Predicting Jobs

The last post was on predicting the future, so let's continue that theme. Here's an article in USA Today worrying about scientific and technical employment:

The predictions are dire, the language grim: Looming shortfalls. Gathering storm. Disturbing mosaic.

No, it's not the economy, global warming or the sitcom industry.

It's the coming shortage of U.S. scientists and engineers, foretold for decades by corporate, government and education advocates. While there have been warnings for more than 50 years, a renewed push over the past four years has earned the attention of both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Speaking to the National Academy of Sciences in April, Obama announced "a renewed commitment to education in mathematics and science," fulfilling a campaign promise to train 100,000 scientists and engineers during his presidency.

Only problem: We may not have jobs for them all.

As the push to train more young people in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in science, math and technology may be a stretch.

One example: Numbers from the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics issued Tuesday showed the unemployment rate for electrical engineers hit a record high, 8.6%, in the second quarter, more than doubling from 4.1% in the first quarter.

The rate for all engineers climbed to 5.5%, up from 3.9% in the first quarter. Those are still better than the nation's overall unemployment rate of 9.7%, but the world is also still minting thousands of new graduates.

U.S. colleges graduated about 460,000 scientists and engineers combined in 2005 (many in social and behavioral sciences), according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, emerging nations such as India and China produced nearly 700,000 engineers alone. But the slow growth of U.S.-born STEM workers, analysts say, may have less to do with funding commitments than with cloudy career paths and low wages relative to other specialized careers such as medicine, law and finance.

I worked in the high tech industry for over three decades and followed the job news closely. My entire career was filled with dire warnings about shortages of engineers and scientists. My reality, on the other hand, was that salaries didn't reflect a bidding war for workers that any true "shortage" would imply. I became suspicious many years ago that the outcry about "shortage" was coming from the industry associations and reflected the desires of employeers to enlarge the pool of workers to help keep the price of labour down. In the US they constantly called for more H1B visas to enlarge the labour pool.

Here's a comment by Derek Lowe, a medical researcher, that questions the "shortage":

I know that employment prospects in our own field of drug research are very much on everyone's mind. The last year or two have been the worst I've ever seen for hiring in the industry. I go back only to 1989, but longer-serving colleagues report the same feelings. Looking over the ads that appear in the likes of C&E News certainly doesn't make a person think differently.

The funny thing is that I believe that society would benefit by enlarging the pool of trained technical people. But in a free market, there's lots more money for entertainment than for technology. Even if a government was far sighted and wanted to encourage technology, it isn't clear how to do that. Simply hiring more people doesn't create new ideas. It gives people time, but who is to say that the newly employed don't fritter their time away on personal interests rather than leveraging science and technology to create a better future. We do know that in moving from the 19th century of individual tinkerers to the 20th century of research labs, a lot more technology was developed. But on the other hand, I believe that most of the new technology came under the duress of war and not during peace time. So this question is a puzzle: how do you employ the "right number" of technical and scientific people to ensure an optimally inventive society?