Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process:
I'm consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I'd love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and science education is increased by an increase in the number of Asian scientists and engineers. If anything, it should be the reverse, right? If engineers are scarce, then a country with a lot of engineers will be a country with a lot of relatively well-compensated people. But if the supply of foreign engineers is going to increase at an astounding rate in the near future, then engineering won't be as relatively lucrative as it is today so it makes sense to cut back on our investment in educating engineers.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the logic, other than being the sort of blind "I took Econ 101 and will now apply it to everything" argument that drives me up the wall, but there's a hidden bad assumption that makes the whole thing fall apart. This argument implicitly assumes that the demand for scientists and engineers is fixed.
This is a terrible assumption, though. If anything, the demand for scientists and engineers ought to be increasing. As countries like China and India (and eventually, one hopes, the vast mass of Africa) increase their level of technology, there will be more for engineers to do, both in those countries, and in the rest of the world. Engineering skills should become more valuable, as the number of places they can be employed increases.
Now, it's true that there's no particular reason why those scientists and engineers need to come from the US. It happens to be convenient at the moment, given that we already have the technological and educational infrastructure to do the job, and the relative level of investmenet needed to push that forward is small. But we could perfectly well scale back our investment in educating engineers, as Matt suggests, and allow the increased demand to be met by an increased supply of engineers from elsewhere in the world.
The question then becomes one of whether the number of jobs in the smartass pundit sector can grow fast enough to soak up the large supply of innumerate humanities grads.
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A little secret for Yglesias: Engineers expand the market and demand for engineers. Scientists expand the market and demand for engineers. (Sadly for scientists, the reverses, while true, are true to a much smaller degree in my experience.)
This is why I don't waste my time on Yglesias-- I tend to look in once every four or five months or so, and usually not because I've seen anything pointing me to him, but out of general curiosity/boredom. And invariably, he's saying something outright daft and superficial, and yet also smug and glib at the same time.
Or maybe I'm just terribly unlucky in my random sampling.
Actually, I'd have thought the concept of elasticity in demand was covered in Econ. 101. But otherwise, yeah.
(1) Learn with your feet. Yglesias should walk around any major city. It is easy to see that there is, say, a clothing district with many competing clothing stores, a jewelry district with many competing jewelers, a restaurant row with many competing restaurants.
Why, if you are a diamond retailer, would you open shop next door to another diamond retailer? Because your neighbor increases demand, and attracts customers, some of whom come to you.
(2) Science = Good. Science, in the 18th and 19th century at least, promised improvements in the human condition for more and more more people, and an approach to problem solving in more and more domains of knowledge that led to a general expectation of Progress in other areas of human concern.
Science = Bad. World War I collapsed the house of cards which is an unrestricted belief in progress, and began the end of the Enlightenment project. The atomic bomb, which ended World War II and started World War III (Cold War + Korea + Vietnam), and problems with fallout (Linus Pauling's 2nd Nobel Prize), and anthropomorphic ecological problems (Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring") and the like have led hundreds of million of people to uncouple Science and Progress. Or even believe that Science causes more problems than it solves.
I am a scientist, husband of scientist, techno-optimist, science fiction writer, and teacher. Hence I have at least 5 clusters of reasons to still believe, with some caveats, that Science is generally coupled to Progress in areas that we haven't exhausted. Yes, improper uses of technology (derived from science) have caused or exacerbated some problems. But I believe, with good cause, that science, engineering, technology, education, and informed public opinion driving social policy can help to solve even the problems that humans have caused for the world.
This is why I don't waste my time on Yglesias-- I tend to look in once every four or five months or so, and usually not because I've seen anything pointing me to him, but out of general curiosity/boredom. And invariably, he's saying something outright daft and superficial, and yet also smug and glib at the same time.
Weirdly, he's one of the few pundit bloggers I still read. I generally like his approach, but he does make daft statements on a moderately regular basis.
He's also one of the few professional bloggers whose typing/ proofreading skills are worse than my own.
Obviously, tastes vary. I could take the daftness or the smugness, but both in combination just makes my skin crawl. I know enough people like that in real life, I don't need to go on-line to find it... much less pay him (indirectly, through advertising) for it.
I think it's unclear how the demand for engineers and scientists will change in the future. Yes, there is plenty for engineers and scientists to do, and there always will be, but it seems conceivable that it will be done by fewer and fewer people. As the tools that engineers work with improve, it might take fewer engineers to turn out a new widget design than it used to, in the same way that it takes fewer factory workers to produce that widget.
Regardless of whether the work is factory work or engineering or agricultural labor, the issue for future employment is whether demand for the particular type of labor rises faster than the productivity increases. Some jobs are immune to productivity increases, such as pundit, politician, nanny, etc. Others I'm not sure about: with the use of computer technology, it's probably possible to greatly reduce the amount of actual acting necessary for an actor to produce a movie. In the future, the actors can just run through their repertoire of facial expressions and phonemes, and then dozens of movies can be constructed out of those bits and pieces plus CGI.
Actually, why is it bad for someone to make daft and superficial blog posts? Yes, you would hope that official policy isn't made based on off-the-cuff, superficial remarks by someone who hasn't studied the issue. But reading blogs is mostly entertainment, and it can be entertaining to figure out what's daft about a daft post. When people write so carefully that there is no room for accusations of daftitude then it tends to be for academic journal articles, rather than blogs.