citizenship. Why wouldn’t we want to know the citizenship of the people living in the country? It seems like very useful data.
>"Why wouldn’t we want to know the citizenship of the people living in the country? "
I think he told us that answer already. His politics benefits from noncitizens being counted in the census, so it would be problematic if such a question were to scare away any illegal immigrants living in the U.S (this is because no permanent legal resident is scared of citizenship questions, since it's usually clarified if something is okay for a legal resident noncitizen or not).
Brain Drain is about networking. Why would most give up the opportunity to relocate around the top thinkers in their field? Inhibiting this movement would arguably slow down progress, while making the country more robust (much like the pros/cons associated with most centralization vs. de-centralization topics).
People from my hometown (pop. ~7500 in Midwest), do not realize that they are falling behind at an almost exponential rate. Many are working jobs that require common training, they do not continue their education, and they spend far too much time behind screens in the form of entertainment. And, even for those who want to continue to learn, they do not have access to a nearby tech meeting hosted by a top firm speaking on the state of the art. If you're not in SF or NY, then you do miss out on a lot of opportunities per people and shared information.
* I am personally ashamed to say that I only realized the power and advantage of networking in recent years.
> Inhibiting this movement would arguably slow down progress.
Don't think the lawmakers want to inhibit movement rather, probably they want to use these conclusions to encourage people to stay. The prosperity brought by progress can be spread across many regions.
> People from my hometown (pop. ~7500 in Midwest), do not realize that they are falling behind at an almost exponential rate. Many are working jobs that require common training, they do not continue their education
Do you think it's caused by the lack of other people who are moving ahead aka role models or are there other factors(quality education etc...)?
I do feel and have seen despite being in the right place some people don't get same opportunities for upward mobility despite being literally next door.
Education, and lack of opportunity for those who are educated and talented. (They will go where they can reap the most benefits for themselves). That top talent - will also educate their co-workers. Not just the people they work closely with, but everyone in their organization will receive great benefits from collaborating with the people who collaborate with that top talent.
But most people working in the tech industry; (which is very highly stovepiped) - will never experience that, and may only read about it.
When you're not fortunate enough to be employed in one of the top tech industry companies, or in one of the hotspots where the industry is focused (Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Austin, Virginia, maybe Provo, Seattle) - then you have to do all you can to use the internet to constantly learn and grow your skills; but also, you have to try to constantly evangelize the same attitude to your co-workers, and management. It is an exhausting job.
I'm roughly 5 years out of undergrad and my peers from my midwestern private school are already stratifying. There are people who flock to the coasts or get assigned to some midwestern capital for a few years (but with a well paying job and opportunity to transfer to a larger office), and there are those who stayed behind. More often then not the people left behind either didn't finish college or aren't using their degree, got married at 23 and kids at 24, and/or parading a pyramid scheme on instagram. Its a shame because this was a private school with a strong focus on higher education, lots of kids getting great scholarships to awesome schools, but after college its like these people stop engaging themselves to beef up their resume. It's easy to stagnate in the midwest.
Interesting how the South appears to have totally reversed course. In 1970, it appears it was attracting talent. Now, it's losing talent quickly. That's unfortunate.
I'm wondering how much of that might have been the Great Migration: of (mostly poorer, less educated) blacks leaving the South specifically because of institutional oppression directly causing that lack of education and poverty.
I’m from Kentucky, live on the west coast, and I cannot at all sympathize with those from there and similar states if they complain about brain drain. If you boast stupid, backwards policies and only give economic opportunities to the well connected, don’t be surprised when the intelligent but not well connected people leave the state. Maybe I’ll retire to my backwards hometown but I make more than double on the west coast than I could (as an employee) there, so not moving back anytime soon.
Having moved from a rust-belt blue state; who had liberal policies (but. . . just failed to nurture their tech industry like other states did), I moved to California; for a richer employment opportunity.
In terms of skills I could learn on the job, there's no way I could have gone nearly as far in my career if I limited myself to the set of employers that were available to me in my hometown.
Now, I've moved to a red state, (for family reasons), and I have interviewed at about 20 different companies. The "tech industry" is very different from California. There's a little bit of a software startup industry growing, most of the jobs are in healthcare and financial IT. Nobody wants to pay people what they could earn elsewhere. And in terms of career paths there's not a lot out there that offers much of a future. (or at least it appears that way). None of these companies seem like they have any kind of vision other than general business continuity. It's a completely different experience than I had interviewing with tech companies in California.
Even worse: the company I did take a job at can't seem to retain talent. And when we look for it, we can't find it. (And when we find it - I implore them to make it worth the candidate's time. . . and HR simply responds about what the "market rate" is. - which is why I keep interviewing elsewhere. . . ).
In a nutshell; the main difference seems to be - technology companies in California are in the business to innovate, and create new technology, and to become industry leaders. Where, in my new state; they're in the business to just be in business.
It’s the great American business bureaucracy - the middlemen companies that don’t drive anything forward, they just provide the minimum service to get their piece of the money funnel.
This exists in the Valley too. IBM, Oracle, Cisco, many businesses once they reach a certain maturity point just turn into “steady” parts of the market.
Yeah, I suppose it’s like that in Kentucky too. But I would guess the salaries are even lower than where you’re from, plus the overall anti-intellectual environment just drives ambitious people away. Plus there are basically no venture capitalists, people (especially older people high up in business) are still quite -ist, and there’s a lot of an old boys network with poor education in general. It’s just an unattractive place to do business
Now, consider the "meta-brain-drain" of 1) increased assortative mating (people are increasingly more likely to marry someone of similar educational and professional achievement) and 2) college-educated women delaying childbirth and having fewer children than non-college-educated women.
The net result is that more educated people tend to have fewer children than the less educated. If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, this doesn't bode well for future generations. It seems like we as a society need to figure out a way to make "have children at a reasonable age" not be a low-status move for highly educated / driven / intelligent women.
That sounds exactly like the plot of "Idiocracy" - people who aren't 'smart' are having more children then those who are 'smart' so society is ruined. How about trying to make education and other opportunities more accessible to the less educated instead of bashing them for having a couple more kids?
Because educating people doesn't change their genetics. If as a society you care about basketball playing ability. And you find tall people are having less kids than short people no amount of basketball camps are going to make the next generation taller.
Also what we care about is societal contribution which primarily happens through work and we're terrible at making people better at their jobs through the education system.
Success is hardly a heritable genetic trait. Most of the education differences you see among families is environmental, and can be compensated for by improving public education.
What do you mean by intelligence and conscientiousness? If you are referring to IQ scores, yes it seems there’s a factor that’s inherited. For intelligence, I would like to know your definition and the research you are basing it on.
Even for IQ scores it‘s not so clear, as our measure of IQ is variable and there are no longitudinal studies to my knowledge showing what you claim.
Yes, so change the public education system that more people get a better education? Look at Sweden/Norway etc., or do you argue that their genes are different ;)
I mean education in the US sucks ... you need to be rich to give your kids a good one (comparable to what’s free in Europe)
My mother, a poor immigrant, managed to provide me with education just fine in the US. Nothing to do with the funding or programs or systems - its just willpower.
The alleged "socialist" success stories tend to have strong labor laws, but also much less business regulation and be much more free market than the typical American has been led to believe.
Sweden for example has no minimum wage and fully voucher-ized education which are anathema to the US left.
So I'd disagree there aren't things holding students in the US back, they just hold the entire DNC captive.
Sweden also has a flat tax. They depend on high income tax across the board unlike the US, but also have higher institutional trust/social cohesion (easier with a low pop) and frankly better governance overall.
Culture matters. It's why southern Europe is not like northern.
There's no quick fix that can be cherry picked to make the US like Nordic nations.
I’m just arguing that affordable and more education is good.
students in the us often have to take on a tremendous amount of debt to get one.
You seem not to like the word “Socialist.” I think it’s obvious that we as humans should help each other if one of us is doing not well due to misfortune.
For me a country should be evaluated on how much it cares about the ones that don’t have power (homeless, immigrants, elderly etc.)
My uncle chain smoked and lived till 90, but I wont argue that smoking extends life. One example does not prove a case.
There are a hundred variables. Sometimes poor people get lucky. Some are pretty and have doors opened to them. Some truly are exceptional. And many are unlucky.
Education doesn't improve genetics, but it still improves a person's intelligence and overall abilities (reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking). There is value in providing education to everyone, regardless of their intelligence (however you wish to define that).
> How about trying to make education and other opportunities more accessible to the less educated instead of bashing them for having a couple more kids?
defen is (correctly) bashing the more educated for not having enough kids, exactly the opposite of the attitude you're imputing to him.
I attribute the view of "bashing the less educated for having more kids" because of what he says below:
>If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, this doesn't bode well for future generations.
I interpret what he was saying, taking in some of what he said earlier, as something along the lines of "less educated people are having more kids, so there are more and more less intelligent children around, so the future is screwed.
Whether or not what he was saying is correct isn't what I'm commenting on here, just clarifying my view.
We're probably less than a century away from having the capability to edit intelligence into the genome of embryos. Certainly not more than two, assuming we don't blow ourselves up. At that point in time, a child will not be shackled to the luck of their parents' genetic fortunes -- at least not because of our technical inability to break those chains. I doubt any hypothetical dysgenic effects will have become so acute by then that we'll be unable to make that advancement, although I too feel some kind of visceral concern over this issue.
Also worth noting: according to [1], women who don't finish high school are only about 50% more fertile than women who finish college, and that group represents only 20% of the population. The difference between the high school, some high school, and college cohorts is much smaller.
We also don't know exactly how well that difference in educational attainment is linked to a genetic difference. That is, it seems very likely that some of the difference in attainment is due to family socioeconomic circumstances, not an underlying genetic difference in intellect. As such, I don't think any dysgenic effects are going to be so pronounced as to cause a crisis before genetic engineering efforts can be well under way.
We’re far closer to blowing ourselves up than 1-200 years, though. It could literally happen via nuclear war or metaphorically via irreversible climate catastrophe within 15 years, easily.
> It seems like we as a society need to figure out a way to make "have children at a reasonable age" not be a low-status move for highly educated / driven / intelligent women.
Isn't the obvious answer better maternity leave laws? Ambitious women in the US don't have kids because it fucks their career. The US is literally last among OECD countries, offering zero guaranteed maternity pay [1].
Higher/highest quality child care is not putting your kid in child care at all. I don't know why rich parents would want to risk the long term welfare of their kids so they can work more. Kids that spend lots of time in child care are objectively worse off.
> Within 10 years, comprehensive analyses of the universal, “$5 per day childcare” program, including its impact on child care use, employment patterns, and children’s and parent outcomes, suggested cause for concern. Social development among children, as indicated by both emotional and behavioral measures, had significantly deteriorated in Quebec, relative to the rest of Canada (10% of a standard deviation lower). Comparisons between children ages 2 to 4 who had been exposed to the program, with older children (and siblings) who had not, revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression in those exposed to the program. And the analyses found more hostile, inconsistent parenting, and lower-quality parental relationships among parents of children exposed to the program. But it was hard to predict whether the negative outcomes identified for 2- to 4-year-olds would persist across their development, or simply dissipate.
> Their research confirmed that the negative effects did continue, and in some cases became stronger across development. Among 5 to 9-year-olds, negative social-emotional outcomes not only persisted, but in some cases increased, as indicated by 24% of a standard deviation increase in anxiety, a 19% increase in aggression, and a 13% in hyperactivity. The impact on boys and children with the most elevated behavioral problems was stronger, especially in measures of hyperactivity and aggression.
If you take 9 months off to raise a child, you're not growing your career -- regardless of wether your company or the state or a combination compensates you.
One big part of this is that even if you have guaranteed maternity pay, it still hurts your career. In a highly competitive environment, I don't see how not working for X amount of time doesn't lead to being X amount of time behind in career growth.
The answer is to have less competitive environments. In Sweden, jantelagen (a cultural sentiment that discourages overt personal ambition) is a huge part of what enables generous leave policies.
And yet they’re not tumbling into nothingness, in fact, many reasonable people place Sweden as an amazing place in many metrics, stable in the top 10% for most lists I’ve seen—everything from happiness levels to GDP(PPP).
Makes me question whether or not our (USians) shouldn’t push for a cultural change where we don’t worship so heavily at the alter of the hyperambitious.
Ambition is what makes things happen. Do you think Apple and the iPhone would have happened without the hyper-ambition of Jobs? It happened in the US, too, not in Sweden.
You can't really tell American business culture to be less competitive. You might as well try to get Klingons to be less war-happy. If you're going to try to improve the situation for women, you have to work within the system as it exists.
The best hope is improving remote work and improving transportation infrastructure. Women don't have to leave jobs that they can do from home, and client visits are less impactful when they take less time to visit the client and return. It's not a solution which fits nicely into a single bill of legislation to be passed, but it's the groundwork that the US needs to make it happen.
I would argue the answer is to offer both men and women the chance to have X time leave per child per Y time worked, that way there's no economic incentive to discriminate.
That still incentivises having children later. Lost growth compounds over a career, so delaying it would still make sense. It would then hurt those who choose children earlier.
That's a problem that may require more policy nuance, but I thought both men and women face a similar modicum of risks for waiting too long for kids, so men cannot get an advantage on women over this.
> men and women face a similar modicum of risks for waiting too long for kids
Sadly, biology disagrees.
That aside, the original thread was that those who delay children have fewer children and the conclusion is this situation selects against the things that lead to delaying children. If career ambition is genetic, then each generation will have less of it. At least, that's the theory here.
* Mothers are protected from firing once they announce the pregnancy. There are still stupid people which fire them and put pressure on them. A friend's boss threw a fit because several of his employees got pregnant and actually said he won't hire women any more. That was likely just blowing off steam, but still.
* The mother can take 12 or 24 months off, but gets the same amount in both cases. The pay is capped at 1800 EUR / month, so if she earns well she'll lose a ton of money.
* The time off can be shared between parents, but all my acquaintances decided that the father should only take a couple of months off, in order not to lose even more money and affect the careers of both parents.
Family doesn't seem to be compatible with the hyper-competitive job market.
> The pay is capped at 1800 EUR / month, so if she earns well she'll lose a ton of money.
Uh, I haven't had to use it but from what my siblings told me it's always a massive pay cut. You supposedly get 60% of your normal wage... Capped to 1800€
In this case, "better" might mean none at all. EU countries with lots of maternity leave are really lacking in children.
Without maternity leave, of course there is a disincentive to have any children. Once you do have a child though, you might as well have a bunch of children. You've already blown the career. This probably explains the odd result of countries with more maternity leave having fewer kids.
Another factor may be that the cost of maternity leave is passed on to everybody. Depending on legal details this may be via higher taxes, lower pay, and higher prices. It obviously isn't free. People often react to higher costs by having fewer kids. The policy may thus have the opposite of the intended effect.
Paternity leave is really important - some of which should be "must take" as much as a woman "must take" time and the rest can be taken by either parent or both parents can work less than full time. IIRC, paternity leave means women are discriminated against less for taking maternity leave.
But it is more than that. Making sure parents can take time off work when their child is sick or they have a meeting with the teacher and things like that are very important. Health care and so on? Important.
I'm guessing that where the paid leave comes from is really important as well: It seems that most of this should simply be taxpayer funded so it doesn't actually break a small business. The US medical leave laws exclude small businesses, so these folks can just fire you and besides, there is nothing saying you get paid time off at all.
There are probably other things that contribute as well.
Depending on the state you are in, it is also very bad to have wife earn way less than you -- because it almost prompts divorce (salaries get distributed evenly post divorce, or more when children are involved.) Most of my successful male friends ensure they have high-earning (equal ideally) spouses to ensure there isnt a natural setup for divorce. This favors late childbirth amongst the wealthy.
A crucial detail that people spouting "free college forever for anyone for any major!" are absolutely living in another dimension where funding a student's degree in civil engineering or chemistry is considered equivalent to the saturated academia-only majors whose only future career prospects are becoming a professor for that same subject matter.
It hasn't impacted any generations thus far. Low income and/or poorly educated Americans have always had more children than higher income/well educated Americans. From back when health standards were terrible, to when having more kids meant more hands to work the farm. Yet society still has found a way not to collapse on itself.
> Americans have always had more children than higher income/well educated Americans.
But is this Universally true? 250 years of US history is a blip in Human history.
You could argue that lower classes used to have a lot of children because child mortality rate and morbility rate was very high. Also children were needed as labour, with a role in the household or working along side their mother or father. With modern healthcare, social security, and children rights legislation none of the previous pattern is true.
In comparison higher income people or more accurately land owning ruling class had the luxary of better nutrition and several children were a way of reducing the risk of having no heir to handover to.
Another fundamental difference for higher income families introduced with Christianity is that the ruling class was now (officially) restricted to a single wife. In comparison if you look at several empiries in Asia and Africa, the biggest benefit of power and wealth (from a patriarch perspective) was the ability to 'acquire' multiple wifes and to maximise your genetic descent, the most brutal example of this was probably Genghis Khan.
The point I wanted to make is that having several (surviving) children used to be a privilege reserved for the rich and powerful of whatever society at the time. However with our science/social/legal achievements and progress this is no longer true in our social fabric and I am unsure we can accurately predict how this 'recent' change will impact humans as a whole.
Maybe education _is_ the problem. Maybe we're teaching children that things like career and information hoarding are more important than family and living life in general. And maybe hyper specialized brains (almost computers) should stay in low numbers relative to the general population. Maybe we're just walking hard drives, full of "facts". Maybe we're not as smart as we think.
"We" are not teaching. Everyone can see for themselves that raising kids is a thankless, difficult job which can hardly be reconciled with a successful career.
I did not get the above information from Mars, but rather from other humans and also from reading and becoming aware of current social topics.
I would have thought that it's a pretty well known thing nowadays that motherhood is at least a part-time job and in spite of the best intentions, fathers can only partly compensate for the additional effort.
Furthermore, being a mother is not a respected "job", it's neither associated with a good salary, nor high status.
But perhaps you've connected with other humans or live in a different country. Would be nice to share those experiences instead of acting uppity.
Motherhood is not a zero sum game where having a child is somehow a loss to the mother that must be compensated by the father. It's a cooperative effort, not a competitive one. Motherhood is not respected only by those who don't respect family, and those who don't value and respect the idea of family, well they're lost souls.
Yes, the less educated still have more children than the more educated, but that gap is getting smaller.
----------
In more current data:
Teenage pregnancies are down by 55% since 2007, which is an enormous public health success that no one seems to have noticed.
And while I can't find more recent data by educational attainment, there does appear to be racial data, which given the enormous differences in average educational attainment between racial groups, are something you can make inferences from.
The groups which are statistically lower educational attainment have seen 2-6x larger drops in fertility than the groups which are statistically higher educational attainment.
Genetics is not the only form of inheritance. You can "inherit" opportunity -- wealthier (and usually more intelligent) people end up in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools and the vicious cycle turns and turns.
Only one form is needed to refute the claim that we "have no evidence, quite the opposite" that children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence.
I don’t see any reason to assume that intelligence is strongly correlated with parent intelligence. Weakly, sure, but nurture factors contribute immensely. I attribute my own success not to genetics, though my parents are successful, but to reading a LOT as a kid and an upbringing encouraging curiosity, and then nepotism. The knack I have for puzzles that I share with my family seems to contribute less to my place in the world and more the roles I choose in this place—that is, I don’t think it has significantly impacted my material position—much more due to the earthly explanations of privilege.
It takes high intelligence to teach your kids to read or do puzzles as a hobby. Your parents could have just as easily put you in front of a TV for your whole childhood, or they could have provided a stressful or abusive environment to grow up in. Intelligence takes many forms.
I think you have some good points, but I don't think the following is a safe assumption, and it can be very counterproductive:
> If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, [...]
You could imagine how this idea can discourage people of modest origins, and can also encourage people of advantage to see themselves as innately superior.
An interesting way to look at this is that nature (from an evolutionary perspective) is selecting away from what the popular sentiment of this board considers intelligent.
Perhaps educated people are better at realising that 40 is a “reasonable age” to have children, while 24 is not.
Raising kids after 15 years of extra life experience, savings, and career advancement sure does make having kids easy. It was pretty straightforward in my experience but I couldn’t imagine how I would have pulled it off back when I was trying to scrape together some savings with my entry level job and tiny studio apartment.
Biologically, 40 is a bad age to have kids at. The risk of Down syndrome and other diseases increases by a lot with each passing year in the 30s and it's anyways harder to conceive.
Pregnancies over 35 are considered risky and are monitored much more closely.
Having kids early is problematic because of the changing economic factors: job uncertainty combined with families moving for jobs and not being able to rely on grandparents for help. But the 20s are the perfect biological age range to have kids in.
The thing they don’t talk about much is that age isn’t so much the factor as overall health. The two correlate pretty well, so it’s more polite to talk in terms of age, but we could watch the way my fit, active, wife was treated compared to a more sedentary, overweight, woman 10 years younger, and it was clear which one people were more concerned about.
Beyond that, even assuming the official numbers are right, I was still happy to exchange “lose one lottery draw when it counts” for an extra 15 years of doing thing you can’t do after having kids. (And of course being able to afford having them comfortably.)
Like you said, economically it makes sense, but I have to emphasise that biologically it's risky(er) to wait. Risk doesn't imply a negative outcome, as you have discovered for yourself, but each would-be parent should at least know what the pros and cons are.
According to Uhl's Obstetrics and Gynaecology for example, fertility is impacted negatively for females of age > 35 and a first pregnancy over 35 or under 19 is considered a risky pregnancy. Same goes for subsequent pregnancies over 40, which have a higher risk of genetic defect, placenta insufficiency, etc.
It's perhaps interesting to note that a genetic consultation is offered to women over 35, but only to men over 50. The risk of a trisomy over 35 is 1 : 370, whereas earlier it's in the thousands and can be shrunk further through non-invasive diagnosis.
There are many more things which become problematic over 35 (thrombosis, diabetes, hypertensive disorders), I don't have time to list them all, but any good book on obstetrics will have the details.
Weight issues (BMI > 25, < 19) and a sedentary lifestyle increase the risk for pre-eclampsia, pre-term birth, pregnancy diabetes or spontaneous abortion. This would explain why the lady you mentioned was likely closely monitored.
It seems that some attributes of the mother (e.g. being overweight, diabetes) are also reflected in the later predisposition to disease of the child. This can include even things like natural vs. C-section birth.
Whenever I see this topic come up, I think back to the climactic speech in the movie Good Will Hunting, the one where Chuckie excoriates Will for wanting to put down roots in the community he grew up in. He concludes:
"It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in 20 years. Hangin' around here is a fuckin' waste of your time."
This was framed as an inspirational moment that finally pushed Will to achieve his potential. This idea -- that self-actualization requires abandoning your small-town roots -- is ingrained in our cultural DNA.
An early memory of mine is when my mother told me that there was no future for me in Southern Illinois, and when I grew up, I’d have to move far away.
She was right. I did, right to the Bay Area. When I go back and visit, the area has gotten more economically depressed, and frankly more stereotypical. And to put a cherry on top, I am completely unemployable there.
I'm not sure I can make sense of the "Gross" figures. The "Net" figures are easy to understand: people have generally moved to key urban areas, being CA, NY, IL, TX, VA/MD, GA and CO.
Compare that to the Net figures from 1940 through 1990, which show a clear migration to the Southern states. But I'm not even sure this is showing what it suggests. Is it simply a proxy for population growth?
Or is this thing just a symptom that people in general have a much lower chance of staying in the same state for 31-40 years?
I find the notion that people "self-select" into like-minded communities as some sort of "social segregation" baseless, even laughable. The South still has the echoes of slavery and (real) segregation that many have sought to escape. The implication here is that people are abandoning their communities. Are they though? What do they owe these states where they grew up? And are they abandoning such states or essentially being chased away because they simply don't conform to whatever cultural or religious norms dominate there? This seems particular relevant to the smaller and more rural states.
Bear in mind that education seems to be a partial antidote to religious dogma [1] in that people with more education tend to express religion less (although this is complicated and Christians seem to somewhat buck this trend). But given the cultural importance of religion in some communities, it seems like your more educated citizens are also more likely to leave, no?
19th century America was one of small, rural towns. With the railroad and homesteading these spread West. What probably began with the Industrial Revolution seemed to turn into a tidal wave of urbanization following the Second World War. Cities are just more efficient at delivering work opportunities.
So. You, as a Representative in this case, have most of your power based on geographic concepts. Not related to anyone you actually govern in comparison to the rest of the country. You then are completely surprised that the party governing your state/city that has largely engaged in sycophancy isn't attracting actually intelligent people.
This is the most least surprising outcome and it these areas need to continue to be absolutely economically devastated until the populace learns the consequences of supporting really dumb government policies.
At least then people spouting off "party politic" lines will realize there is a fundamental, realistic, constructive difference of parties int the U.S. and what it means for society as a whole.
Brain drain is one of numerous dynamics highly similar to Gresham's law, though with subtle implications. Goods movements, where mobile, follows direct reward.
Brain-drain may be for economic, technological, social, and cultural reasons. It's not uncommon for talent flows to be at least nominally bidirectional, though with different and distinct motivating factors. The flight of intellectual (and especially Jewish) European talent to the US before, during, and after WWII contrasts with black American's migration from the US, particularly though not just the South, to Europe. Contrast Fermi and Einstein against James Baldwin and Nina Simone. Both oppression (negative driver) and economic opportunity (positive) existed for each.
Within the British Commonwealth, substantial migratoon supported by some cultural and political commonality (even where other strong differences existed) facilitated vast human flows, generlly toward London, thpugh also other centres.
Similar dynamics exist within countries as well, often (per Jane Jacobs) at the urban regional level, particularly contrasted with rural regions. And hub formation / centres of excellence tend to accelerate such consolidation (a point Edward Glaeser argues relatively well, though with flaws).
Economic goods tend to move toward reward, and away from punishment or restraint, though the dynamic once in flow tends to be self-sustaining, at least for a time. There's much focus on positive network effects and growth, less on decline. But the immigration surces of migration toward first the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, and later the Western US, came from what had been earlier. priods' dynamic hubs. Why those declined should be instructive study.
So Ive got to ask, and I've failed to find answer through research for this question, where the hell are all the educated young people at? I'm 28 and relocated to Tampa Bay and I have no idea where my cohorts are here or in this state.
There are tons in the Bay Area, Seattle, Dc area, NYC area, Chicago, and Boston. Not so sure about Tampa though it’s up there on my list of nice retirement destinations
I think the article hints at this but I wonder if civil political discourse is over for people even despite the fact that people of differing beliefs don't live next to each other and intermingle. It seems that enough people spend a lot of time online and can hang out virtually in their circles anyway and get caught up in groupthink.
Living in one of the high rent areas, it's amazing how many people move here for the work, and then leave once they've achieved their goals. Quality of life and good pay don't seem to be collocated.
This applies to me, I guess. I've tolerated Kentucky long enough. They keep increasing taxes to pay for pensions they've looted in the past, while nixing services. I feel no benefit at all from my taxes that keep going up. Paired with low wages and a low educated populace, I'm outta here.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadStates which retain and attract highly-educated adults stand to reap substantial economic benefits. At the same time, those that bleed much of their homegrown talent will see their economic fortunes decline if they fail to replace the leavers with highly-educated out-of-staters. Yet even if they do manage to offset their losses, these states are still losing a vital source of social capital.
What is more, the outmigration of highly-educated adults has almost certainly played a role in the deterioration of civil society in struggling communities across the country. And to the extent that the geographic mobility of the highly-educated has increased social bifurcation, it has likely exacerbated distrust of and intolerance toward people who hold different beliefs. One need only glance at today’s polarized political environment to see these attitudes on display.
Our research finds that states that are doing the best—low gross brain drain and net brain gain—generally cluster along the Boston-Washington corridor and on the West Coast: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, Oregon, and Washington. Other brain gain states are regional hubs—Hawaii, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Illinois. Several of these states experienced high gross brain drain and net brain drain in 1970, but have reversed course; others have seen continued good prospects or improvements on one or both measures. For the most part, these states are home to what Richard Florida would describe as “winner-take-all cities.”
On the other hand, states in the Southeast, in the Rust Belt, and in other parts of the country tend to fare much worse when it comes to retaining and attracting the highly-educated. Several states in the Southeast—West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—had low gross brain drain and net brain gain in 1970, but today generally experience high gross brain drain as well as net brain drain. Most Rust Belt states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—have done poorly on these measures in both 1970 and 2017. Perhaps unsurprisingly, states that defy these regional trends (for example, Illinois in the Rust Belt, and Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia in the Southeast) seem to be attracting highly-educated out-of-staters to their dynamic metropolitan hubs.
Brain drain has significant consequences—economic, yes, but also political and cultural. By increasing social segregation, it limits opportunities for disparate groups to connect. And by siphoning a source of economic innovation from emptying communities, brain drain can also lead to crumbling institutions of civil society. As those natives who have more resources leave, those left behind may struggle to support churches, police athletic leagues, parent-teacher associations, and local businesses. State and local policymakers are understandably focused on the economic consequences of brain drain. But anyone concerned about the health of associational life in America should worry that what this report has mapped out, to some extent, is the geography of social capital drain.
Huh... churches are the first thing that come to mind. Yep, this was definitely written by a Utah senate staff.
I don't even go to church or have a shotgun, but I suddenly wanted to live there and be a part of that community. I guess you could say that that sort of genuine community made me envious.
Community masters, one of the reasons that SLC has the highest income mobility in the country
And different people have different ideas of what a “nice” place is to live.
Education is only one factor, there are many others.
FYI - 'Worker mobility' in the US is actually declining, and has been for some time.
This could possibly mean that regular workers are moving around less, relative to educated one's.
It also could mean as communications and transportation become easier, the 'big city' advantages are just compounding.
So the major metro areas are just sucking up everything around them.
Texas, Colorado, Illinois have a sea of purple around them.
I'm not saying that applies to everyone. I was "brain-drained" despite those things. But I know others who couldn't just pick up their lives for a job on the other side of the country.
The notion that 'you could feasibly make more money elsewhere, and therefore should leave' is not obvious to me, or I think to most people.
Chicago may have more opportunity than Michigan overall, but that doesn't mean there are not great opportunities in Michigan. But that's within the context of your imperative.
The real answer is that for most people, their job is not the defining artifact of their life, it's a means to support their families, and maybe give them an opportunity to engage with their communities, have hobbies, friends.
I think for young people, in their 20's the notion is a little big different, because moving is exploring and liberating in some ways, but that's only one phase of life.
Just because there are some great opportunities in Michigan does not mean there are enough great opportunities in Michigan for everyone who could find one in Chicago, SF, or Seattle, or NYC.
https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/population-loss-in-illi...
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/study-illinois-home-to-highes...
Source: grew up in NJ and lives in MA
Don’t believe me? Check this out: Chinese students got beaten down by university securities, for protesting against fake degrees given to them. Happened today https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/bhxgng/chinas_studen...
The most qualified people around me on previous jobs moved to US, Europe or are working remotely (myself included).
It's sad because it increases the difficulty of local companies to grow a good team, continuing the cycle.
>It’s the competitive advantage of being a nation bound by ideas and common purpose than a monarch or ethnicity or religion.
I think the US has become very ossified in this belief (which people fool themselves that the nature of this belief is any different from any other belief), you can see global capital flight to (parts of) the US and brain drain into the US, but in market speak, its a crowded trade, driven out of fear of the current downsides and not future upsides. However the nature of crowded trades is that they have the most tail risk, that some people (like me) cannot stomach.
I'm of the mind that things will get more complicated soon within the next year (well at least for those who have been oblivious all along despite the warning signs), and that people will start to realize that value can be found anywhere if those are willing to seek it out, though it may not be as simple as what we are used to and have come to expect.
It's amusingly ironic how exclusive the politics of inclusion can be.
And it would be helpful if the commentary on Murray's thoughts exceeded the meta-commentary on mentioning Murray's name.
Maybe edit or reframe your comment.
He also strongly argues that your ability to succeed is a measure of your innate intelligence. (perhaps this is the part that user/yasp thought would be considered abhorrent?) and that combines with the earlier parts to say that there will be increased stratification and it will be on intelligence as well as on money.
This whole thing is a waste of time because I gained nothing novel from having chased this vague-ass comment. Ugh.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
the lowest EU member is Bulgaria (1475), the highest is Luxembourg (3843); that's a factor 2.6.
The EU also has much larger cultural barriers to movement than the US (different languages, just to mention the most obvious one).
I very much question the validity of PPP in this case. Things are no doubt cheaper in Bulgaria, but I'm fairly certain that electronics, cars etc are going to cost roughly the same, because there's a free flow of goods. People just make do with less.
Also keep in mind that people might move abroad to work there, but still come back home once in a while. The effect on the economy is still going to be similar. The median equivalised net income is just too different inside the EU: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=ilc_...
German is also widely taught in Eastern European schools, so the language barrier isn’t as high as Americans think it is.
(Sample: Romanians, Poles and Croatians I know through work)
Oh, you have an MBA? Guess I’ll have to show you how this works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's why companies prefer hiring people with more education.
That said, I think many roles should not require a college degree for application.
That one single thing might make a big difference - because as you hint there are tons of otherwise great people who don't specifically have the education.
I deal with “highly educated” people in the mental health field on a daily basis and some can barely write grammatically correct sentences: the support tickets I get from people with PhDs and MA mental health professionals are frequently atrocious. But my “uneducated” dad worked as a precision machinist for NASA projects as well as teaching graduate students metallurgy. He’s considered not highly educated, but only because he didn’t get a degree. His education has zero to do with intelligence. That story isn’t an outlier either. My point is that higher education attainment often has nothing to do with intelligence beyond a base level, but more of class, financial resources and desire. A naval fighter pilot with a bachelors degree, in my experience is far more “educated” than someone with a masters in education, sociology, poetry or whatever. Highly educated as a proxy for “desirable worker” is a folly. Ambition, drive and work ethic are more valuable to a society than simply someone who checked the boxes and got a university degree. Using a university degree as a proxy for “desirable” worker is just snobbery and intellectually lazy.
That doesn't mean there are not quite intelligent people who don't have a college degree, or that some kinds of specialized people are true artisans.
That said, it’s incredibly underserved and there’s tons of very capable and friendly people.
Edit: maybe I didn’t get the intended point across - I’d ask though, how many people do you know that moved for cultural reasons, especially from hometowns? I’m in the LGBT community where almost every single person I meet has moved for cultural reasons.
A thing I like to say is that I am proud that I am from Ohio, but I'm also happy I'm not there now.
I’m from Florida but it’s not something I’m proud or not proud of. I’m proud of my kids. I’m proud of my work. I’m proud of my multi decade relationship with my wife. Those are things to be proud of.
When a class I belong to does something great, I feel I can only be proud to be a member of that class to the extent that I contributed to the great thing and that we worked together to achieve something greater than ourselves. Even then I’m proud that “we did that thing” not that “I’m a member of that group.”
Just a thought. I know many people are proud of where they are from but it’s irrational to me.
The LGBT thing is anecdotally true in my experience, and in particular, leaving your home state for college is a good socially-acceptable excuse to leave your home state and meet others you suspect are like you at exactly the same time that you're no longer a minor under your parents' control.
[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
ID/UT/AZ -> Lower/middle class people can no longer afford to live comfortably in California
FL/WA -> People are getting sick of the progressively longer, shittier winters in the midwest/northeast
Interestingly, unlike the other issues you've listed, pro-choice support does not vary a whole lot by age. 63% support from 18-29, 59% for 30-59, and about 57% for everyone older than that (https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-aborti...) Whatever causes the difference on that issue is not due to age.
Seeing your edit, I can understand why you think it's mostly cultural rather than economic, but I definitely think it's both.
You accuse "republicans" of running a culture war on a board that you know will never downvote you or moderate you... while announcing you're part of the LGBT community.
Real quick: can you name one country throughout history where LGBT lifestyles aren't promoted or endlessly sustained by massive, massive, massive media effort/high-level cultural/religious/military infiltration? Your "community" is a living, breathing culture war artifact that is 100% artifical and is, literally, made in advertising board rooms.
Imagine the amount of people who intentionally avoid anywhere your fake culture infiltrates and how much brain power refuses to help you out.
If you look at the 2017 Net Brain Drain it shows the following top gainers: - Texas - Virginia - Illinois - Maryland - Colorado - California - New Jersey - New York - Massachussets
Georgia and North Carolina also showed strong gains (along with many other states). That may be blue-leaning but it's not a landslide.
It's more like people are concentrating in the biggest cities generally, and to the degree that there's a blue-shift its that states dominated by their urban population lean democrat and states dominated by a rural population lean republican, so the cultural change follows the demographic shifts rather than driving them.
Of course as pointed out by a sibling, it’s kind of an irrelevant point anyway. The brain migration is away from rural areas (which are red, regardless of state), to big cities (which are blue, regardless of state). That only reenforces the parent’s hypothesis that intellectuals resent the anti-intellectual bent republicans have taken in recent times.
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/247025/democratic-states-exceed...
There was plenty of anti-intellectualism in the US in the 70s. The movie "Revenge of the Nerds" wasn't made in a cultural vacuum. Neither was "Animal House". Sports heros have always been worshiped, not so with intellectuals (other than Einstein).
Much of this changed with Bill Gates. He was derided for being a nerd for years, until he made so much money people stopped laughing at him.
You’re not wrong about anti-intellectualism always being a thing though, point taken!
I been brain drained by being offered higher pay.
You want to stop brain drain?
PAY!
Solved.
Which means decision makers or ultimately state/federal government think that funding of certain things at certain geographies is not important. (Or alternatively not offering any stimulus such as reducing taxes).
Article misleads reader by claiming "what is" without explaining the driving force behind the dynamics of skilled market.
There are lots of companies doing exactly this and driving costs lower in areas where they can get away with it. I think a non-trivial amount of brain-drain is simply paying people what they are worth regardless of how nuanced the issue actually is.
I actually find the concept rather odd to use domestically, because it's generally used to show a contrast between a country paying for your college education, and then you reaping the benefits in a different, richer country -- which can seem unfair.
But in the US, students 1) generally pay for their own college education, and 2) often go to college in a state different from where they grew up and different from where they'll settle down later. So it doesn't seem to have any "unfair" aspect.
I mean, complaining about brain drain domestically feels like complaining about free trade domestically... it doesn't make sense to me. People have the freedom to move to areas of better economic opportunity and that's a good thing in a dynamic, ever-changing country like America. Complaining about brain drain domestically really just sounds like wishing more people lived in the country instead of in big cities... no thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight#United_St...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/21/report-asks-w...
And you have some pretty good schools to choose from here: University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State (which has improved a lot in the past 10 years).
There are plenty of fair criticisms that can be leveled against the HOPE scholarship, but it seemed clear to me that it would reduce brain drain in the state, simply because students could get a high quality education at almost no cost. But these data show that the drain ratio increased from 1990 to 2010.
So this is a situation where students aren't paying for their education, are going to school in the state where they likely grew up, and then are still leaving.
This was me. I grew up in Georgia and went to Georgia Tech on the HOPE scholarship, but there just aren't many tech jobs in the area (despite the fact that GT has one of the top ranked CS programs). I moved to the Bay Area a year ago. If Georgia would incentivize the tech industry like it has with filmmaking recently, I bet a lot more people would stay.
Let's say that hypothetically all new science and engineering jobs are all in ScienceVille. In that case, any local government that doesn't receive some direct tax benefit from taxes collected in SV has negative incentive to teach their students anything about Science, since those students will just leave (after their education has been invested in by the local government) and move to SV to get a job. Those local government are now incentivized to teach their kids anything else (like religion and manual labor) since even if they can only do manual labor at least they're going to stay in their hometown.
Now there is a difference of incentives for the individual States verses the Nation. The Nation would prefer to have lots more engineers and skilled tech workers. The States would prefer to keep their best and their brightest, and if that means they are underutilized that's still a local maximum for the individual State.
Naturally, this is great for SV, but horrible for the rest of the nation. In this scenario, the entirely imaginary, hypothetical "SV" has to either give something back to incentivize the rest of the nation to keep teaching Science and Engineering, or the rest of the country continually subsidizes SV through education which is unsustainable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hometown_tax
Its implementation is flawed though, citizens can freely pick any city even if they have no relation to it, and cities are allowed to give gifts to citizens who choose the city, resulting in cities competing to offer the best kickbacks.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/mike_lee/412495
Here are some links on his proposed education reforms:
https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/education-reform
https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/higher-education...
Some choice quotes:
"Whereas conservatives promote policies that empower parents with the freedom and resources to choose what works best for them and their families, harnessing the power and problem-solving capacity of civil society and the free-enterprise economy, Democrats prefer government-run, one-size-fits-all programs."
"Conservatives do not claim to have all the answers when it comes to early education policy. But the available research and the lessons of experience teach us that massive government investments to scale up early education programs into a single formula that applies to everybody simply don’t work. At best, they are a waste of money. At worst, they are harmful to our children, families, and communities."
"The EEOA would expand school choice to all parents, regardless of socio-economic status or zip code, by allowing federal “Title I” K-12 support funds to follow low-income students to any public or private school of their choice."
"The HERO Act would accomplish this by changing the way schools are accredited. The HERO Act would enable each state to accredit any institution that provides post-secondary education. With this new accreditation power, states would be able to authorize innovative new education options (for example, massive online open courses, competency-based offerings, and certification exams) for students in any learning situation."
But please do read it all yourself, read the lines, between the lines, make up your own mind about where you think Senator Lee truely stands on this issue.
That's his voting record, and links to his webpage, and the words are his. I said nothing negative about the man. All I asked is that people read it. You think this brain drain article with his face on it is logically disconnected from his politics?
The result of including the question will sow fear in non-citizens, fully entitled to be counted (the census requires "whole persons", not just citizens) and is projected to cause an undercount of many, many millions of people in "brain gain" states.
This will directly effect the amount of federal money, by many billions of dollars, that goes to states for education. You think this article is somehow disconnected from that? That maybe some of the senators that sit on the Joint Economic Committee might have something to gain from this?
This is not about bad choroplethy and bogus metrics, this is American politics.
I think he told us that answer already. His politics benefits from noncitizens being counted in the census, so it would be problematic if such a question were to scare away any illegal immigrants living in the U.S (this is because no permanent legal resident is scared of citizenship questions, since it's usually clarified if something is okay for a legal resident noncitizen or not).
"The Roots of the New Urban Crisis"
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/the-roots-of-the-new-...
"Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer"
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/richard...
People from my hometown (pop. ~7500 in Midwest), do not realize that they are falling behind at an almost exponential rate. Many are working jobs that require common training, they do not continue their education, and they spend far too much time behind screens in the form of entertainment. And, even for those who want to continue to learn, they do not have access to a nearby tech meeting hosted by a top firm speaking on the state of the art. If you're not in SF or NY, then you do miss out on a lot of opportunities per people and shared information.
* I am personally ashamed to say that I only realized the power and advantage of networking in recent years.
> People from my hometown (pop. ~7500 in Midwest), do not realize that they are falling behind at an almost exponential rate. Many are working jobs that require common training, they do not continue their education
Do you think it's caused by the lack of other people who are moving ahead aka role models or are there other factors(quality education etc...)?
I do feel and have seen despite being in the right place some people don't get same opportunities for upward mobility despite being literally next door.
But most people working in the tech industry; (which is very highly stovepiped) - will never experience that, and may only read about it.
When you're not fortunate enough to be employed in one of the top tech industry companies, or in one of the hotspots where the industry is focused (Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Austin, Virginia, maybe Provo, Seattle) - then you have to do all you can to use the internet to constantly learn and grow your skills; but also, you have to try to constantly evangelize the same attitude to your co-workers, and management. It is an exhausting job.
Industrial decline accellerated hugely in the 1970s.
1. The terms and implications are still confusing me, but the effect remains: the former CSA states scored positively 1940-1970 and in cases later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_Ame...
In terms of skills I could learn on the job, there's no way I could have gone nearly as far in my career if I limited myself to the set of employers that were available to me in my hometown.
Now, I've moved to a red state, (for family reasons), and I have interviewed at about 20 different companies. The "tech industry" is very different from California. There's a little bit of a software startup industry growing, most of the jobs are in healthcare and financial IT. Nobody wants to pay people what they could earn elsewhere. And in terms of career paths there's not a lot out there that offers much of a future. (or at least it appears that way). None of these companies seem like they have any kind of vision other than general business continuity. It's a completely different experience than I had interviewing with tech companies in California.
Even worse: the company I did take a job at can't seem to retain talent. And when we look for it, we can't find it. (And when we find it - I implore them to make it worth the candidate's time. . . and HR simply responds about what the "market rate" is. - which is why I keep interviewing elsewhere. . . ).
In a nutshell; the main difference seems to be - technology companies in California are in the business to innovate, and create new technology, and to become industry leaders. Where, in my new state; they're in the business to just be in business.
This exists in the Valley too. IBM, Oracle, Cisco, many businesses once they reach a certain maturity point just turn into “steady” parts of the market.
The net result is that more educated people tend to have fewer children than the less educated. If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, this doesn't bode well for future generations. It seems like we as a society need to figure out a way to make "have children at a reasonable age" not be a low-status move for highly educated / driven / intelligent women.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/fertility/...
Also what we care about is societal contribution which primarily happens through work and we're terrible at making people better at their jobs through the education system.
And there are no educational interventions that come close to the effect size of intelligence or conscientousness.
Even for IQ scores it‘s not so clear, as our measure of IQ is variable and there are no longitudinal studies to my knowledge showing what you claim.
And by conscientiousness I meant the big 5 psychology measure which also has large longitudinal studies.
Sweden for example has no minimum wage and fully voucher-ized education which are anathema to the US left.
So I'd disagree there aren't things holding students in the US back, they just hold the entire DNC captive.
Sweden also has a flat tax. They depend on high income tax across the board unlike the US, but also have higher institutional trust/social cohesion (easier with a low pop) and frankly better governance overall.
Culture matters. It's why southern Europe is not like northern.
There's no quick fix that can be cherry picked to make the US like Nordic nations.
students in the us often have to take on a tremendous amount of debt to get one.
You seem not to like the word “Socialist.” I think it’s obvious that we as humans should help each other if one of us is doing not well due to misfortune.
For me a country should be evaluated on how much it cares about the ones that don’t have power (homeless, immigrants, elderly etc.)
There are a hundred variables. Sometimes poor people get lucky. Some are pretty and have doors opened to them. Some truly are exceptional. And many are unlucky.
defen is (correctly) bashing the more educated for not having enough kids, exactly the opposite of the attitude you're imputing to him.
>If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, this doesn't bode well for future generations.
I interpret what he was saying, taking in some of what he said earlier, as something along the lines of "less educated people are having more kids, so there are more and more less intelligent children around, so the future is screwed.
Whether or not what he was saying is correct isn't what I'm commenting on here, just clarifying my view.
Also worth noting: according to [1], women who don't finish high school are only about 50% more fertile than women who finish college, and that group represents only 20% of the population. The difference between the high school, some high school, and college cohorts is much smaller.
We also don't know exactly how well that difference in educational attainment is linked to a genetic difference. That is, it seems very likely that some of the difference in attainment is due to family socioeconomic circumstances, not an underlying genetic difference in intellect. As such, I don't think any dysgenic effects are going to be so pronounced as to cause a crisis before genetic engineering efforts can be well under way.
[1]: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-le...
Isn't the obvious answer better maternity leave laws? Ambitious women in the US don't have kids because it fucks their career. The US is literally last among OECD countries, offering zero guaranteed maternity pay [1].
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/19/news/economy/countries-most...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...
> Within 10 years, comprehensive analyses of the universal, “$5 per day childcare” program, including its impact on child care use, employment patterns, and children’s and parent outcomes, suggested cause for concern. Social development among children, as indicated by both emotional and behavioral measures, had significantly deteriorated in Quebec, relative to the rest of Canada (10% of a standard deviation lower). Comparisons between children ages 2 to 4 who had been exposed to the program, with older children (and siblings) who had not, revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression in those exposed to the program. And the analyses found more hostile, inconsistent parenting, and lower-quality parental relationships among parents of children exposed to the program. But it was hard to predict whether the negative outcomes identified for 2- to 4-year-olds would persist across their development, or simply dissipate.
> Their research confirmed that the negative effects did continue, and in some cases became stronger across development. Among 5 to 9-year-olds, negative social-emotional outcomes not only persisted, but in some cases increased, as indicated by 24% of a standard deviation increase in anxiety, a 19% increase in aggression, and a 13% in hyperactivity. The impact on boys and children with the most elevated behavioral problems was stronger, especially in measures of hyperactivity and aggression.
If you take 9 months off to raise a child, you're not growing your career -- regardless of wether your company or the state or a combination compensates you.
The answer is to have less competitive environments. In Sweden, jantelagen (a cultural sentiment that discourages overt personal ambition) is a huge part of what enables generous leave policies.
Makes me question whether or not our (USians) shouldn’t push for a cultural change where we don’t worship so heavily at the alter of the hyperambitious.
I don't think these examples make your point.
The best hope is improving remote work and improving transportation infrastructure. Women don't have to leave jobs that they can do from home, and client visits are less impactful when they take less time to visit the client and return. It's not a solution which fits nicely into a single bill of legislation to be passed, but it's the groundwork that the US needs to make it happen.
Sadly, biology disagrees.
That aside, the original thread was that those who delay children have fewer children and the conclusion is this situation selects against the things that lead to delaying children. If career ambition is genetic, then each generation will have less of it. At least, that's the theory here.
* Mothers are protected from firing once they announce the pregnancy. There are still stupid people which fire them and put pressure on them. A friend's boss threw a fit because several of his employees got pregnant and actually said he won't hire women any more. That was likely just blowing off steam, but still.
* The mother can take 12 or 24 months off, but gets the same amount in both cases. The pay is capped at 1800 EUR / month, so if she earns well she'll lose a ton of money.
* The time off can be shared between parents, but all my acquaintances decided that the father should only take a couple of months off, in order not to lose even more money and affect the careers of both parents.
Family doesn't seem to be compatible with the hyper-competitive job market.
Uh, I haven't had to use it but from what my siblings told me it's always a massive pay cut. You supposedly get 60% of your normal wage... Capped to 1800€
Nothing helps a woman reenter the work force better than a husband who can take some time off to take care of the toddler.
Reestablishment of traditional family structures where grand parents pitch in as free day care may also have a large positive effect.
Without maternity leave, of course there is a disincentive to have any children. Once you do have a child though, you might as well have a bunch of children. You've already blown the career. This probably explains the odd result of countries with more maternity leave having fewer kids.
Another factor may be that the cost of maternity leave is passed on to everybody. Depending on legal details this may be via higher taxes, lower pay, and higher prices. It obviously isn't free. People often react to higher costs by having fewer kids. The policy may thus have the opposite of the intended effect.
Paternity leave is really important - some of which should be "must take" as much as a woman "must take" time and the rest can be taken by either parent or both parents can work less than full time. IIRC, paternity leave means women are discriminated against less for taking maternity leave.
But it is more than that. Making sure parents can take time off work when their child is sick or they have a meeting with the teacher and things like that are very important. Health care and so on? Important.
I'm guessing that where the paid leave comes from is really important as well: It seems that most of this should simply be taxpayer funded so it doesn't actually break a small business. The US medical leave laws exclude small businesses, so these folks can just fire you and besides, there is nothing saying you get paid time off at all.
There are probably other things that contribute as well.
It hasn't impacted any generations thus far. Low income and/or poorly educated Americans have always had more children than higher income/well educated Americans. From back when health standards were terrible, to when having more kids meant more hands to work the farm. Yet society still has found a way not to collapse on itself.
Are you daft? Why are you even here?
But is this Universally true? 250 years of US history is a blip in Human history.
You could argue that lower classes used to have a lot of children because child mortality rate and morbility rate was very high. Also children were needed as labour, with a role in the household or working along side their mother or father. With modern healthcare, social security, and children rights legislation none of the previous pattern is true.
In comparison higher income people or more accurately land owning ruling class had the luxary of better nutrition and several children were a way of reducing the risk of having no heir to handover to.
Another fundamental difference for higher income families introduced with Christianity is that the ruling class was now (officially) restricted to a single wife. In comparison if you look at several empiries in Asia and Africa, the biggest benefit of power and wealth (from a patriarch perspective) was the ability to 'acquire' multiple wifes and to maximise your genetic descent, the most brutal example of this was probably Genghis Khan.
The point I wanted to make is that having several (surviving) children used to be a privilege reserved for the rich and powerful of whatever society at the time. However with our science/social/legal achievements and progress this is no longer true in our social fabric and I am unsure we can accurately predict how this 'recent' change will impact humans as a whole.
I would have thought that it's a pretty well known thing nowadays that motherhood is at least a part-time job and in spite of the best intentions, fathers can only partly compensate for the additional effort. Furthermore, being a mother is not a respected "job", it's neither associated with a good salary, nor high status.
But perhaps you've connected with other humans or live in a different country. Would be nice to share those experiences instead of acting uppity.
Take a look at the second section for 1995-2010 changes: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-p...
Yes, the less educated still have more children than the more educated, but that gap is getting smaller.
----------
In more current data:
Teenage pregnancies are down by 55% since 2007, which is an enormous public health success that no one seems to have noticed.
And while I can't find more recent data by educational attainment, there does appear to be racial data, which given the enormous differences in average educational attainment between racial groups, are something you can make inferences from.
The groups which are statistically lower educational attainment have seen 2-6x larger drops in fertility than the groups which are statistically higher educational attainment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/fertility-rate-decline... (last sections for figures).
> educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence
For this we have no evidence. Quite the opposite in fact -- not that this should stop anyone from enjoying a hilarious movie :)
(Just keep in mind that Idiocracy is fictional)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Only one form is needed to refute the claim that we "have no evidence, quite the opposite" that children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence.
> If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, [...]
You could imagine how this idea can discourage people of modest origins, and can also encourage people of advantage to see themselves as innately superior.
Raising kids after 15 years of extra life experience, savings, and career advancement sure does make having kids easy. It was pretty straightforward in my experience but I couldn’t imagine how I would have pulled it off back when I was trying to scrape together some savings with my entry level job and tiny studio apartment.
Having kids early is problematic because of the changing economic factors: job uncertainty combined with families moving for jobs and not being able to rely on grandparents for help. But the 20s are the perfect biological age range to have kids in.
Beyond that, even assuming the official numbers are right, I was still happy to exchange “lose one lottery draw when it counts” for an extra 15 years of doing thing you can’t do after having kids. (And of course being able to afford having them comfortably.)
According to Uhl's Obstetrics and Gynaecology for example, fertility is impacted negatively for females of age > 35 and a first pregnancy over 35 or under 19 is considered a risky pregnancy. Same goes for subsequent pregnancies over 40, which have a higher risk of genetic defect, placenta insufficiency, etc.
It's perhaps interesting to note that a genetic consultation is offered to women over 35, but only to men over 50. The risk of a trisomy over 35 is 1 : 370, whereas earlier it's in the thousands and can be shrunk further through non-invasive diagnosis. There are many more things which become problematic over 35 (thrombosis, diabetes, hypertensive disorders), I don't have time to list them all, but any good book on obstetrics will have the details.
Weight issues (BMI > 25, < 19) and a sedentary lifestyle increase the risk for pre-eclampsia, pre-term birth, pregnancy diabetes or spontaneous abortion. This would explain why the lady you mentioned was likely closely monitored. It seems that some attributes of the mother (e.g. being overweight, diabetes) are also reflected in the later predisposition to disease of the child. This can include even things like natural vs. C-section birth.
"It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in 20 years. Hangin' around here is a fuckin' waste of your time."
This was framed as an inspirational moment that finally pushed Will to achieve his potential. This idea -- that self-actualization requires abandoning your small-town roots -- is ingrained in our cultural DNA.
She was right. I did, right to the Bay Area. When I go back and visit, the area has gotten more economically depressed, and frankly more stereotypical. And to put a cherry on top, I am completely unemployable there.
Compare that to the Net figures from 1940 through 1990, which show a clear migration to the Southern states. But I'm not even sure this is showing what it suggests. Is it simply a proxy for population growth?
Or is this thing just a symptom that people in general have a much lower chance of staying in the same state for 31-40 years?
I find the notion that people "self-select" into like-minded communities as some sort of "social segregation" baseless, even laughable. The South still has the echoes of slavery and (real) segregation that many have sought to escape. The implication here is that people are abandoning their communities. Are they though? What do they owe these states where they grew up? And are they abandoning such states or essentially being chased away because they simply don't conform to whatever cultural or religious norms dominate there? This seems particular relevant to the smaller and more rural states.
Bear in mind that education seems to be a partial antidote to religious dogma [1] in that people with more education tend to express religion less (although this is complicated and Christians seem to somewhat buck this trend). But given the cultural importance of religion in some communities, it seems like your more educated citizens are also more likely to leave, no?
19th century America was one of small, rural towns. With the railroad and homesteading these spread West. What probably began with the Industrial Revolution seemed to turn into a tidal wave of urbanization following the Second World War. Cities are just more efficient at delivering work opportunities.
[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-edu...
This is the most least surprising outcome and it these areas need to continue to be absolutely economically devastated until the populace learns the consequences of supporting really dumb government policies.
At least then people spouting off "party politic" lines will realize there is a fundamental, realistic, constructive difference of parties int the U.S. and what it means for society as a whole.
Brain-drain may be for economic, technological, social, and cultural reasons. It's not uncommon for talent flows to be at least nominally bidirectional, though with different and distinct motivating factors. The flight of intellectual (and especially Jewish) European talent to the US before, during, and after WWII contrasts with black American's migration from the US, particularly though not just the South, to Europe. Contrast Fermi and Einstein against James Baldwin and Nina Simone. Both oppression (negative driver) and economic opportunity (positive) existed for each.
Within the British Commonwealth, substantial migratoon supported by some cultural and political commonality (even where other strong differences existed) facilitated vast human flows, generlly toward London, thpugh also other centres.
Similar dynamics exist within countries as well, often (per Jane Jacobs) at the urban regional level, particularly contrasted with rural regions. And hub formation / centres of excellence tend to accelerate such consolidation (a point Edward Glaeser argues relatively well, though with flaws).
Economic goods tend to move toward reward, and away from punishment or restraint, though the dynamic once in flow tends to be self-sustaining, at least for a time. There's much focus on positive network effects and growth, less on decline. But the immigration surces of migration toward first the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, and later the Western US, came from what had been earlier. priods' dynamic hubs. Why those declined should be instructive study.
You want the other side of the state, near the middle of Brevard county. It's a bunch of engineers working for DoD and NASA contractors.