America’s Broken Brain Trust

Full disclosure here… Yes, I now earn my MONEY as a real estate professional.  In contrast to science - it is a field where you can make a great deal of money with relatively little formal training.  Not unlike science, finding your way to the bank  is not so easy.  I wrote this blog for consumers and real estate professionals alike.  What was interesting on the professional forum was the response.  There are definitely those that would take such statements seriously. Perhaps they think scientists sit in ivory towers and think up ridiculous experiments because we have nothing productive to do.  Others - the reference to genes went right over their heads.

Most importantly - this blog flushed out a trend .  A few ‘confessed’ of a former career in science or engineering. There were civil engineers, statisticians, one life scientist and a couple of programmers and a software engineer.   This trend is profound - the trend away from STEM employment due to continued outsourcing and the flood of H1-B’s  from areas where we create a product or work towards collective knowledge that seeds new technology.  Sad.  On the good side, the addition of these individuals - myself included - may create a professionalism that has been lacking in that field before - Hence articles like mine and my friend who created Ethyl Broomhandle.   But few would argue that the future of our country would fare better if people like this were about the business of creating new technology and products.  Getting people like this BACK TO WORK IN THEIR CHOSEN STEM FIELDS - would help secure our infrastructure, create new sources of clean energy and advance medical science.  But when a country throws its best and brightest into the garbage can of poverty - what do you think will happen?

A real estate colleague of mine from another geographic area  recently wrote an article on  private forum about a REALTOR all of us in the business are all too  familiar with. He named her Ethyl Broomhandle  and I would give this agent credit for his diatribe, but I have a feeling that he wanted his comments to remain anonymous.

We all know her.

The most obnoxious real estate agent that God ever created.  Aggressive, nasty, mentions repeatedly that she has been in the business since the dawn of time.  Agents cringe in horror when a buyer falls in love with one of her listings.  I’ve written about her before on professional forums. In fact – a good chunk of my time with my real estate coach is spent talking about how to deal  with the Ethyl Broomhandle’s of the real estate world without finding myself at the bottom of a bottle of Cabernet every night.

But through all of this,  I never came clean.  Well I have a confession to make… you see I created Ethyl…I did this 20 years ago when I was young and foolish. While the public was focused on the cloning of Dolly the cloned sheep – they didn’t know that a group of mad scientists – of which I was one  – had  created clones of thousands of “worst nightmare”  real estate agents and deposited them in every brokerage across the continental US.

How did this happen?

You see – about 20 years ago when I was first starting out as a budding mad scientist – we were under a lot of stress.  We decided that we deserved to have  a “fun project” to lighten our burden.  Then one night a couple of us got drunk while watching Star Trek reruns we got our inspiration from this episode: The clip gives you the conclusion…

In this episode – Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy decided to create hundreds of copies of a henpecking android to punish Harry Mud for causing problems for the crew of the Enterprise.  He was was left on a small planet with 500 “Stella’s” all screaming at him.

We were cloning almost everything – so why not a REALTOR? Why not clone the worst most aggressive, useless, pointless REALTOR in the world – make thousands of copies.  No one would mind – their purpose in life would be to torture other REALTORS and everyone hates REALTORS anyway. If we were caught, we could argue that we did this as a public service.

But we didn’t stop there – We chose the DNA of the “original” Ethy Broomhandle. Her name was actually  Stella DragonLady and she was a piece of work to begin with.  But  we souped up her DNA with several genes and enhancers .

1. We added alleles dragonlady 1, 2, & 3 – genes know to enhance sarcasm and bitchiness.
2. We added the jackass promoter.  In men this piece of DNA enhances  the phenotype of the “jerk.” In women it enhances  the ability to seek out male companions with money – who ironically are generally jerks.
3. We also threw in the  a newly discovered gene called cha-ching in order to be sure our clones could smell money.
4. We  incorporated the gene called puff. We called it that not only because source of inspiration came from something you puff – but because this clever gene removes all inhibition to blatant self-promotion and exaggeration. An individual possessing the enhanced version of this allele is capable of repeating “I’ve been in this business for over 100 years” every five minutes with a straight face.
5. Our final touch was to add  the catclaw promoter – which works synergistically with the dragonlady locus taking the phenotype to a whole a new level of bitchiness.

Now one of our progeny – Ethyl Broomhandle  has come back to remind me of my dark past.  I guess the experiment worked.

© 2010 – Ruthmarie G. Hicks – http://thewestchesterview.com – All rights reserved.

Just ask Jon Stewart of TheDailyShow. The reason I’m such a fan of the The Daily Show is that Jon Stewart has a knack for getting at the issues using his innate sense of timing and humor to soften the blow.  Let’s face it:  We are  a total and complete mess as a nation.  We can either laugh or cry - so laughter is my preferred poison. Since we’ve entered an era of each against all where everyone is protecting their own self-interest it is not surprising that those in STEM fields have abandoned R&D for Wall Street.

We don’t make things any more. We have abandoned innovation and R&D in favor of market manipulation.   Why make money through innovation when manipulating markets and creating bubbles is so much more profitable?  The creation of the so-called “ownership society” forced many a mathematician, scientist or engineer (yours truly included) to leave our innovative  havens of discovery.  When a Ph.D. in my field is looking at a 70 hour work week that pays less than $40k a year - staying in place is no longer an option.  the fate of many STEM careers has been similar.  Offshoring, outsourcing, insourcing - call it what you will….but the bottom line is this: scientists and engineers have been forced out of their fields because “market forces” have created a situation where a livelihood can not be sustained. So most of us ventured forth  into the  world of business and we have plied our intellectual capacity in the market place.

The lesson here is NEVER underestimate an intellectual…..the best and brightest are a flexible bunch and  have a knack for being able to apply themselves to whatever task is at hand. Even if underhanded - we excel at being the best.   When we apply ourselves to making gobs of money with no regard to the consequences and with no underlying concerns about the trivial (such as whether what we are doing is right, underhanded or just plain wrong) we tend to kick ass.   Never was this seen so blatantly as is in the housing meltdown.  Many a brain with an mathematical bent wound up plying their craft at hedge funds instead of developing innovative algorithms or finding new sources of renewable energy.  Instead of contributing to solving our problems, they’ve been instrumental in creating more problems than we could ever imagine.   But hey! It’s a living…..So what if the world economy nearly collapsed!  Now here is the result of such intellectual might. Instead of “These brilliant guys” Jon Stewart is calling them “These F@#king Guys”

Enjoy the clip -its from April of this year - and realize that Goldman Sachs could not have done this without help from the mathematically gifted…

© RMGHicks - http://www.americasbrokenbraintrust.com

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to to read a small publication that I had been carrying around with me for weeks - perhaps even months. It was a small paper published by Harvard Business Review, by Paul Krugman with the compelling title “A Country Is Not a Company.” the paper points to the major differences running a large company as a CEO and the stewardship required to guide a national economy. Krugman was pointing out why CEO’s think that they are uniquely qualified to shape public policy during an economic crisis, and why the correlation between country and company is not as linear as they assume.

In the subsequent pages Krugman goes on to describe a national economy as a “closed system” while individual companies are more “open systems.” By analogy he described the garbage collection system in his township. The town had decided that it didn’t want its own land fill. Although it collected the garbage, the ultimate disposal was outside the town. Thus, garbage dumps and land fills are “open systems” with respect to the township. But garbage disposal in the United States as a whole - is a closed system. The trash has to go somewhere and moving it from place to place doesn’t change the total volume of landfill that we use as a country on iota.

I see a similar analogy in how the training of scientists was managed in our country over the past 20 years or so. I came up in the era where everyone was anticipating the great scientist and Ph.D. shortage. Articles appeared willy-nilly in the journals Science and Nature. The Scientist wrote of dire predictions if the problem wasn’t addressed. Qualified students were encouraged to enter the sciences and seek higher degrees because surely as surely as the sun rises, there would be a crying need for new investigators and there would be plenty of work in industry if Academe didn’t suit us.

The early 1990s saw a bolstering of the NIH and NSF budgets - particularly once Clinton was elected. This allowed established investigators to expand their labs and add more graduate students and post-docs to their budgets. This in turn led to a greater demand for student’s and an increased number of visas being granted to those who wished to study in the US. Investigators and universities saw no problem in this. After all each investigator’s laboratory represented and “open system” into which graduate students and postdocs flowed in and out. The same held for each university. If there wasn’t room in one lab for a student once they graduated, there was a whole country full of labs, both industrial and academic, that would surely employ the student or post-doc. In the meantime no one was factoring in the impact of all this foreign labor on the so-called scientist “shortage.”

Most investigators continued to see science as a field of infinite possibilities and projects. The trouble is that there are just so many labs and so many companies - the number of student’s and post-docs that can be absorbed into the entire system as fully employed scientists is quite finite. The Krugman analogy here would be the parking lot at the train station. Most train stations in the Tristate area have parking issues. Prof. Krugman found that he could get a space when he arrived early enough. But he secured his spot at the expense of others who would arrive later and find no spot. The system was “closed” and getting what you needed meant someone else had to go without.

For scientists and engineers this means that finite funds prevent infinite avenues of investigation from expanding indefinitely. At some point - saturation is reached and the spill-over (no matter how marvelously qualified) is left in the lurch. At best they are left in a perpetual no-mans land of indentured servitude as post-docs for years and years.

Now we see the darker side. As foreign-born scientists supplanted Americans, remuneration became more and more problematic. This created a vicious circle in which Americans fled science. But the glut continued unabated. Now it has come to the point where even foreign nationals are disgusted with the long hours and poor pay. They are looking towards “home” for a better life. So eventually we will truly have a shortage - a shortage that was fueled by a monster glut and rampant exploitation.

So the question remains….in the present state of affairs - how will America ever be able to compete again? It takes years to train a scientist or engineer. It’s nothing like the 2-year M.B.A. or a 3-year J.D. We ought to congratulate Academe though….they managed to create a future shortage out of a glut all while providing a top-notch education for our competition in the global market. Good going guys.

© 2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://Americasbrokenbraintrust.com - All rights reserved.

The protests from college students across the country hit a very personal chord with me. Having been through the “academic mill” I sympathize deeply with these student’s who are attempting to do. They see education as their ticket to a middle class - or even upper class life. However, I had to wonder when I saw the protests, will the education that they are protesting for truly result in a higher standard of living for these young people?

My concerns are based on personal experience. As someone who holds a Ph.D. that I hardly use, the question above is far from moot. Ask anyone who has a degree is science, math, computer programming, engineering and the like. Many underwent extensive educations which were taken with the idea this would pay off in the form of increased remuneration for years to come. When I was an undergraduate, I had a job in a graduate school working in the registrar/bursar’s office. The specialized in engineering and computer science. The students flooded in each semester. The classes were held from 6 PM to 10 PM Monday through Thursday. Some students were on campus every night - others were around twice a week. This went on for years. Even in the mid to late 80s, it was expensive and certainly intellectually demanding and very time consuming. It’s been about 21 years since I worked in that institution. But these days I often wonder about the fate of the students who came through those doors. Are they still employed? Have they been outsourced? Did someone with an H1-B replace them with a lower salary? Given what happened to the monetary value of my own Ph.D. , these questions aren’t idle musings.

Many academics and business people a like now say that such education should be a lifetime effort. That fields of work will come and go - but that re-education into new fields every decade or so will be the norm. That this is not necessarily a bad thing. Really? To these notions I say BULL$%#$!

Why? The time and expense makes such an on-going educational imperative is wildly impractical and of dubious financial benefit. Degrees are expensive and time consuming undertakings. Even back in the 80s and 90s the cost was far from trivial. What made the time and expense worthwhile was the belief that once completed, the graduate really “had something” worthwhile - that would pay off for years to come.

Now, entire career paths and the courses of study required for admission are being created and commoditized with alarming speed. The hapless student chasing these degrees often finds their “cheese moved” before they even come out of the education pipeline. Going in - the student sees this as a viable career with high demand - this creates a flood of people chasing the same dollars. The flood creates a glut and industry adds salt to the wound by importing “cheap labor” from abroad. This scenario appears to be repeated over and over again throughout many industries and fields of study.

But how practical is this for the average worker? The answer is that it isn’t. We are getting to the point where a Master’s degree might get about six years of milage out said degree. Then the cycle has to restart when “retraining” becomes necessary. How many degrees are we going to have to take, in order to stay viable? Does it even make any sense to take theses degrees? I don’t know, crunching the numbers, it doesn’t seem to be very practical. For anyone taking a Ph.D. the stakes couldn’t be higher. The pipeline to graduation is so long that a student entering a Ph.D. program is more likely that not to be seeing a very different employment market when they emerge.

My point is this - education is valuable - however, if there are no jobs going with these degrees - people are simply going to truncate their educations. Resulting in a further dumbing down of our society. The brain trust we are counting on is being eaten alive by academia and industry alike. No one has clean hands on this one. Academia certainly aided and abetted the situation with respect to biomedical science. Breaking the American brain trust ? It’s already broken.

I haven’t done much teaching lately. Budget cuts have pretty much killed off adjunct positions and I have not sought a full-time position. So my exposure to undergraduates over the last two years has been limited. When I held such positions, students would often ask my advice about the realities of a career in science.

When I had such encounters I answered honestly that being a successful scientist was about as practical as trying to become a movie star or professional athlete. Further, there was no striking it rich for the few that “made it.” Income prospects for even the most successful in the field were moderate at best. At worst, they were consigning themselves to a life of poverty.

Last night I went to a “State of the Union” party where supporters of Obama got together to discuss the issues of the day and watch Obama’s address to the nation together. Although most of us were 40+ with a smattering of 30-somethings, there was one student from Stamford who happened to be a biology major.

We watched the State of the Union and amid the encouragement that Obama offered would be scientists and engineers - I had to advise caution to this student. Not surprisingly, he agreed with me. He felt that mid the grim statistics, the post-doctoral logjam, and literally piss-poor pay for the “successful” that you would have to be crazy to pursue a career in science.

Unfortunately for Obama and for the country as a whole, all the grant money in the world for education is pointless unless there are well paying jobs at the end of the educational pipeline.

But more important, what this type of encounter show us is that there truly are young people interested in pursuing science and engineering as career paths. The difficulty is that these careers are just not viable from a practical standpoint. So they turn to other fields such as law, finance, banking and sales. One has to wonder just how many people can be sustained in these fields.

It is this narrowing of viable income producing fields that has our country on the ropes. There are precious few places for people to go in order to earn a viable living. Everyone is flooding into the few niches that will actually produce the “green.” This is exacerbated by the fact that there are no more safety nets. The widening income gap has created a society of rich vs. poor. The poor are truly becoming POOR. The best and the brightest of our youth have a choice: they can choose to pursue their dreams and end up poor - or set them aside and end up rich. More and more, they are choosing money over dreams. From a practical standpoint - this is the right choice for the individual - but the wrong one for society. However, will society treat these people any better for doing the right thing? No, it won’t.

A few years ago a headline appeared in the journal The Scientist:  On the cover there was a picture of a 30-something “homeless” man holding up a handwritten sign on corrugated cardboard which read something along these lines:

• I have a Ph.D.
• 10 publications
• 6 review articles
• 7 years post-doctoral training
• Will work for food!

The fact that such a photo actually appeared on the cover of such a well-read journal should be evidence enough that the system of training and compensating scientists is in serious trouble.  The cover coincided roughly with the time that I had decided to throw in my lab coat for a career in sales.  Having taken a critical look around me about twelve months earlier I saw nothing but a future of indentured servitude and poverty.  It was time to move on.  The cover article was a grim confirmation that I had done the right thing.

If anyone had lingering doubts about the seriousness of the situation - opening the cover and actually reading the article should have caused most of the optimists arguments to R.I.P.  Inside the journal there were a few scientists who made light of the situation and sighted single-minded “dedication” as a sure path to success.  They even likened the dedication required to a career in the arts…think acting, music, dance, and the fine arts.

I have some notion of the daunting hurdles that those in the arts face.  My late mother was a professional singer and radio interviewer.  I also studied music seriously in college and as a result, have several friends from college who tried to break into careers in acting and music.  The odds against success are simply staggering in any of the arts.  If the criteria for success is a full-time job, success in the arts is far more elusive than success in the sciences and engineering.  But if the goal is to make a livable salary that actually pays the bills, puts the kids through school and provides for retirement, the similarities become obvious.  In fact, I would submit that it is the full-time work requirement for the scientist that creates far greater financial risk to the scientist than to the artist.

How can that be true?  I admit the statement is counterintuitive.  But artists have one strong advantage.  They have the ability to develop complementary “day jobs.”  A couple of musicians that I know actually created ancillary careers for themselves.  They were able to build something to fall back on if things weren’t working out for them in the arts.  The fact that a career in the arts is generally defined as part-time until there is significant success makes these back-up careers possible.  But for the scientist that is not the case.  There is no part-time option for the aspiring scientist and no way for the fledgling scientist to supplement the pathetic income they are given for 60-80 hours of grinding labor that is expected of them weekly.

The financial risk for the scientist arises from the following factors:

• The length of training required.
• The amount of compensation offered.
• The number of working hours required.

In biological and biomedical fields, you are looking easily at a 6-9 year period of pre-doctoral training.  Few make it out in less than seven years.  The average is about eight years.  This is full time training with no ancillary employment for supplemental income allowed.  Since you are looking a 60-80 hour week the potential- so unless you are robbing banks, the time constraint alone places a heavy constraint on creating additional income.

Throughout the nineties and until about 2002, many new graduates were counting on leapfrogging into a nice industry job.  Most have been living in grinding poverty for about eight years so they are pretty hungry for a good paycheck.  Since that time, we’ve had a major glut of doctorates coming out of the pipeline in the midst of a contracting economy for biotech.  The dreaded “Post-Doc” has become the new holding pen for those caught in the Ph.D. logjam.  Initially, the post-doc was meant to be a short extension of the Ph.D. training period and was not intended to extend beyond 2-3 years.  This “extension” now seems to meander on indefinitely.  Most graduates do at least two post-docs, many do three before they can find a “real job.” Each position lasts a minimum of two years and some can stretch on for six years.  The pay is generally under $40k with the hours are similar to that of the Ph.D. candidate.   Most graduates are looking at 6-10 years in the holding pen.

For who lost track - you are looking at a 12-19 year “training” period where supplemental compensation is largely impossible.   Small wonder that I have dubbed this prolonged training period  -  “the endless indenture.” Most graduates  are realistically looking at 15 years in the pipeline.  This means that most  Ph.D.’s are sliding into their first “real job”  when they are approaching or in middle age.  38-42 years of age is a good benchmark.

Common sense dictates that the jobs had damn well better be there or these highly trained, very educated people are off a financial cliff.  They have undergone a grueling process of specialized training all of which is full-full time such that lateral movement to another field is well nigh impossible.  In the process they have also lost 15 years of valuable time in building a nest egg for a home, a college education for their children and a retirement fund.  The training process eliminates the flexibility that is badly needed in an economy where the sands shift rapidly under everyone’s feet.  The price tag for extending education into mid-life is too high for most individuals to bear.

Bottom line - its all well and good to say the world is “flat” and that this is a necessary “adjustment.”  But don’t sit and complain (like Thomas Friedman does) about the lack of interest in the sciences on the part of Americans.  We have enough critical mass of interest and ability to produce the next generation of scientist.  Our graduate institutions are world renowned - so I would submit that education is not the issue.  The issue is one of risk and compensation.  The risk has to be mitigated and the compensation increased to a level commensurate with that of other professionals.   The training period also needs to be reduced.  If we don’t do these things,  the best and brightest will continue to flock to the 2-year MBA or the 3-year J.D. and shun the Ph.D.