Stardate 20021202.1736

(Captain's log): In response to my post about the decline of Europe, I've gotten letters from many people. Some have been in Europe and present additional information I thought valuable. (No one in Europe has written to defend the current system.)

One person works for a large manufacturer in France (a very familiar name, but he requested anonymity for himself and his employer):

Due to my own stupidity I spent five years of university instead of the UK norm of three. This will seem clearer soon.

In France there are several levels when working for a company (particularly one that was once government owned). Cadre (Management), ATAM (I'll call it technician) and Employee. To be Cadre at this company you need to have BAC (Baccalaureate) +5 (five years at university). 99% of the time anyone who is not Cadre can never be Cadre. Cadre get different pension rights, ATAMs count every hour they work, employees are usually non-skilled workers (canteen, cleaners etc).

So back to my own stupidity; I get in as a manager of a team of three because I spent five years at university. The guys in my team are over fifty. All they look forward to is their retirement (at 57 they can have some sort of pre-retirement). Pay rises are in the region of 2% (that's a good payrise here). Because they started as non-Cadre they never aspired to be managers or to really progress - their status had been decided the day they joined, therefore they just 'coasted' along. I've had pretty frank discussions over a few glasses of wine with these guys and they didn't like the system but did nothing to change it.

The problem is that technical skill isn't rewarded. In the UK I knew several very highly skilled technical people who earned more than their bosses. Here it would be unthinkable. The only way to progress is through management. John Doe has spent 5 years at university getting good grades in a highly technical subject. He is taken on by a company like [this one] and what do they do to him - put him into management. Wasting valuable technical skills. The UK learned this lesson too late. Now there are hardly any British large manufacturing companies left.

The only reason France still has so many 'French' industries is due to protectionism. Maybe also because who in their right mind would invest in French industries to make money?!?!

Then we have the senior managers. These guys are usually from INSA schools. Nepotism at its finest. Doesn't matter if they are any good - most are not, they will be the ones who float to the top. There is no such thing as meritocracy. And everytime you come up against anyone over 54 the approach is European at its finest - talk, negotiate and two months later nothing is done.

Europe won't come anywhere near the performance of the US, now or in the future. The regulations are killing small businesses, there is no incentive to be highly technically skilled because it doesn't pay, in later life there is no incentive to take risks because no-one wants to jeopardise their pensions.

The issue of a promotion ceiling for technical workers is one that the US faced at least twenty years ago, and sometime in the late 1970's or early 1980's most big companies tried to implement a longer career track for people that permitted them to stay technical and didn't force them to enter management. In part, I think this may have been a response to the book "The Peter Principle", but a lot of it was a recognition that a good engineer isn't necessarily going to make a good manager, and that even if he does then he won't be doing engineering any longer. (I myself tried being a manager twice, and I sucked at it both times. I won't try again.)

Steve wrote as follows (edited for length):

I'm a regular reader and saw your essay this evening on the differences in science and technology between the US and the EU. Let me make another comparison that might interest you. I'm a physician scientist; I do cell biology (related to asthma). There are lots of biomedical journals in which cell biologists publish their work, and these journals generally publish work based on merit as opposed to geography. If you work at Heidelberg University in Germany, for example, you can publish in the Journal of Cell Biology, an elite American journal, as long as your work is of highest quality.

There are two major cell biology journals that are the workhorses of the field: the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), an American journal, and the EMBO Journal, ... Now as you might expect, each journal publishes good work from the other continent, and the JBC is very good about publishing work from East Asia. The articles in each generally run about the same length (average is 7 pages or so), because of the nature of the reports and the amount of information to be conveyed. Both are published by non-profit organizations that represent the major efforts in cell biology on each continent: JBC is published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and EMBO J is published by the federated European Molecular Biology Organization. Each "volume" covers twelve months of publication.

The payoff: can you guess the number of pages published by each? The most recent completed volumes are from January to December, 2001. In that year, the EMBO J published 7,343 pages. And the JBC published 49,484 pages.

Again, authors from around the world can submit work to either journal and to many other good journals. With Medline and other indexing systems, good work can be found regardless of where it is originally published. So the relative difference reflects in the end the intersection of demand for publication of good work (the output by scientists in the universities and biomedical industry) and the resources to run an academic press.

What is the contribution of the US cell/molecular biology community to published research in the world? According to Citation Index, it's about 47.5% of papers published from 1997 to 2001. And the relative impact of that work compared to the world is judged to be very high (their explanation is at the bottom of the cited web page). Other biomedical sciences such as immunology and biochemistry have similar proportions and impact factors.

You noted that Europe is home to some tech companies (e.g., Nokia) that are excellent. Likewise, Europe has some superb scientists. Check the top six immunologists, according to their citation index, for 1992 - 2002. Two are American, one is Canadian, and three are European. One could find similar results in other areas of science. The difference is that, as you've noted, the depth of American science is far greater than seen in Europe. That may be aided by immigration to the U.S. from Europe and Japan (and increasingly, China). This advantage builds over time in the same way as in technology or engineering: the best get better, and the rest get left behind.

His last point is an important one, for it does not convey hope in the situation. The reality in competitive marketplaces is that absent special circumstances, inequality will be magnified. You see that with corporations where it manifests as "shakeout" and you also see it internationally between nations. To a certain extent, the benefits of being the leader help you maintain and extend your lead.

Them as has, gets.

One of the big reasons why there's a brain drain towards the US is because this is where the action is. We're the ones doing the majority of the exciting research in nearly every field. We're the ones whose companies are trying to design the majority of leading edge products. The most motivated scientists and engineers in the world want to come here because this is their best opportunity to do good work and to benefit personally from it. But when they do come here, they sustain that very situation; they contribute to the very concentration of excitement and vitality that they wanted to join, and which will cause others to want to come here as well.

And Dilacerator has a long post which points out many other issues which are important. Here's a small taste of it:

In listing the European companies that den Beste thinks are worthy of being called high-tech, he mentions amongst other Siemens and Philips. Now, it is true that both these companies have good research staff and have produced some interesting advances in technology. However, as companies, they're not doing well at all. Siemens is a GE-wannabe, producing everything from light bulbs to nuclear reactors. Its financial performance has long been a blot on the German industrial landscape. (Whether GE's performance is as good as the myth would make it seem is a different matter. GE Capital is a large and opaque part of GE's overall balance sheet.) Philips is somewhat similar, although it's one of those companies that has been trying to find the right reorganization to really get it going. It too is a conglomerate; Philips originally started as a light bulb producer and then branched out. Everybody agrees there's a lot of potential in Philips; it just somehow seems it never gets realized. ...

Den Beste also mentions the large numbers of Nobel laureates (in the sciences) who live and work in the US rather than in Europe. I was in Italy when the physics Nobel prize was announced, and the newspapers were full of stories about Riccardo Giacconi, an Italian who emigrated to the US after getting his degree, and who's been an American citizen since 1977. I only had time to read two newspapers, the Corriere della Sera and Il Sole 24 Ore. Both carried soul-searching editorials asking the question why. Why does Italy not have scientists who stay in Italy and win Nobel prizes? In the interview with the Corriere della Sera, I remember how Giacconi explained it (I can't find the interview online, alas). His advisor told him: Go West. He was a brilliant and ambitious man, and his advisor told him that if he wants to fulfill his potential, he has to go to a place that allows him to do that. And that place was the US.

Actually, it's not just a question of why Italy can't produce top-notch scientists who stay home and earn their prizes there. Why aren't there any Americans emigrating to Europe and becoming citizens there who are earning so many prizes? (A couple of the Physics prizes were awarded to Americans working at CERN, but none of them had naturalized, and they were exceptional.)

There's a lot of movement in the US, but it mostly balances. Companies recruit all over the nation; I was recruited in Massachusetts by Qualcomm, who moved me here to San Diego. At the same time, people from here are being recruited to move elsewhere. Lots of people are moving around all the time. But you don't really get uneven flows. Grads from Caltech take jobs in Boston and grads from MIT take jobs in Palo Alto. A high school student from Charlotte attends college in Michigan and takes a job in Boston (where I met her and started dating her) and at the same time other people from Michigan and the NE take jobs in Research Triangle (i.e. not very far from Charlotte). There's lots of movement but it goes every direction.

The remarkable thing about the brain drain is how one-sided it is. It's not so remarkable that Europeans are coming to the US; what's remarkable is how few Americans go the other way. European companies don't recruit here, and few here I've ever met have any interest in moving to Europe. That alone says enormous amounts.

Dilacerator asks what the US will do if this divide increases over time. If the US is callous and utilitarian, then as long as Europe doesn't descend into war as a result of economic collapse (as Eric S. Raymond suggests is a distinct possibility, thus forcing us to go "over there" for a third time to clean up the mess) then it's something of a self-solving problem. Even as relations with Europe become worse, Europe will also be less and less important, and as such it will become easier to ignore it. Europe's criticism of the US will become more strident but less influential; it nullifies. Unfortunately, as Eric says, when Socialism collapses they may again embrace Fascism and in that case we're all in deep shit.

But I would hope it didn't come to that. I hope that the Europeans will start looking honestly at the numbers and trends and recognize that the economic policies they are embracing can't be sustained.

That's what I hope. But it's not what I expect. Rather, populist leaders concerned only with the next election will continue to use anti-American rhetoric as a way of distracting voters from failure at home. Demagogues have always tried to blame their own failure on foreign devils.

And for Europeans of talent and capability, they can either try to single-handedly move the European boulder and fail, or they can bail out and come here where they can actually make a difference. We'll welcome them, of course, and certainly that decision is a good one personally, but it leaves Europe in even more dire straits. As the European economic experiment with Socialism increasingly fails, the brain drain will only grow.