Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Poaching American Intellectual Capital

How come no one thought of this?

Actually, some people have thought of this. And Reuters is reporting the news.


Now that America is going all-in for diversity, many superbly qualified older white men will be getting laid off. They might be suffering early retirement, but they also might get thrown off the corporate promotion escalator. Replaced by minority or female applicants they might find their aspirations stymied.


What will they do? Obviously, they will seek employment elsewhere. They will seek jobs where their talents are not disparaged because of the color of their skins.


Where will they find enterprises that are willing to do them justice? Why, in Chinese companies.


Say what you will about Chinese corporate culture, one thing we know is that they do not have diversity programs. And, China has one of the strictest meritocracies that the world has ever seen. If a Chinese student does poorly in his college admissions exams, nothing that anyone can do will get him entrance into a prestigious institution. Such is not the case in the United States.


At a time when diversity mandates have crushed the hopes of white American males, and at a time when our government is placing stricter controls on the sale of intellectual property-- technology and the like-- China has figured out that human capital, in the person of discarded white executives, is becoming easier to poach.


Reuters reports:


American company men may find a savior in China Inc. As corporations try to make their ranks more ethnically representative, many experienced – if white and older – males will find themselves without a job. Chinese companies, deterred from acquiring U.S. firms with valuable intellectual property, can recruit their discarded human capital instead.


The new diversity regime is going to make it far easier for Chinese companies to poach talent:


The goal is to reach new customers and positively transform corporate cultures. In the immediate term that may translate into net layoffs of older, more expensive, Caucasian men.


Some of those hitting the streets, resumé in hand, will have value for the right employer. Economic research firm Sonecon put the price of intellectual capital of U.S. companies at $9.2 trillion in 2011. Acquiring that by buying companies will be difficult under President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to continue the crackdown on Chinese acquisitions. 


Poaching talent is easier and, in some cases, may be more efficient.


In the past some technology companies from the People’s Republic had reputations for poaching American experts, extracting trade secrets, then tossing them back. But those with expertise in artificial intelligence or international communications are keepers. And with Chinese retail traders starting to play U.S. stocks, American financial experience is becoming valuable too. Webull Financial, a Chinese-owned trading app that competes with Robinhood Markets, hired a white American dude as chief executive.


And, of course, China seems already to have recovered from the coronavirus. It’s businesses are up and running, making money and at the ready to hire more white talent. As Reuters puts it, companies are people, not patents:


Chinese companies that have bounced back from the pandemic might even be able to offer more competitive pay packages. It may be a less direct way to get at American intellectual assets, but then companies are made by people, not patents.


7 comments:

370H55V said...

"Say what you will about Chinese corporate culture, one thing we know is that they do not have diversity programs."

Well, to be fair about it, it's kind of hard to have a lot of diversity in a country that's 98% Han Chinese.

The US wouldn't have a diversity problem either if it didn't countenance the import of millions of illegal Third World aliens.

370H55V said...

I wonder how many white males will pose as gay, even to the extent of engaging in sham marriages (a la Chuck & Larry) in order to meet LGBTQ diversity requirements.

I also wonder how the women who have taken advantage of this setup will find mates, since they are hardwired to marry up, when they find that there aren't a whole lot of men to marry up to.

But then again, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, right?

trigger warning said...

With a caveat that the article is purely speculative and (IMO) best filed under the "You Better Be Nice To China" tab, I doubt that Chinese companies are going to aggressively seek to "recycle white men". I'm more inclined to think that the Chinese are more likely to continue doing what they are already doing and aggressively burrow their citizens in Western companies. Expanding H1-B caps is a well-known demand of American tech oligarchs and a stated Lunchbox Sockpuppet policy wish.

trigger warning said...

Speaking of China, I note for the record that the World's Formerly Largest Radiotelescope in Arecibo PR recently collapsed from lack of maintenance, and the Chinese FAST 500-meter spherical telescope (now the world's largest filled-aperture dish) collected first light in 2016. Believing they need or want to recycle white men is a dangerous vanity.

Anonymous said...

If a Chinese student does poorly in his college admissions exams, nothing that anyone can do will get him entrance into a prestigious institution.

Terrible. All those years invested in rising the Communist Party and apparatchiks can’t even get their kids into first-rate schools.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

But they can get them into Harvard....

epochse said...

White men are going to go the way of the dodo apparently. I have been told I have no right to have interests in the only country I will ever know by people who have been in the country for 15 months and apparently everyone is ok with this. I know white people who are now raising their kids as transgender. It's now trendy to give kids puberty blocking hormones Stuart, is there anything we can do to stop this nonsense without being labelled nazis?