American Economics Thread

[valysre]

67% of people who work in a computer occupation that requires more than a bachelors degree in the were born in U.S. (

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). Further, this reasoning is partially circular - foreign-born individuals that desire to stay in the U.S. who aren’t applying on a family reunification greencard have very few career choices available to them to stay in the U.S. - computer occupations being the main one

No. It doesn’t.

71% of US STEM workers were born in the United States and 86% of US workers writ large were born in the U.S.

"Computer occupation" is a very broad term and not indicative of the high-skill positions that are largely populated by foreign-born workers who obtained doctorates in the US.
You will observe that the "very few career choices available for them to stay in the U.S." is actually by design and is in place to support the demand for high-skill workers that cannot be produced domestically.

Regarding your denial of the miserable state of the US education system: the average SAT score is 1028, per a cursory web search. The SAT is a very easy test, and the average should not be 1028. The average on the SAT math section is 521. Given that the SAT math section deals only in algebra, it is extremely concerning that the SAT average is so low. The number of students who attend college and then are unable to perform at a satisfactory level in entry level math classes (primarily introductory calculus) is also concerningly high.
Besides mathematics there are similar issues in reading and writing abilities. My experience in entry level writing courses (primarily basic essay writing) in colleges is also very concerning, and many students seem to struggle to construct a simple "claim -> reasoning -> conclusion" essay.

"STEM workers" is also a remarkably broad field, and frankly includes many fields that are easy. I once again point out that many fields that are hard and require a high standard of mathematical ability are not populated by US born workers. Of course, there are not that many jobs that require a high standard of mathematical ability. However, the fact that US born workers seem to be decisively outcompeted for these positions by foreigners is concerning. I would also like to see your source for that statistic so I can see how "STEM worker" is defined.

I will make a comment on your general posting style. In your posts you seem to rely very heavily on statistics. I must caution against using statistics so freely in arguments regarding things such as the state of the US education system. The issue is that the definitions used in the gathering of statistics are poorly defined.
For example, "meeting academic standards" is a statistic that seems high, but in reality, is quite abysmal once the definition of "academic standards" is made clear.
Similarly, "STEM workers" is a statistic that seems very useful, but is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations include computer and mathematical, architecture and engineering, and life and physical science occupations, as well as managerial and postsecondary teaching occupations related to these functional areas and sales occupations requiring scientific or technical knowledge at the postsecondary level.

Looking at the BLS' breakdown of these numbers, as well as the BLS' ranking of the top 10 subfields within "STEM workers" we see that many "STEM workers" are in fact customer-support oriented, in either "software developers, application" (webpages, app UIs, etc.), "Computer user support specialists" (tech support), "Computer systems analysts" (tech consultants for companies), "Computer system administrators" (the IT department), etc. These occupations are notionally STEM occupations, but in reality, barely engage any serious STEM thinking and should not be considered in discussions about high-skill labor that requires a high level of education.

 

[chgough34]

"Computer occupation" is a very broad term and not indicative of the high-skill positions that are largely populated by foreign-born workers who obtained doctorates in the US.

That is why there is a restriction on people that hold at least bachelor’s degrees.

You will observe that the "very few career choices available for them to stay in the U.S." is actually by design and is in place to support the demand for high-skill workers that cannot be produced domestically.

If your entire evidentiary basis is an extremely small section of the U.S. workforce “PhD CS holders that actively work in programming”, that means that every other field is producing sufficient talent. There are also substantial reasons unrelated to ability why US citizens would not want to pursue PhDs - they do not want to spend 4-6 years in school making no money when they could instead, be earning half a million dollars in the meanwhile; they may not want to. And the H1-B/EB1/EB2 regulations were written up in 1965 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act and have rarely been revised since due to domestic political constraints. Very little about US labor market conditions can be inferred from Congress’ inaction on immigration.

Regarding your denial of the miserable state of the US education system: the average SAT score is 1028, per a cursory web search.

This is definitional. The SAT is means referenced, the test difficulty and grading scale move up and down to maintain a constant mean and standard deviation. Everyone on this site, as well, likely did extremely well in school, and that means everyone’s frame of reference here is extremely left-skewed. Hence, why time-series and cohort comparisons across time and space are necessary to add context.

"STEM workers" is also a remarkably broad field, and frankly includes many fields that are easy.

Yes, hence the bachelor degree exclusion.

However, the fact that US born workers seem to be decisively outcompeted for these positions by foreigners is concerning.

This is a more colorable argument, where the set is restricted to doctoral degree holders. However, doctoral degree holders are ~1% of the U.S. population. The inclusion of some is necessarily the exclusion of others - if workforce development is working well for 99% of the population (which in part addresses your other comments about the BLS classifications) it broadly is working well. As for doctoral degree holders - there are many reasons unrelated to academic ability to why U.S. citizens do not pursue a PhD but foreigners do (namely, the desire to stay in the U.S. compared to already having the ability to stay in the U.S. and wanting to start a career/family early). But even then, even for STEM PhD degrees - US citizens comprise a majority of degree earners (figure 2 -

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) and it simply strains credibility that a few thousand of the 2 million+ bachelor degree holders are academically unable to pursue a PhD instead of being unwilling

 

[valysre]

That is why there is a restriction on people that hold at least bachelor’s degrees.

If your entire evidentiary basis is an extremely small section of the U.S. workforce “PhD CS holders that actively work in programming”, that means that every other field is producing sufficient talent. There are also substantial reasons unrelated to ability why US citizens would not want to pursue PhDs - they do not want to spend 4-6 years in school making no money when they could instead, be earning half a million dollars in the meanwhile; they may not want to. And the H1-B/EB1/EB2 regulations were written up in 1965 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act and have rarely been revised since due to domestic political constraints. Very little about US labor market conditions can be inferred from Congress’ inaction on immigration.

This is definitional. The SAT is means referenced, the test difficulty and grading scale move up and down to maintain a constant mean and standard deviation. Everyone on this site, as well, likely did extremely well in school, and that means everyone’s frame of reference here is extremely left-skewed. Hence, why time-series and cohort comparisons across time and space are necessary to add context.


Yes, hence the bachelor degree exclusion.

This is a more colorable argument, where the set is restricted to doctoral degree holders. However, doctoral degree holders are ~1% of the U.S. population. The inclusion of some is necessarily the exclusion of others - if workforce development is working well for 99% of the population (which in part addresses your other comments about the BLS classifications) it broadly is working well. As for doctoral degree holders - there are many reasons unrelated to academic ability to why U.S. citizens do not pursue a PhD but foreigners do (namely, the desire to stay in the U.S. compared to already having the ability to stay in the U.S. and wanting to start a career/family early). But even then, even for STEM PhD degrees - US citizens comprise a majority of degree earners (figure 2 -

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) and it simply strains credibility that a few thousand of the 2 million+ bachelor degree holders are academically unable to pursue a PhD instead of being unwilling

I think we each may not understand the other.

I have two points to make, one is about the quality of US high school education, and the other is about the figure of "STEM workers" and its usage as a metric of US education system performance.

Regarding "STEM workers", the qualifier of bachelor's degree does not really affect my remarks on the nature of most "STEM workers"' occupation in the US. None of the fields that I mention that are listed in the BLS' 2017 presentation on STEM employment are precluded by the qualifier of the bachelor's degree. I do not have a figure to support it, but I am confident that upwards of 80% of the workers in the fields I mentioned ("software developers, application", "Computer user support specialists", "Computer systems analysts", "Computer system administrators", etc.) have bachelor's degrees. Once again, this subset of the "STEM workers" population is a subset that barely engages any serious STEM thinking and should not be considered in discussions about high-skill STEM labor. Additionally, this population cannot seriously be used as a metric of US education system performance, because the US education system does not have to perform well for large numbers of US born workers to work in these jobs.

I do concede that my experience is focused largely on what you describe as “PhD CS holders that actively work in programming”, but it is also what I believe to be what drove what you described in your original post as "the broad IT-ification of all kinds of businesses" via a rapid development of easily accessible cloud-based computing and the sudden growth in the development of computing models to support "all kinds of businesses".

As an aside, I believe your comment on

an unprecedented growth in services sector productivity

to actually be a negative, as an unprecedented growth in the service sector implies a dearth of employment opportunities in other, more useful sectors. I personally believe the service sector to be "water weight" when measuring economic productivity.

Regarding the quality of US high school education, I understand that the SAT is designed to maintain an average of approximately 1000. However, I believe that the current difficulty of the SAT that is yielding an average of approximately 1000 is far too low. I will concede your point that I most likely have a very skewed view of what academic performance should be, but I maintain that a high school population that struggles with basic algebra is unacceptable. On the basis of this alone, I must label the US high school system as subpar. Additionally, I note that you do not address any concerns on the disturbing number of students who seem incapable of following entry-level courses at the college level.

I do propose an alternative explanation: while the US education system may be of decent quality (at the least, the vast majority of students have a teacher who is literate), the students are not of a decent quality. Indeed, my observation of most US students today are that they seem reluctant to attend school, are disrespectful of school as an institution of learning, and do not appreciate the value of a comprehensive education. Americans do not want to learn. Knowing this, it is possible to say that the US education system does not provide a low-quality education, but rather that US students do not want to obtain a high-quality education.

I personally have some methodological complaints regarding the US education system that are not directly supported by data or observations on performance, but I believe still deserve some consideration. In my opinion, far too much time in US education is spent on fluffy material that has very little objective value. Universally, the classes that assign the most homework (measured by time and effort to complete) are English and "Social Studies". I believe this to be a waste of student time, and in fact somewhat reminiscent of the 政治 (Politics) classes in China. Indeed, with all the time spent on these classes, the inability of the average US high schooler to compose a reasonably structured essay (judged from the performance of former US high schoolers in entry-level college courses) is made all the more disappointing. Although, with so little time spent on math and the sciences, it does somewhat excuse the horrendous performance of US students in these fields.

 

[chgough34]

The “IT-ification” I was referencing previously points not to software development in particular but the broad diffusion of software and other forms of ICT to improve the productivity of all kinds of other businesses such as in banking for processing payments, or airlines in flight planning and flight routing, etc, etc. -

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[valysre]

The “IT-ification” I was referencing previously points not to software development in particular but the broad diffusion of software and other forms of ICT to improve the productivity of all kinds of other businesses such as in banking for processing payments, or airlines in flight planning and flight routing, etc, etc. -

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"Via a rapid development of easily accessible cloud-based computing and the sudden growth in the development of computing models to support "all kinds of businesses"." which was largely driven by an influx of foreign “PhD CS holders that actively work in programming”.

 

[chgough34]

Regarding "STEM workers", the qualifier of bachelor's degree does not really affect my remarks on the nature of most "STEM workers"' occupation in the US. None of the fields that I mention that are listed in the BLS' 2017 presentation on STEM employment are precluded by the qualifier of the bachelor's degree. I do not have a figure to support it, but I am confident that upwards of 80% of the workers in the fields I mentioned ("software developers, application", "Computer user support specialists", "Computer systems analysts", "Computer system administrators", etc.) have bachelor's degrees. Once again, this subset of the "STEM workers" population is a subset that barely engages any serious STEM thinking and should not be considered in discussions about high-skill STEM labor.

This is illogical. Individuals with college degrees cost more. If those jobs didn’t require college degrees, why would employers constrict the pool of talent available to them and increase their payroll costs for no reason?

Additionally, this population cannot seriously be used as a metric of US education system performance, because the US education system does not have to perform well for large numbers of US born workers to work in these jobs.

And that’s where we disagree. IT support and similar work is a few decades old, is a quite specialized and requires some quantitative capacity, that are developed in adolescence.

"the broad IT-ification of all kinds of businesses" via a rapid development of easily accessible cloud-based computing and the sudden growth in the development of computing models to support "all kinds of businesses".

Yeah - companies deploying clouds, software, and IT to make their non-software businesses run more efficiently and smoothly. That’s bachelor degree work.

As an aside, I believe your comment on
to actually be a negative, as an unprecedented growth in the service sector implies a dearth of employment opportunities in other, more useful sectors. I personally believe the service sector to be "water weight" when measuring economic productivity.

No? Service and manufacturing sectors are complementary and services are valuable in their own right - after all, we are voluntarily on an internet publisher’s website right now. Software publishers, cloud and data hosting services, research & development, governance, all of these are services but all quite obviously necessary for performance.

Regarding the quality of US high school education, I understand that the SAT is designed to maintain an average of approximately 1000. However, I believe that the current difficulty of the SAT that is yielding an average of approximately 1000 is far too low. I will concede your point that I most likely have a very skewed view of what academic performance should be, but I maintain that a high school population that struggles with basic algebra is unacceptable.

I agree completely that the U.S. isn’t performing as well as a hypothetical ideal. Where I disagree is assuming it’s “bad” because it isn’t performing as well as a hypothetical ideal - time and space comparisons are more apt here and both reveal the U.S. is performing generally better than in the past.

Additionally, I note that you do not address any concerns on the disturbing number of students who seem incapable of following entry-level courses at the college level.

It’s the same paragraph explaining SAT scores (frames of reference)

Knowing this, it is possible to say that the US education system does not provide a low-quality education, but rather that US students do not want to obtain a high-quality education.

Yeah - this is definitely applicable to a large share of high school students (as has been the case since forever).

To summarize my arguments - regardless of anecdotal evidence, there is substantial labor market data to suggest education writ large does a good job with workforce development for a broad range of jobs across the economy and that for a narrow narrow slice of the economy that demands highly quantitative skills - those are still majority-filled by US-born residents (and the foreign share is simultaneously the effect of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that hasn’t been edited since, and the substantial lost earnings with uncertain payoffs that U.S. citizens face when pursuing PhDs).

 

[valysre]

And that’s where we disagree. IT support and similar work is a few decades old, is a quite specialized and requires some quantitative capacity, that are developed in adolescence.

This is definitely where we disagree. I think most of this work does not require substantial education to pull off, and that the reason why many people in this field have bachelor's degrees is because companies simply demanded such bells and whistles in the past due to a poor understanding of the work. I don't think either of us will budge on this, so we can move on.

time and space comparisons are more apt here and both reveal the U.S. is performing generally better than in the past.

I don't think you are trying to do this, but I strongly dislike this sort of "U.S. is performing generally better than in the past" talk because it encourages an acceptance of the status quo when the US right now is performing comparatively worse in some fields than competitors. An example of such a field is the production of algebra-capable students who are more strongly positioned to conduct useful research and work in more mathematically demanding jobs. An example of such research/jobs is the recently popular field of machine learning, in which strong mathematics are a must.

Yeah - this is definitely applicable to a large share of high school students (as has been the case since forever).

I personally believe that this is the result of a strangely backwards culture in the US that seems to punish those who perform well academically. I very rarely see "nerds" portrayed in a positive light in US entertainment, nor do I see them being praised in the news. And while other countries may not worship their "nerds", at the least they do not belittle or humiliate. In US, it feels that it is socially undesirable to be an academic success.

there is substantial labor market data to suggest education writ large does a good job with workforce development for a broad range of jobs across the economy

I believe that this "good job" is not truly a "good" job, but rather a "not failing" job. I think that it is not the education system doing a good job with workforce development, but rather the labor market being forced to work with the mediocre results of the education system. I think at the very least, the labor market would appreciate if the education system could improve its results by ensuring most of the students who graduate are capable of (even if not formally) propositional logic (if A and B are true, A is true and B is true, etc.). This may seem a low bar, but I do not think it is being met at the moment.

To summarize, I believe that your approach to the US system of education and the resulting employment is a bit too complacent. While the country is not failing in these respects, it is running the risk of falling behind international competitors--some would argue it has already fallen behind--and could do well with some serious introspection and change.

 

[chgough34]

To summarize, I believe that your approach to the US system of education and the resulting employment is a bit too complacent. While the country is not failing in these respects, it is running the risk of falling behind international competitors--some would argue it has already fallen behind--and could do well with some serious introspection and change.

So I guess this will be the last post on the topic where it summarizes -
1. We will agree to disagree on the level of formal education necessary for IT and related work (Bach degree vs. no formal education

2. We both agree that the U.S. education system isn’t performing optimally (compared to a hypothetical ideal that indeed should be a policy goal) but we seem to both agree on the time and space comparisons

3. The workforce development arguments: for highly quantitative positions comprising ~1% of the workforce, there’s agreement as to there being substantial foreign representation but a disagreement as to why - opportunity costs associated with PhD completion that aren’t evenly shared and career considerations and 1960s-era immigration politics vs. ability of native-born individuals

For the rest of the workforce - I’m mostly taking the broad “IT-ification” and large U.S. firm size compared to an international panel as being evidence of being “good”; you take it as not failing. And we will probably continue this conversation in another context sometime later.

 

[manqiangrexue]

1. There’s an obvious difference between arresting a handful of individuals compared to closing all the universities for a decade (a point which no one has disputed).

No there's not. The individuals arrested aren't the point. The point is intellectual destruction by creating a culture of fear, that one must think as instructed and not as one will. It doesn't matter how many people have to be arrested to achieve this; the fewer there are, the more easily cowed the population.

2. The U.S. has been politically restrictive on liberal campus protestors for decades now - Students for a Democratic Society, Kent State, the Iraq War protests, and the Gaza Protests - treating it as something new or a cultural revolution is lulz.

So it is a gradual rot, reaching new heights.

They will resolve the way they’ve always resolved - the children of upper-middle income professionals will graduate, get a job, enter the middle class, and their political activism impulses will die down, as they always have.

It's not about the activism; it's about the forced conformity, one which very ironically America accuses others of while attempting to paint itself as free. Fractures beneath the visible surface are fractures all the same, but not to the election-driven.

It’s absolutely predictable.

Except to those saying that China can't escape a hard landing.

There are diminishing returns to physical capital. Regardless of the size of the economy, those patterns still persist so with a higher gdppc, gdp growth slows. China is larger so its economy will almost inherently be more complex and diversified but that doesn’t detract from the original point - China’s growth from 1978 on afterwards was due to physical capital deepening/formation and technological catchup - and both of those will predict declining growth rates with higher gdppc.

Hindsight is 20/20 LOL. Wonder what you were saying 10 years ago.

Right. It wasn’t on topic but increasing educational attainment is well documented - higher graduation rates which reflect greater human capital attainment -

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,

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. Similarly, high school course rigor has increased a ex. in 1990, 7% of calculus course taking and in 2010, 16% of calculus course taking; for chemistry, 51% to76%, and for physics, 23% to 40% (

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).

We've already done this and you already lost. If you want to go back, find my comment that you last failed to comment on and ran away from and continue from there. Reduced SAT difficulty, reducing testing requirements for college entry, mass failures in mathematics, etc...

Yes. Urban areas in the U.S. are and have been adversely selected due to redlining and white flight - it’s almost by definition where the worst outcomes will be concentrated, and especially in the 60s and 70s when school desegregation fireworks were all the rage and before the Serrano decision and its copycats that equalized per capita school funding for all students (urban school districts had substantial funding inequalities in the 60s and 70s due to property tax funding that only equalized after the California Supreme Court decided Serrano v. Priest, 5 Cal. 3d (1971); and you got various clones of other state supreme courts - Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby, 777 S.W.2d 391 (Tex., 1989), Rose v. Council for Better Education, 790 S.W.2d (Ky. 1989), etc.

You may think that quoting the law here makes you look educated but it actually makes you look like a book fool attempting to apply your field to arguments for which it is irrelevent. What is relevent is how many people are failing. Was it higher before? Because the current level is insane. Unimaginable in an education-oriented society. Comparing you to China wouldn't be fair to China; this is like third world slum country level.

Yeah - it’s a common shared global pattern, for example, in China, 17.9% of teenagers have ever smoked -

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From your article:

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"

For USA:

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"According to data from the NYTS, in 2023, more than 2.13 million U.S. youth, including 10.0% of high school students and 4.6% of middle school students, currently used e-cigarettes. Moreover, among high school students who reported current e-cigarette use, 39.7% reported using the products frequently (on 20 or more of the past 30 days) and 29.2% reported daily use."

So actually, of the Chinese students in the study, the vast majority only tried it and stopped (17.9% dropped to 5.9%). Of those who did not stop, they basically retain the ability to do it for social occasions but rarely do it (5.9% dropped to 1.8%). And the last 1.8% are screwed with frequent use. In the US, the majority of the 10% of smokers smoke frequently or every day (39.7%+29.2%=68.9%), which is 6.9% of the total high school population in heavy use, making it almost 4x as high as in China.

Oh, here's a little bonus for the US. It's so fugly I don't even wanna go through it all LOL

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“we found high levels of drinking among Chinese adolescents aged 12 to 17 years old. Around half of Chinese teens reported having consumed alcohol at some point” -

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From your article:

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Around half of Chinese teens reported having consumed alcohol at some point. One in four reported drinking in the past month and one in 10 reported binge drinking.

These drinking rates, while significant, are in fact lower than those reported by European, American and Canadian teens."

These 2 comparisons are for the most accessible substances; cigarettes and alcohol are legal almost everywhere. If you add hard drugs into the equation, the ones that get you the death sentence for selling in China, it's a runaway for the US and the West.

Furthermore, this is all secondary to the fact that Chinese students, both in China and in the US, beat their American counterparts into the ground, no competition, at every STEM subject. So after considering the results that are a Chinese academic blowout victory (it's such a runaway that China leaves in the dust the countries that leave the US in the dust), the smoking and drinking comparisions are basically a trivial detail.

The US High School Class of 1980 is now 60 and entering near their retirement age, and they presided over the U.S. turning into an net oil exporter due to oilfield technologies, sustained U.S. leadership in Silicon Valley, the broad IT-ification of all kinds of businesses, and an unprecedented growth in services sector productivity, among others. They are fine and clearly received substantial human capital development.

They did it by recruiting immigrants by using the US finance system set up after WWII. Now America's economic power against China is much weaker than it was compared to the 80's and China's STEM is getting major boosts every year so US talent recruitment as a part of the global pie (basically how many Chinese scientists you can get) is much much weaker than before, and technology is all about comparing and competing. We did this before; America's homegrown STEM talent is trash and you ran away from that debate too. You wanna start it up again here or do you wanna go back to were you last fled and answer those points?

 

[chgough34]

No there's not. The individuals arrested aren't the point. The point is intellectual destruction by creating a culture of fear, that one must think as instructed and not as one will.

Nah. It really isn’t. The protestors are being arrested for conduct, not speech (including either teaching or research) so there is no chilling effect on thought or teaching. University sociology, anthropology, history, and PoliSci departments are as being free-wheeling liberals as they’ve ever been. It’s also just off topic. The original topic was on macro-econometric models: those were not being developed in China in the 1960s and 1970s because the universities were closed; and there is nothing analogous to the cultural revolution that will stop academic research on macro-econometric models in the U.S.

Hindsight is 20/20 LOL. Wonder what you were saying 10 years ago.

Much the same thing - see Table 6 on page 52 of the IMF report -

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We've already done this and you already lost. If you want to go back, find my comment that you last failed to comment on and ran away from and continue from there. Reduced SAT difficulty, reducing testing requirements for college entry, mass failures in mathematics, etc...

Not really - the SAT getting easier (even if true) is not evidence of declining achievement. The removal of testing requirements was done due to COVID (when testing centers were difficult to access) and haven’t disrupted universities since. I’ve already addressed “mass failures in mathematics” as not being time-series evidence, but you have some other scattershot evidence of “test scores low = disaster” dating to 1983 and A Nation At Risk (

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)

You may think that quoting the law here makes you look educated but it actually makes you look like a book fool attempting to apply your field to arguments for which it is irrelevent.
What is relevent is how many people are failing. Was it higher before?

Failing? It’s impossible say - standardized testing wasn’t a thing in the 1960s and 1970s. But it’s easily inferable that educational quality was worse in the 1960s and 1970s - especially urban districts, due to funding inequalities, school desegregation fireworks and protests (or explicitly segregated school districts), non-enforcement of truancy laws, redlining, among others.

Furthermore, this is all secondary to the fact that Chinese students, both in China and in the US, beat their American counterparts into the ground, no competition, at every STEM subject. So after considering the results that are a Chinese academic blowout victory (it's such a runaway that China leaves in the dust the countries that leave the US in the dust), the smoking and drinking comparisions are basically a trivial detail.

The original poll question that Dr. Burge posted on Twitter was ever use. Since those are in effect, the same in both countries (for “ever use”), you are now arguing the severity is different, which while true, is both not what was 1) originally argued (“US youth cohorts are doing better than before”) and 2) your retort (“I can’t imagine this would ever happen in any country”). Whatever the Chinese version of the YRBS may be,
I’m not familiar with it so the comparisons across space are going to be quite random.

Also, China having a good education system is not exclusive to the U.S. also having a good education system. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

We did this before; America's homegrown STEM talent is trash and you ran away from that debate too. You wanna start it up again here or do you wanna go back to were you last fled and answer those points?

No. US-born STEM talent is the super majority of US STEM workers (as they’ve always been), and the U.S. is now producing more STEM bachelor degree holders than ever before. A supermajority of US STEM PhD holders are US-born as well; and to the extent there is the ~0.1% of the workforce that is the “PhD holder that works in CompSci research” - there are once again, multiple economic explanations that are much more credible (substantial lost earnings from a PhD, PhD wage premiums not being that large, and not wanting to move after already being settled in a metro area with both professional/social networks that will be lost, and selection effects from the 1965 INA that isn’t been updated since) than “there aren’t a few hundred US-born CS BS earners each year who aren’t capable of earning a PhD”.

It’s also besides the point - whatever deleterious effect did exist, it didn’t prevent the 1980s graduating class from managing and being directly responsible for a large sustained period of innovation

Since this seems to be your particular hobby horse- China is likely to grow at a 4-5% rate for the next 2 decades, the U.S. at a slightly sub-2% level, and China will be a larger economy in NGDP by the mid-2030s and substantially larger than the U.S. by the mid-2050s. Even with that said, the U.S. will still be incredibly wealthy (particularly on a GDPPC basis) and have market-leading firms in every sector (as will China; albeit from catch-up) due to accumulated capital deepening, experience-related human capital, and accumulated technology (code bases, industrial designs, etc).