Decline of the West

A member of a software start-up explained to me about recruiting software talent in China. University X graduates 20,000 software engineers per year. You assemble 1000 of these in an auditorium, where they take a battery of tests. An IQ of 140 might be the minimum. The top 100 take more specialized tests, and twenty get interviewed. Maybe three get hired at $10,000/year.

At the same dinner, a software engineer for a major defense contractor explained how many of his colleagues had little real work to do, and most couldn't do it very well anyway, but stayed on the rolls because it was a cost plus contract.

I somehow doubt that the Chinese will be content to be high IQ cheap labor for long. Ditto their counterparts in India.

At some point, the government of China will decide to invest in all that highly-skilled (and soon, highly experienced) labor, and that immense flow of dollars financing the US spend and borrowing spree will vanish. I fear a pretty hard landing for the US economy.

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