I recently noticed an argument on X kick up about how many of our companies have been taken over by foreigners who came to America. I won't get into the details, because too much of it became racial, and that is not very productive to this particular conversation, I think.
What I do think it boils down to is cultural priorities, and American culture prioritizes things that are ultimately not very important. This was highlighted very well by Vivek Ramaswamy who laid down some brutal facts about how Americans spend their time vs. how other cultures do. Not everyone liked what he had to say, but I think it's worth considering.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
Here's what Ramaswamy had to say in full:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the
TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
Let's shut the door on something before I continue. Some people take this as Ramaswamy saying we need to import foreigners to run our corporations and create our scientific advancements for us. I don't know why people think that, as that's not at all what Ramaswamy was saying. He's simply pointing out that we here in America started celebrating mediocrity, even putting our children in front of that celebration and demonstration, and then wondered why we fell behind.
Given, this isn't just an America problem, it's a Western world problem. C.S. Lewis even noticed this happening and made a commentary on it through is popular work "The Screwtape Letters":
“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
We became so comfortable in our superiority that we got lazy. We began to focus more on bread and circuses than actual achievement, merit, or advancement. People are more apt to put their kid in front of a television screen with bright colors and noises than sit down and teach them things, or encourage them to pursue something that would grant them both skills and work ethic.
This may sound odd coming from me, a man who is highly critical of the culture and encourages participation in it, but I want to point out that I've always been critical of what we put into our culture. I'm not shy about partaking, but I'm more than happy to call out when said culture is creating something that is ultimately damaging. Moreover, I've always been someone who said our intake of it should be self-regulated, meaning we don't waste away in front of screens, especially if we're not getting anything out of it except mere entertainment. Escapism is good in bits, not so much in total immersion.
Even the aforementioned shows that Ramaswamy mentioned aren't totally a bad thing unto themselves. I was a huge fan of "Boy Meets World" and still believe it was a brilliant sitcom, but we sometimes forget that Hollywood isn't real life and things don't always work out for the best in a tight, 30 minutes with commercial breaks. Success and good outcomes are often the product of hard work and persistence over time.
As many of you know, I also believe that not every show or movie has to be clean in order to be good. It would be fair to say that the show "South Park" influenced me greatly growing up, as I was one of those kids who snuck behind their parents' back to watch it, and kept watching it well into adulthood. To this day, I consider "South Park," with all its dirty jokes and fart humor, one of the more intelligent and honest shows ever created.
The point is, cultural consumption isn't a bad thing; it just has to be taken in moderation, as all things should be.
But to Ramaswamy's point, our culture put too much emphasis on common denominator entertainment, and as that happened, we started to be "like folks," as Lewis put it, rather than trying to make something great out of ourselves. We let laziness take hold, we were less capable of critical thought, we lost the drive to do great things, and we became more interested in being entertained than anything else.
We should, in my opinion, start injecting more celebration of greatness into our culture. We should hold up scientists, artists, and thinkers as important. We should reward that talent and skill with a little more spotlight. We should be a little more Nikola Tesla, and a lot less Kim Kardashian.
In that way, we can break free from whatever dependence we have on foreigners, and truly gain independence here in America, with Americans running American companies, and discovering new things.
[Editor's note: This article was edited for clarity after publication.]
