Reply #27: The reason that wages were high in the US was that labor was scarce relative to natural resources

[FarCenter]

From the Civil War to World War I, the robber barons couldn't import workers fast enough to exploit all the opportunities.

The railroads got every other section of land on each side of the right of way, and had to get immigrant farmers to settle the land and grow crops for them to carry.

The timber barons needed Scandinavian workers to cut the northern forests down.

The steel interests needed to import miners from the Carpathians and Balkans to mine the newly discovered iron ore in Minnesota.

As for the ethnic stereotyping, much of the supply of new engineers is are first generation Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, Iranian-Americans, Arab-Americans, etc. who often achieve at a high standard even though they are not in the best schools. Its a family and cultural thing.

Formerly, the source was Jewish, German, and other European groups, but these have become too assimilated to American culture. The other source was rural and small-town America (from which many of the astronauts came) but these too are dwindling.