NYT: High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

What I don't understand is how following economic incentives can make a nation's economy weaker. Are the economic signals wrong, or are the investors (the students) ignorant? Absent evidence so, the flight from science and engineering could be an efficient reallocation. Heck, I'm one of those who are leaving.

The only other possibility that comes to mind is that benefits from science education are a public good - benefits from having such an education exist, but are enjoyed by society overall and cannot be efficiently captured by the individual.

HT: Xinhong

Authors@Google

Richard Florida quotes Scott Page (The Difference) on the causes of innovation (paraphrased by me):

If you want to know where innovation comes from, you have to understand cognitive diversity - cognitive diversity is critical for innovation. And an easy route to cognitive diversity is through demographic diversity - diversity in ethnicity, nationality, place of birth, gender, sexual orientation, age groups. Benefits from such result in the clustering force.

Most of the people I know who criticize the paternalistic policies of modern Asian nations are bent on replacing that paternalism with another paternalism of their own design. Pluralism requires a bigger cognitive jump, I think.

At 53:30, Florida explicitly mentions the missing element in trying to create Silicon Valleys by combining universities and venture capital - you are still missing the tolerance for diversity, which is left out because of its subversive potential.

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Diversity is not all good, however - according to Robert Putnam (KSG), there is evidence that diverse neighborhoods exhibit more social isolation. That study is consistent with "Who's Your City" in determining a positive correlation between diversity and creativity/economics, but finds that social trust is lowered by diversity.

Went to Ikea today. Ikea really supplies from many countries - the labels I read had China, USA, Israel, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Portugal, Spain, Italy... and probably more that I have forgotten. I had a fun time running around and guessing before looking.