January 28, 2004 12:41 PM

The Brain Drain and the election
Posted by Jason Butlerat 12:41 PM

Robert Cringley has a take on how offshoring must be one of the critical issues in this fall's presidential election.

In the 1950s and '60s in England, there was a phenomenon they called the "brain drain," which was the mass emigration of scientists and engineers to the United States.  The UK was still suffering from World War II, which had a much greater effect on that country's economy than on that of the U.S. Americans and even many younger people from Britain have little understanding of how difficult it was for that country to recover after the war.  The war ended in 1945, but food rationing continued in some form in the UK until 1954, and foreign exchange restrictions remained in place well into the 1960s.  The package holiday industry was invented solely because it was the only way to have a vacation in sunny Spain when you were only allowed to take £25 in cash out of the country.  Against this austere economic landscape, America with its big cars and big salaries and technical industries with big ambitions looked to be the place to go.  We as a nation benefited immensely from this migration as European science gave us the bomb and took us to the moon.  Europe and the UK, in turn, did not particularly benefit from this technical exodus, which hurt their local industries and local economies.

That was then and this is now, and while America remains a country of great technical capability, that capability is being compromised by a new kind of brain drain as we simply allow our local industries to fall apart.  Send enough technical work to India or China, and what once was the engineering department ends up working down at Home Depot.  The industries that are being particularly affected are information technology, telecommunications, and aerospace.  These are also the only U.S. industries that in the 1990s produced substantial trade surpluses.  We are shipping overseas the only manufacturing work that still makes money for America.

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