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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

I think there are plenty of qualified and hard-working people in China, I'm not sure this change would increase the number of people there the same way it might in places like Europe or India.

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For about 5-6 decades all the qualified and hard-working people in China came to the U.S, because they could enjoy more freedom, fewer arbitrary government dictates, and better economic opportunities. This brain drain was a huge factor in U.S. global dominance.

That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.

So the US underinvested in the native workforce and now the chinese have gone back there's a big gap that a native workforce would have filled if they hadn't been temporarily replaced by chinese? Seems terrible short sighted.

Yes. The mechanism is that American kids stopped learning useful things like STEM skills. I remember when I went to college in the early 00s, every single person in my physics class was either an immigrant, child of an immigrant, or Jewish. Now we have a shortage in engineering skills that has to be filled by H1Bs, and a population that all gets service jobs and consumes disproportionately because of an overvalued reserve currency. If that currency ever stops being overvalued, we're fucked.

Americans stopped learning or they were rejected?

Come on.

Stopped learning. Physics classes at my college were about 12 students. CS and math would be about 20-30ish, History and English and Psychology classes were about 40-60, PoliSci could be upwards of 100. I don't think any science or math course there ever filled up. There was zero barrier to anyone wanting to take a physics course or be a physics major, other than the work being really hard.

The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.

The U.S. is 4% of the world population. Back when the world population was 2B people and the developed world population was about 400M and the U.S. was 130M of that and the only market whose capital stock hadn't been totally destroyed by WW2, we were crucial to the world economy. But now the world population is 8B, the developed world population is 6B, and the U.S. is 330M of that. In terms of raw size of consumer markets, the world can ignore the U.S. The tricky part is the dependence on U.S. software and financial companies for significant parts of the global information infrastructure, but there's already a strong movement to that.

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