Well, I don’t know about the provocative part, but here’s the most promising—in fact, the only promising—idea around: raise the fucking salaries.
That’s how the market works, doesn’t it? If you want more of something, you raise the price you’ll pay for it. If the price the market sets for scientists and engineers is low, compared to other professions, that suggests that we don’t need them all that much. People who do so much of the complaining about the current state of affairs, like Bill Gates, simply want to eat their cake and have it too. They want top-flight people, but they don’t want to have to pay for them. They want them at the “prevailing wage,” but, they say, they can’t get them. If that’s the case, then they should raise the prevailing wage. But they don’t want to do that. They’re the big shots, after all. They’re in charge. Employees shouldn’t set wages. Employers should. So they try to import “guest workers” under the H-1B program, workers who have limited opportunities to play one employer against another, which is, of course, the very definition of a “free market,” which is what people like Bill Gates are supposed to believe in.
Does the U.S. need “more” scientists and engineers? If you believe in the free market, unless and until you see the salaries of scientists and engineers increasing faster than the overall average, the answer is no.
Afterwords
Are we “falling behind” the rest of the world? Since the rest of the world outnumbers us twenty to one, how can we not fall behind? The rest of the world is simply catching up with the unfair advantage that we’ve enjoyed since Europe decided to blow itself up during the first half of the 20th century. And as the rest of the world has benefited from our advances, so we’ll benefit from theirs.
Addendum
Wikipedia explains why H-1B workers, if they aren’t exactly indentured servants, aren’t exactly free either. (Though, just like “real” indentured servants, they still want to make the trip to the U.S.)
