Recommended: The Genteel Nation

David Brooks has written another of his thought-provoking Ed pieces in the Sept 9, 2010 New York Times. It is entitled The Genteel Nation, and makes the point that I have made in past posts about how the nation's best and brightest are increasingly moving into more lucrative but essentially "non-productive" service fields like law and finance. One result is that increasingly the science and engineering skills in the nation come from immigrants, and increasingly manufacturing is moving outside the country, so increasingly we as a nation just push paper (or electrons) and don't really make anything. Brooks points out that the British Empire went through a similar shift, immediately before it began its decline as a major world power, and he wonders if the effect will be the same in this nation.