What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers?

John Tierney echoes my own thoughts:

If the United States really has a critical shortage of scientists and engineers, why didn’t this year’s graduates get showered with lucrative job offers and signing bonuses?

That’s the question that comes to my mind after reading about Barack Obama’s plans to address the “shortage” we keep hearing about from blue-ribbon commissions of scientists and engineers. He wants to pay for the training of 100,000 more engineers and scientists over the next four years, as my colleagues Bill Broad and Cory Dean note in their excellent analysis of the presidential candidates’ plans to encourage technological innovation.

Now, I’m all in favor of American technological innovation, and I’m glad to see Mr. Obama promising to review the export restrictions that have been so damaging to the aerospace industry (and that were promoted by John McCain because of what he called national-security risks). I’m also all in favor of American scientists and engineers, especially the ones in my family. (My father is a chemical engineer; my brother is an electrical engineer.) I’d love to see American corporations and universities frantically competing to offer them the kind of salaries paid to M.B.A.’s and lawyers.

But employers don’t have to throw around that kind of money because there’s no shortage of workers — and they won’t be increasing their offers if the federal government artificially inflates the labor supply with an extra 100,000 graduates.

Read the whole thing and also see my previous post on the matter: Whither the Engineers?

Did I Take A Wrong Turn?

If you want to "make a difference", should you become an engineer or get your MBA rather than practice law?

A recent bar passer sent this query into Freakonomics:

I recently passed the bar and am currently applying for jobs. My main concern is bringing out the most charitable result. Should I work in the nonprofit section where my services are passed directly along to the most needy, or should I get the high-paying firm job and donate the difference in my salary to charity?

A certain Harvard Law School grad might say, "Do the right thing at every moment" -- and avoid the Big Bad Law Firm. But Freakonomics blogger Stephen Dubner seems more skeptical of public interest work:

I am not so convinced that working for a nonprofit means that one's "services are passed directly along to the most needy." Here's one reason why.

One Freakonomics commenter's response to the question of "public interest v. Biglaw": neither.

If you want to make the most "charitable result", you're too late. Lawyers rarely add any value to the economy (after all, this IS an economics blog). Lawyers don't make anything but they consume large amounts of capital, both human and financial. Had you wanted to be a net contributor to society, an MBA or engineering degree or medical degree or some such would have been the way to go or even just start a small business. This would allow you to actually produce something of value. A law degree only allows you to add friction to the economy....

Scrap the law degree, start a company, get rich, buy a big house and a big boat, give generously when you can and do what Buffett and Gates are doing, give it all away when you're finished. Nothing wrong with that at all. That would be a life well lived.

I was once an engineer who got his MBA. Now I find myself in law school. I was on the right track... what happened???

Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and Electronics

A great overview of electrical engineering.

Japan Is Running Out of Engineers?

Rikei Banare!

After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? One way Japan can start to reverse this trend is to increase the salary they offer engineers (which should begin to happen as they get more scarce).

Japan's dilemma (in contrast to the US) is that they are not culturally very open to foreigners immigrating, so it's difficult for them to simply import more tech workers:

While ingrained xenophobia is partly to blame, companies say Japan’s language and closed corporate culture also create barriers so high that many foreign engineers simply refuse to come, even when they are recruited.

As a result, some companies are moving research jobs to India and Vietnam because they say it is easier than bringing non-Japanese employees here.

Japan's populaion is also aging far more rapidly than that of the US, meaning their workforce is quickly shrinking. Their education system is also not as flexible as America's and it is extremely rare for people to go back to school after having started their first career.

Japan's demographics pose many challenges to the country. The shortage of engineers seems like it should be of much less concern than its shortage of children.

I worked as an engineer for Japanese companies for six years before coming back to school and it is the one country I have visited most frequently and feel closest to outside the US. It makes me sad to think of the challenges that lie ahead for their nation. While I think there are some painful transitions ahead, I am confident the people of Japan will find ways to adapt to these changes in a distinctly Japanese way.

Not All Majors Are Created Equal

A breakdown of salaries by college major and experience, from Forbes magazine. Note that Forbes orders these based on a 10 to 20 year outlook. This may subject these rankings to a survivor bias (weeding out a portion of people who are either not successful in or dislike a particular profession). If using this information to select a major in college, I would recommend putting greater weight on the 0 to 5 year and 5 to 10 year data. I would have found information like this very helpful in helping to choose a major when I was an undergrad.

As I have previously written, majors that require strong quantitative skills are in very high demand and more limited in supply (therefore paying more). Those not requiring strong quantitative skills are much less so. If I were starting over as an undergrad today knowing what I know now, I would either major in computer or electrical engineering (I studied mechanical engineering as an undergrad) or else double-major in computer science (at an ABET accredited school) and economics.

	Major	0 to 5 Years	5 to 10 Years	10 to 20 Years
1	Computer Engineering	$60,500	$80,800	$104,000
2	Economics	$48,100	$71,800	$96,200
3	Electrical Engineering	$59,900	$78,400	$96,100
4	Computer Science	$54,200	$75,100	$94,000
5	Mechanical Engineering	$56,900	$73,000	$88,100
6	Finance	$46,900	$64,300	$84,400
7	Mathematics	$43,500	$64,700	$82,200
8	Civil Engineering	$52,600	$67,100	$81,700
9	Political Science	$39,400	$55,000	$74,400
10	Marketing	$39,400	$54,000	$72,300
11	Accounting	$44,600	$57,900	$71,500
12	History	$37,600	$52,100	$68,000
13	Business Management	$40,900	$51,700	$64,900
14	Communications	$36,400	$50,300	$64,300
15	English	$36,700	$47,900	$62,300
16	Biology	$37,900	$52,600	$60,000
17	Sociology	$35,700	$46,900	$55,900
18	Graphic Design	$34,700	$45,300	$54,700
19	Psychology	$34,700	$45,400	$54,000
20	Criminal Justice	$34,200	$44,400	$53,400

(HT Greg Mankiw)

Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight

Mechanical engineers making a comeback!

In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and cool-nerd software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.

For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants humming, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption.

Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say.

That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.

Mechanical and electrical engineers with experience in data center design, air-flow modeling and power systems management are in demand. “If you have those skills, there are jobs waiting,” says Phil Calabrese, a mechanical engineer and director of I.B.M.’s real estate engineering and construction unit.

“After 25 years, we’re finally elevating mechanical engineering and adding a lot of electrical engineering, computer science and applied physics,” said Mr. Patel of Hewlett-Packard.

One of the last engineering jobs I had before coming back to school was helping design and set-up a remote monitoring center for power plants that included a small, on-site data center. Maybe after I finish up my PhD in economics and my law degree here at GMU, it will be time to go back to being an engineer?

How Much Do Professors Make?

Faculty salary data for 2007-2008:

The American Association of University Professors today released Where Are the Priorities? The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2007–08. Here are some highlights from the press release:

• Overall average salaries for full-time faculty rose 3.8% this year, the same as the increase reported last year. But with inflation at 4.1% percent for the year, the purchasing power of faculty salaries has declined for the third time in four years.
• The salaries paid to head football coaches at Division I-A universities are ten times as high as the salaries of senior professors.
• The gap between faculty salaries and salaries paid to administrators continues to grow.

Here are the 2007-08 average salaries for three faculty ranks:

• Full professor $103,521
• Associate professor $73,275
• Assistant professor $61,359

Press and blogopshere coverage:

• Chronicle of Higher Education: Gap Persists Between Faculty Salaries at Public and Private Institutions, by Richard Byrne
• Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Salaries and Priorities, by Scott Jaschik

Not too bad, but for the amount of time, education, and effort involved, there are much better paths to take if your goal is to make money. If want to get the best bang for your buck from education, I still think engineering and/or an MBA is probably the best way to go. (If engineering isn't your thing, economics can also be an excellent choice for an undergraduate major.) Law can be very lucrative if you can get into a top tier program, but beware of the debt and don't overestimate how much you might make.

Engineers Explained

How to tell if someone is really an engineer:

People who work in the fields of science and technology are not like other people. This can be frustrating to the nontechnical people who have to deal with them. The secret to coping with technology-oriented people is to understand their motivations. This chapter will teach you everything you need to know. I learned their customs and mannerisms by observing them, much the way Jane Goodall learned about the great apes, but without the hassle of grooming.

Engineering is so trendy these days that everybody wants to be one. The word "engineer" is greatly overused. If there's somebody in your life who you think is trying to pass as an engineer, give him this test to discern the truth.

Follow the link to learn how to figure out if somebody really is an engineer.

(HT Presurfer)

Ninjaneers?

Engineering: The Stealth Profession:

Engineering has been called the "invisible profession" or the "stealth profession" because most people have no clue what engineers do. This is unfortunate, because everything in society is linked to engineering.

So what is engineering? It's hard to get a good idea from just a few words. This whole site is meant to help answer that question. If you haven't explored our cool things yet, check those out and then come back to this page. The stuff below will make a lot more sense.

A really broad but short definition of engineering is:

"Engineering is the application of math and science to create something of value from our natural resources."

The World that Never Was

Note that the definition above states that engineering is not science. Engineers generally don't "do" science. Science is about discovering the natural. Engineering is creating the artificial. Theodore Von Karman, an aerospace engineer, put it nicely when he said, "Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was."

The Most Creative

The word "create" has been used several times here in reference to engineering. Engineers as a group are probably the most creative people. They synthesize, solve problems, and innovate...all big words meaning that they make new things and make old things better. People in the arts are creative too; but their creativity deals with thoughts or emotions. Engineering creativity is directed at things.

Specific Types of Engineers

Check out the links below to find out more about specific types of engineering and engineers.

• Aerospace Engineering
• Ceramic/Materials Engineering
• Chemical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Electrical/Computer Engineering
• Environmental Engineering
• Industrial Engineering
• Manufacturing Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Other Engineers

Follow the link to discover much more about this mysterious profession.

Systems Biology Using A Mechanical Engineering Approach

Some good ideas for modeling complex systems from my former discipline:

Quantitative modeling of a biological pathway normally involves intense computer simulations to crunch all available data on the dozens of relevant reactions in the pathway, producing a detailed interaction map.

Now an MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can give researchers an alternative way to look at the inner workings of a complicated biological system-such as a pathway in a cell-and allow them to study systems in their natural state.

Read the whole thing.

Seems like there might be some good ideas here for studying complex economic systems too.

P.S. -- Read more on MIT News.

The Politics of Engineering

Curious Cat:

Politics of engineering by Patrick Mannion, EE Times:

Engineering interests historically haven’t been at the forefront of the political debate, at least not compared with those of, say, farming, law or health care. But given the importance of the technological advances that engineers help effect and the need to maintain our competitive edge in a rapidly changing global environment, that situation needs to change, and fast.
…
Then came word of the $25 billion being handed to farmers in yet another subsidy, loudly denounced by some as welfare for the wealthy. I’m not going to get into the right or wrong of the subsidies–but I am amazed at the ability of agribusiness to get them at all. It shows the power of the farm lobby. Ditto for pharmaceuticals, HMOs, lawyers, “big oil” and so on. It underscores the relative political weakness of the engineering community.

If the science and engineering community are not well represented to our representatives the interests of the science and engineering community will get short changed. Especially since so few politicians in the USA have even a basic understanding of science and the scientific method. And a very small percentage have any advanced degrees in science and engineering fields or work experience in them. That being said the political arena is much like a tar pit: that is it is difficult to interact with without becoming entangled in a big mess. And it is not as though the scientific and engineering community are even close to unified but still the impact of political decisions is very significant and science and engineering leaders need to be heard.

The post above seems to lament that technology is not subsidized the way farming and other industries are. Yet technology is the one area where America particularly shines. The unstated assumption in the commentary is that subsidizing technological development and more political involvement of engineers and scientists would improve the pace of technology in the US. As an engineer turned economist, I would posit that it would have precisely the opposite effect.

Public funding typically leads to political control, regulation, bureaucratization, and lack of flexibility in any area it touches. For technology to develop at the fastest rate, it has to be able to change quickly and stay dynamic. The more this is process is handled through private funding and market forces, the better able it is to respond to changing environments. Contrast the development of the computer industry (little regulation) to that of railroads or electrical power generation (highly regulated). The synergies, dynamism, and high rate of innovation of the Internet are indicative of how much human creativity can be unleashed when it is not interfered with by government forces.

The post continues by contrasting the lack of engineers in American politics to the quantity of them in China's government:

China’s Economic Science Experiment - China’s 9 most senior government official are all engineers (in 2006 - I am not sure now):

When China’s leaders meet with Hu each week in Beijing’s government district, Zhongnanhai, they could spend hours discussing cables, switches, tool-making machines and control devices. That’s because every one of them has a degree in engineering. The president himself, the son of a tea merchant from Jiangsu Province, trained to build hydroelectric power stations, while the others hold degrees in electrical engineering, metallurgy and geology.

Hmm... if China's government is an example of what happens when you put engineers in charge, let's keep all the engineers away from power.

Speaking as an engineer myself, I think if you put most engineers in charge of running a country, they would view the economy and social development of a country as a system to be tweaked, adjusted, and tuned for optimal performance. They'd be prime candidates for overvaluing the capability of intelligence, what Hayek called the Fatal Conceit.

Engineers tend to be phenomenal problem solvers. Unfortunately, that trait would make them particularly dangerous as politicians.

Engineers of Jihad

I've extolled the virtues of studying engineering on this blog on several occasions, citing that engineering is the top degree for S&P 500 CEOs. Unfortunately, it's also the degree held by many top terrorists.

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings...

Tyler Cowen and Henry Farrell share their thoughts. Cowen says this paper is probably the best piece on terrorism he has read.