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Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students
cremeglace writes "It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. But a new paper by sociologists at the Urban Institute and Rutgers University contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply of native-born talent in the United States. In fact, the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack of incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive. Cranking out even more science graduates, according to the researchers, does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students."
I want my salary to go up
Incentives? You mean like paying graduates more when you're saying that the market is saturated with them already? How does that make sense?
A prevailing assumption is that the number of scientists needed is proportional to the population. I think this is what has caused the glut of scientists (trust me I'm an ex-scientist and I know)
My guessis that the number required is of the order log(population), or even possibly a fixed constant after a certain population size.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't give a rusty fuck what some study says people should or should not go into. I work in the fields I love, and I'd recommend it to everyone else. If you want to do science, do science. If you don't then don't. Who really cares what some frigtarded academic thinks anyway? Final thought - how often is it that we look back on these studies five or ten years later to find out they were somewhere around, oh, dead wrong. if these guys are such friggin' geniuses at predicting the future they should go make $Billions in the stock market.
If all you care about is money than go into politics or join the mob (it's ethically about the same).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
With outsourcing so prevalent, it's not something you do unless you really love what you do or were somehow grandfathered in...
But a new paper by sociologists
Ernest Rutherford once said The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't
So while its nice that they've tried to have a firm opinion they really haven't, what they've said is that as the salaries in science and engineering fall behind the likes of banking and other world destruction careers the top people aren't going into science and engineering as much.
The phrase "Well Duh!" comes to mind. I'm mean seriously is this research or just some people sitting around a table in a bar after 10 pints drunkly going "you know what, I think that if there is less money in an area that less top people will want to work in it". Now what they spectacularly fail to note of course is that some of the very, very brightest have become the very, very richest people on the planet as a result of science and engineering (and maths).
Good god its hard to believe that people not only get degrees in subjects so vague and obvious but also get to do "research" that would leave Homer Simposon feeling that it wasn't stretching him.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So... the sociologists say there's too many technical scientists? That's just what I'd expect from those namby-pamby girly-haired soft-science types! I'll bet they've got a correlation study and everything. Well, maybe the technical scientists say there are too many sociologists? And we've got freaky equations and stuff.
Yeah!
Who you going to believe, pretty demographics charts or complicated equations? Eh? EH?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
At my previous employer we had a very bright individual who held a PhD. in combustion. The company paid for him to continue his education, so he got an MBA from a very prestigious business school. The day after he graduated he left for a high paying gig on Wall Street. The company responded by no longer paying for any schooling for it's employees.
It took two years to find someone to replace him.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I think it's kind of interesting how the economics of this work. The supply of scientists and engineers is steady, but it seems like there are fewer who are good in the market. What this means is that if you are good and in the field, you are in extremely high demand and thus salaries can be lucrative for you. So, the field may only attract those who have a genuine interest and more likely to innovate.
Then again, money is a strong factor and may siphon away people. I work in the embedded software field, and I get paid fairly well for someone only a couple of years out of college. However, I often think how nice it would be nice to be making well into 7 figures and have a nice home and possibly a Lamborghini (I love cars) after going into lawschool instead of "just" 6 figures and trying to cobble together a 20% down payment for a decent home in Northern California.
When you keep downward pressure on wages of scientific positions; When you don't offer people compensation for the utter destruction of their social lives required to seriously pursue science, they gravitate toward management. (for comparison, at least medicine and law provide salaries commensurate with the effort required for the education)
You never see those massive bonuses going to the mathematical wizards, engineers, or design teams who are actually responsible for the profits. It goes to some otherwise average person who sat in his office and barked orders.
Don't be surprised when the truly intelligent notice where the money is going and choose to expand their social lives in the process!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I had hoped that the best scientist and engineers would be motivated by something more than just money.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
From the article:
The supply [of science students] has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude from an analysis of six longitudinal surveys conducted by the U.S. government from 1972 to 2005. However, the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive.
From the Associated Press:
Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273.
So we have the costs of already outstanding tuition fees rising in a faltering and near collapsed economy. Many top positions in fields of science require Masters or Doctoral level education. A Master or Doctoral level of education also demands a Master or Doctoral level of tuition. In an uncertain environment for employment, the risk of entering the field of science, can be high.
Instead of going into science or mathematics you see the smarted minds who are more money minded going into the financial fields. They are intelligent but because of the upbringing in a capitalist society desire money more than anything. So they become investors, stockbrokers, and deal with money all day and night.
What we need is to recruit the best of the best, have private industries, and government, pay for the tuition of these individuals or offer them guaranteed job positions. Does a promising young high school student enter undergraduate school looking for a degree in bio-medicine? Have a major cancer research outfit pay for his tuition. Or have a medical technology firm cover his tuition. Or have him pay for his own tuition but make it known publicly that anyone with a degree in 'science' who applies to 'x job' will have his college tuition fees and loans paid for in full by the company if he works x number of years.
Maybe we need to lower the tuition for higher science. If you want a degree in particle physics, wave physics, astro-biology, or whatever, then you tuition is significantly lower than your peers. My graduate work was in television broadcasting, if my peers studying medicine and high level math had lower tuition fees than myself, I would not have batted an eyelash.
If you cover the tuition fees of our smartest students, and they go on to become the people who provide us with life changing nanotechnology, or cure HIV-AIDS, that money will pay off 100 if not 1,000,000,000 times more down the road.
We need to invest in our future by investing in our brightest minds and steering them towards occupations where they can make a lasting difference in the world.
As noted in the article, Wall Street is a major draw for the top students. While in grad school, even my professor mentioned to me on several occasions that I probably would make a lot more afterwards if I left research and did investment banking, private equity, patent law, management consulting, or any of a number of other jobs, though he hoped I would stick with academic chemistry. I am looking for an academic post now, but I certainly can see the draw of the more lucrative fields. For one example, when McKinsey was recruiting PhD's at our institute a few years ago, first year total compensation was estimated at $130-165k. That's quite a bit higher than what the total compensation would have been at the time for the coveted entry level PhD positions at the top pharmaceutical companies, and the compensation in the business world would rise much more quickly in subsequent years. Doing good science is hard, and during the tougher times in grad school, it was extremely tempting to jump ship.
Scientist were assigned a study to find out if additonal scientists are needed and they found that there were already plenty of them and they should have gotten huge raises instead.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water. Of course, lots of people think that's true, too.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
Not every price is set solely by supply and demand. In this case, I think culture has a lot to do with it, as do negotiating skills (which geeks don't generally have in abundance). Science and math types are still considered dorks, and the leeches who work on Wall St. or Madison Ave are the cool kids. Fewer science students isn't going to change that.
Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students
Because all the science money will be going to China and India from now on.
You've got yourselves a brain drain. Growing up in Australia as a geek I had the sole intention of getting out of the country, going to university in Europe and finding a decent, well paid job there. In Australia there was no funding or development, no highly paid jobs, little basic research at all, and as a student cash was the big draw to get out. The brain drain was almost epidemic. The USA wasn't an option due to your ridiculous Green Card Lottery. Very glad I did too as I simply had more, and better opportunities. There are some truly excellent innovations that still come out of Australia built literally on a shoestring. Realtime over-the-horizon radar that can image a supercarrier off the coast of Japan is one example, and it is constructed from thousands of hand wound wire, wrapped around cotton reels. So it is possible to have success (albeit non-financial) in the midst of a brain drain.
Reducing the Green Card quotas further, and kicking foreigners out of Science will certainly reduce the number of graduates, and the intelligence of the nation. Weren't most of the USA's scientists working on the big name projects of the last 50 years foreign born anyway?
The ponderous population of smart people in the US is an untold bane on our society.
:(
I have yet to read the actual article, what I am replying to is the slashdot clipping. I'll read the article later just for arguing points and completion.
This is moronic. I don't know *how* they are calculating that 'the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years,' but if that is true, that demonstrates
a growing need for science and technology students, not that it's fine. The US was the world leader in science, technology and manufacturing coming out of WW II, and our
society has revolved around progressive upgrading and retooling of our industrial output.
The total population growth of the US from 1979 to 2008 according to the US Census Bureau was approximately 80 million people. You have to consider retiring, and emigrating persons in your picture when you are trying to estimate how many science sector persons we have produced, and kept in the last whole generation. So, if our number of graduating science, engineering and manufacturing sector students has remained the *same* for the *past 30 years*, we are ALL in a LOT of trouble.
I'd say that their conclusions, contrary to what they speculate as 'needing fewer Science students' shows data explaining how the scientific, industrial and manufacturing sectors of our country have been decaying for the past 30 years.
Cranking out even more science graduates, according to the researchers, does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students.
Or they could pay solid wages to the highest-performing students, and lesser wages to the less performing students. You know, the way the market is supposed to work.
Seriously, did they get grant money for this crap?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The summary implies that reducing the number of science graduates would provide an incentive for companies to increase the pay of scientists and engineers. I counter that a reduced amount of science graduates would simply increase the number of H1B visas granted which will in turn drive down the pay for native scientists and engineers.
The summary got at least one sentence right. Incentives to stay in science are very small. I finished my graduate work not to long ago, and I'd make more money in almost any field compared to staying in physics. I know a number of people who left the field to do finance or something else. The thinking is: "If I have to work 80 hour weeks, I might as well be making several hundred thousand." Go to any of the top colleges/universities, and a large amount of the students want to go into finance or some other money making field.
Maybe we should bailout the science and technology companies.
Maybe money isn't the sole motivator. Did it ever occur to you that maybe there are students that really want to go into science, but because of the job prospects (or perceived lack thereof), don't think they can *afford* to go into science?
I mean, if you think you are going to give up 6 years of your life/potential income [well, you can still work while in school, perhaps, but probably not make as much income as you could if you were working full-time + overtime at a job for those years], and spend $60,000 (plus interest, so probably closer to $100,000), say, to get a Masters in Science, and then you think you will only make 40,000-60,000/yr, you might not think you can afford that. I have a cousin, only has a high school education, works for a road construction/repair company. On the one hand, he has to work a lot of overtime, but on the other hand, I think he's making in that same $40,000-60,000/yr range [maybe more]. He's been doing that basically since he graduated from high school, and never had to take out any student loans. So, the way I see it, someone in his position potentially comes up about $300,000 ahead (on graduation day) of the guy who went to school for 6 years and took out those loans.
That's the reality of education. In order to justify the expense, you need to make good money after graduation - such people should probably be starting at $70,000-$90,000 yr almost straight out of school, with raises every year which outpaces inflation, just to allow them to recover that "lost" $300,000 over the course of say the first 10 years of their employement, and then continue to make that kind of money after that so they come out *ahead* of the people who didn't go to school.
But, it sounds like, from the article, that's not happening, so while students might be attracted to science, they may just feel that they can't sacrifice their financial future in order to benefit corporations who aren't willing to give them reasonable compensation for their education.
The kicker is in the last paragraph:
"Susan Traiman of the Business Roundtable criticizes the new study, saying that it gives an illusion of a robust supply because it bundles all STEM fields together. There may be an oversupply in the life sciences and social sciences, she argues, but there is no question that there are shortages in engineering and the physical science."
Of course there are too many social "sciences" students. Is that really a STEM field? There still aren't enough engineers.
This is an attempt by sociologists to build up their status by sabotaging the real sciences. Seriously, if a country doesn't value a sector monetarily, it will suffer. The United States has long underpaid its academics and is now reaping the rewards, or lack thereof.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
I studied Math. Not the worst possible choice for an undergrad, really: the level of conceptual abstraction and logical rigor make it difficult, maybe even somewhat more so than some other technical fields, but in terms of sheer number of hours of coursework, it's considerably shorter than engineering, which allows a student to take a lot of other courses and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time. And it's a pretty good education, too.
I don't think I'd do it again.
It's exceptionally clear that not only does the marketplace value other skills (law, finance, business adminstration, plumbing) more highly, but that 90% of the population doesn't even understand what it is you learned. I'd have been far better off to pick a Math minor for core skills and rigor and pair it with an Econ or Business Major. And let's not even go to the Electrical Engineering degree I originally considered. Unless you're doing it for sheer love, it's a waste of time.
That's the general prognosis. As a career choice, STEM fields offer mediocre to middlin' rewards. Particularly when you consider the alternatives.
Tweet, tweet.
"This happens, they say, by depressing wages in S&T fields and turning potential science and technology innovators into management professionals and hedge fund managers." The number of science graduates has very little to do with the salary differential between "technology innovators" and hedge fund managers. Reducing the number of science graduates will most likely just reduce the number of people who remain in the field, since it would effectively boost the pay of hedge fund managers.
We need more people in the B-Ark. More insurance salesmen, tv producers. Scientists are in the A-Ark and that's already full.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There's something to be said about doing what you love and saying "to hell with chasing the almighty dollar". But then you get paid $12,894 per academic year, and you wonder if a little dollar chasing might not be a bad thing. There are other things in life that are desireable (like a family), and they take money.
A science career means spending ~5-6 years working hard and being paid crap in grad school, and then another couple of years working hard and being paid a bit more as a postdoc, and then maybe you can get a decent paying job doing science, but there aren't all thay many science jobs (at least in physics), in academia or industry (bye bye bell labs -- moreover, just because you like science in academia donesn't mean you'll like science in industry), relative to the number of PhDs so there's a decent chance you'll end up in a non science job.
I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "people don't do science because all they care about is money."
I am a scientist, because it is what I am. The pay or the lack thereof provides me a means of being who I am instead of having to force myself to be something else. Really, as long as I have a roof over my head and food on my table then the rest is just gravy as long as I can do science. The assumption/ theory that money equals happiness has already been disproved. Now if you want me to be something that I am not, then you will have to pull out your checkbook so that I can compensate my lack of happiness with something that will bring momentary gratification.
insert inflammatory comment here!
If you're doing a PhD in the physical sciences, then you're almost certainly not paying tuition directly (let alone a level of tuition proportional to your degree as you seem to claim). Otherwise, absolutely zero people would be doing it. MD, JD, and MBA programs can charge a lot because you'll make a lot of money once you've got the degree. The same cannot be said for a science PhD.
Its always amusing to see 'professions' such as sociology or psychology and science mentioned in the same sentence. Science requires objective, quantitative, repeatable process that yields predictable and measurable and quantifiable results. In spite of the 'ology' suffix these are scientific fields more like phrenoology or climatology than like biology or geology.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
The cause of depressed wages are companies seeking to lower the expenses of their labor force whether it is intellectual labor or physical. It all starts there and the cure should be focused at the cause. Schools are going to continue to put out graduates of every kind they can because that's how they get paid. There is no incentive for schools to slow or reduce the production of graduates.
It is merely wishful thinking to approach the problem by wishing there were a lower supply to increase the demand. That supply needs to be managed in other ways such as reducing the amount of knowledge worker jobs from being exported or the government otherwise discouraging outsourcing and hiring H1-Bs.
Despite the claims, H1B does suppress wages.
Productivity is everything, or almost everything. Our standard of living is higher than that of our ancestors 100 years ago, primarily, not because of sociologists, not because of government, and not even because of civil liberties, but because of increases in productivity due to new developments in science and technology. The lack of growth in productivity accounts for our current stagnation.
But for my money I would still rather have ten new scientists or technologists trying and failing than another sociologist telling me that it isn't worth trying.
I would sell my right to vote if it could buy me the opportunity to be the lowliest peasant with a public education in a society 100 years more technologically advanced than our own, and I have good reason to believe I would be better off than I am today for it in every measurable way, owing to the rising tide of productivity lifting all boats.
But it isn't a foregone conclusion. It requires a commitment to public education, public university education and research in the hard sciences, and a government willing to throw off the chains of industry and innovation that stifle equality of opportunity in the name of equality of outcome.
With many Indian software engineers in the global software industry, and most of them being Hindu, this should not come as a surprise!
http://picasaweb.google.com/[my username here snipped for privacy]/UcAsTE?authkey=[generated part of the URL here snipped for privacy]#
catch the "caste" in the middle of the URL! "as in, What's ur caste buddy?"!! - "ucAsTE?!!"
https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=&shva=1#inbox
catch the "shva" (shiva!) in the middle!
Also, the Google "Chrome" browser has "Om" in the middle! Chr"Om"e!
As a side note, "Google" may also be interpreted as "Good-gle", "God-gle"
So much for the company that wants to do "good things for the world"!
I was on an evaluation team that was charged with determining how well a government program had addressed a "shortage" of a specific skill set. On the committee was an economist from a big university. He opened the meeting with the comment: There is no shortage; the government is just not willing to pay market value.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
In the past 30 years, we've seen the Reagan/Thatcher revilution, which resulted in the rise of the golden boy, top talents going to work as "quants" for Wall Street instead of research, and, last but not least, the current economic crises.
There is a simple solution to this steaming pile of dung: raise taxes on high incomes to the level they were 30 years ago. That would make gambling^Wbanking as dull as it was when it was working properly, ie from the late 40s to the 70s.
So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water
Don't see the similarity.
This is an economic argument about supply and demand for a certain kind of skilled labor. For whatever reason, it's pretty much true that salaries for engineers and scientists have remained more or less flat in real terms over the last 30 years. And in relative terms -- compared to careers in medicine, law, finance, etc, they're increasingly less competitive.
Who wouldn't consider an alternative field?
Instead, our business and public leaders seem to believe the solution is to magically increase the supply of this kind of skilled labor via educational (but not career!) incentives and immigration policy. Increased supply should mean decreased price. Decreased price will mean decreased incentive -- particularly for the brightest who will always have other options -- and the labor market will equilibrate accordingly.
The article argues we should let compensation for skilled engineers rise, and the labor market will equilibrate with more of the brightest with options again choosing science and technology.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
In theory, this is pretty much to be expected over successive iterations in even an efficient market economy where some people accumulate more wealth than others and some people have a talent for managing it profitably. People with money are happy to pay other people lots of money if they can make them more money.
In practice, I suspect there are other factors involving perception and asymmetric information.
Tweet, tweet.
I would LOVE to go back to school, get a doctorate in physics and work in the field doing ANYTHING related to physics.
Instead I'm a Engineer hiding in a marketing dept happily making between 150-200k/year and I spend my lunch and weekends madly reading about physics, politics, ancient history, all the things that I really love, and would love to get paid to do.
Instead I write white papers, talk at conferences, run tests on hardware that I love, and I do for the most part love my job. But I would SOOO much rather being working for the DOD, or a school, or anyone, doing research. But I can't live on what they make.
And so I remain an engineer hiding in marketing eagerly awaiting Brian Greene's next talk :)
Because in 36 short months, thanks to Goldman Sachs and their ball-suckers at the Carlyle Group, etc., the United States is going to resemble AFGHANISTAN more than it does DENMARK.
Who needs a science education to scavenge rats for supper?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
.... we all know multi-core processing is much more capable of dealing with huge chunks of data, as compared to a single core/thread.
What's science done for us lately? The high-energy physics people aren't any closer to a clear theory of how physics works down at the bottom than they were thirty years ago. They're just confused in a different way. There hasn't been a major breakthrough in nuclear power since the first nuclear plant came on line over half a century ago. The rocket scientists are doing worse than they did in the '50s and '60s. Aircraft are about the same size as 30 years ago, and a little slower. On the medical side, life expectancy hasn't gone up by much in fifty years, although more of the problems of old people can be patched for a while now. Materials are a little better; plastics are slightly better than in the 1950s, and we have carbon fiber golf clubs now. Big deal. Yes, computers and phones are much better. Semiconductors are far better.
Business has recognized this, and doesn't put money into basic R&D any more. The big wins aren't there. Maybe science, like oil, has peaked. We've made the easy discoveries.
So why put more money into science?
The U.S. probably doesn't need more science and engineering graduates. It does, however, need a higher percentage of the brightest minds to be those graduates.
What need do you have of smart, capable people?
Further proof of America's continuing decline towards Third World status.
Mod me to hell, I don't care.
Academia is the problem starts. You have to compete with idiots for good grades in classes you dont need to get a certificate that doesn't matter for a job that you wont get. In the IT field any jerk who can take a standardized test can get certified a Microsoft/Cisco expert so now that guy with an IT or Engineering Degree that he spent years studying for and around $100k has to compete for a job with the idiot that took weekend classes at a productivity point. In the Medical field they spend years making you take classes that have nothing to do with medicine or general practice yet if you do not get through organic chemistry and calculus you cant be a doctor. My doctor is an idiot he couldnt solve a calculus problem if his life depended on it. Corporations constantly want to drive the bottom line down so they create a competitive market place for jobs that is almost counter productive to corporate interests. CEO's that do nothing but manage stock price are given million dollar bonuses but engineers that create new technologies are given the axe as soon as they have a budget cut. The bean counters get the bonuses but when things get screwed up they depend on the engineers and doctors to get them out of the jam poor bean counting got us in.
Exactly.
I was always considered one of those "promising" science students. I have undergraduate degrees in both biology and engineering, and a Ph.D. in "Computation and Neural Systems". My best stay-in-science career path was a low-paying postdoctoral fellowship that would have required me to move to a very flat and uninteresting city in the Midwest.
As much as I loved science, I stayed in Los Angeles, became a freelance software developer, and am making more than twice a postdoc's salary working roughly half a week's hours freelance. I even do a little science in my spare time. I could have made a similar amount working in engineering or science for a company, but then I'd be working 50-60 hour weeks on someone else's projects.
TFA's conclusion - at least the part about science jobs being overpaid and underworked - is certainly no surprise to me.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Science does not hold the same position in peoples' lives as it used to. We now seek more and more scientific answers to common issues. We need far more scientists than at any time in the past. There are now far more areas of science for them to investigate as well. WE also need to consider the size of our population. Since our population is now so large we should be supporting far more scientists than ever before, There is also the nasty little problem of keeping up with foreign nations.
I am a bit surprised that there is not such section.
I think promoting the pursuit of scientific knowledge in the US will chip away at the ignorance quotient. Screw the economy, I'm tired of dealing with the dumb. And I don't care that some people get Phds and are still idiots. Questioning attitude + scientific method is a good thing.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Once we get decent robots (and they can now pick loose nuts out of a bin), 99% of jobs (even low skill ones) go away.
Buy a grocery shelf stocker robot for $50k and let go 6 people. It's never sick and works on holidays.
50 stockers lose their job and are replaced by one repairman-- but with proper design, even he is a minimum wagejob ("check code: A5, replace module 3")
If you can read a piece of paper and enter numbers, your job is threatened in the near future.
We have to find a better way than scarcity to distribute time at the beach, good food, and other resources or it is going to get extremely ugly within the next 20 to 30 years.
Too many people- no value to society- 1% of people having stuff- 99% of people not having stuff. Historically that doesn't go well.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
and you see why it is best to have a stable career, albeit low paying.
With a stable career I can plan things long ahead, and have my own signature project on the side. This is essentially what most tenured professor like to do.
New Economic Perspectives
Lawyers
Doctors
Professors
New Economic Perspectives
"Overpaid Scientist with huge salary and mammoth bonuses, even when they don't deliver" I hear that one all the time. But business executives, far dumber than the scientists, you never ever hear about stupidly high salaries with insane, more than the wettest dream bonuses, gee, you never ever hear about that. Nooooo.
Ultimately, the root cause of STEM jobs not getting paid significantly or even evenly when compared to finance/management careers is because the corporations who employ the scientists also "own" the work produced by them. Hell, the article on slashdot directly above this one talks about a patent "by" Amazon. I assure you, none of the management/finance/legal personnel contributed to writing the code that allows that patent to even be a reality.
The scientist is simply working to make something, or make something better. The managers/financiers are looking to "own" the thing the scientist made in order to make money for themselves.
But of course, it's the money that had been made on the backs of previous scientists that the newest scientist had the expensive equipment and research money in order to perform the task assigned. But again, the majority of the returns from this money doesn't get back to the scientist who created the thing in the first place. A greater portion of the returns goes to the people who ensured the fact that the scientist would receive a lesser share at the end of it all.
The vicious cycle of capitalism.
-PlaneShaper
If you own stocks or mutual funds and you never voted, you are part of the problem.
Commenting out sections of argument would be rough too.
Though the concept of catching laws that were totally jacked would be truly amusing. ,n
Programmers would rip the law to shreds.. as those inconsistencies flourish when you let people who dont consider the edge conditions.
For instance because Kansas doesnt recognize gay marriage.. you can be gay married in Washington, move to Kansas, get straight married(they'd have to recognize the gay marriage to claim bigamy), and move to Vermont where they would have to recognize both.
Just add Graph Theory.. and you can have size 2n circular marriages for [n >2
"in closing your honor I would like to submit that this state sanctioned dictionary is recursive with no base case, as such none of the words can be considered to be defined, therefore the law are made of undefined words, meaning the defendant must be acquitted", programmer judge "Therefore I didnt understand a word of your closing, instructing the jury to strike closing"
Obviously the US doesn't need as many scientists, and can increase the ratio of tax collectors and entertainers. Hey guys, if you start a riot in your city, you'll probably get more entertainers than tax collectors.
and you see why it is best to have a stable career, albeit low paying.
No, it's better to get that $100 million Wall Street bonus.
With a stable career I can plan things long ahead, and have my own signature project on the side.
Once he gets that bonus he can do whatever work he wants. If he wants to he can plan ahead, if he doesn't he doesn't need to. And if he wants he can take the rest of his life as a signature project.
Hey, didn't Jimmy Wales do that?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Scientists don't do much anyway. For example, I just saw how 2 or 3 guys riding their bicycle from atlanta to LA were going to help cure cancer. Shoot, I would have thought Lance A. had already cured cancer. That reminds me, I need to organize that marathon to find a way to make fusion work.
Reading their paper (RTF...P?), the words "masters", "doctorate", and "phd" don't appear outside of the footnotes. Wouldn't a large portion of the very best science students pursue a graduate education? Aren't people arguing we need more of those, not undergrads with a relatively generic degree in the sciences? The authors are asking the wrong questions.
I see we have a business major chiming in.
This is why your mom and I wanted you to study hard in school
Let's each take one.
1 scientist per gene = 30,000 scientists right there.
Disclamer: see subj.
Seen both sides, reasonably successful in both areas, prefer finance because:
1. Less BS, more meritocracy (surprise!). Science does not have money => in science you need to BS big times to get grants. The outcome of research is often probabilistic and luck could matter more than hard work. When the research is done by a large group often the loudest voice gets most of the credit.
2. Sense of achievement: In science you work on the problem only 100 ppl in the world could understand. The rest are constantly asking: "Why are you wasting your time and taxpayers money doing this?". Seeing B- student making 10X your salary does not help either.
3. It is next to impossible to get fired from govt. lab. After 10-15 years of existence a good part of its workforce is staying there just because they can not find job anywhere else. Working in such environment could be very demotivating ( anyone from NASA or Fermilab want to comment? )
3a. More and more people stay in science just because they can not find job anywhere else or they just afraid to change their field.
4. Immigration issues do not make it better. It is easier to get Green card working in the bank than working in academia.
As a side comment: I few of my friends with PhDs left for Canada, Europe, and Russia within last 3 years. Some from academia some from finance. Some of them were doing top notch research, some were paying >$100K of taxes each year. This country shoots itself in the foot by not keeping PhDs from top schools.
5. Just for Slashdot: It is easier to get laid. :)
http://www.fashionmeetsfinance.com/
The drawbacks are obvious: 60 hours/week working schedule, little or no vacations, occasional junk from taxi driver that "It is my personal fault that he can not pay his mortgage". Should I explain that most people working in finance are actually serving the society by providing financial services and lowering transaction costs?
Also it is not a closed club. From what I see, vertical mobility in high frequency finance will probably beat other industries.
Anyway, this rant is getting too long. Will appreciate comments.
And while [flat for] "about a decade" is an exaggeration
Bet your ass it's an exaggaration. From the link you gave me:
1998: 11.49 billion
2008: 23.84 billion
That's DOUBLE by any reasonable standard, not "essentially flat."
The year-over-year increases barely kept pace with inflation in most cases, and sometimes fell behind. I don't know about NSF and other non-DoD scientific funding agencies, but I'm guessing they suffered the same fate.
Actually, everything went up faster than inflation. Not even talking about Bush being the
first president to fund stem cell research, or push through actual tests of student/teacher performance.
The only problem I see with Bush's science policy was that he actually gave TOO MUCH to all the Lysenko wannabes over at DoD.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Well wait until you see the next economic tsunami and you see why it is best to have a stable career, albeit low paying.
When the economic tsunami hits it will overturn all boats. Actually, the lowest paid layer of employees in technology companies is laid off first; they are not considered essential.
This is silly. Good scientists are hard workers, not necessarily the smartest thinkers. Accumulating experience and data is a tedious and painstaking effort, and one which is fraught with self-doubt. It is a selfless pursuit which, while offering a small reward (learning something new) at the end, is mostly motivated by a desire to make a real and meaningful contribution to the world and the state of human existence. Science does not offer adequate living wages. I think that everyone should make around $50,000. I argue that we need to cut the salaries that marketing, advertising, and salespeople make. If competition in the marketplace means playing meaningless games to distract customers while their pockets are picked, what can be said for the number of business graduates churned out?
For the past 8 years the federal government has been regulating the US labor market, importing labor into the US. This has driven down wages and increased unemployment for skilled workers. When the federal government interferes with the labor market they drive out the best US students.
The corporate communist, people like Bill Gates, hate regulation of their corporations but they LOVE to regulate my job.
And by the way scientists who do not LOVE what they do are far more likely to be in it for 1) Pride 2) ego 3) spite. Trust me: these are the ones who stretch facts (or fabricate). A love of the finding out things and intense curiousity are as necessary as brains. Love of money: please go elsewhere.
I had hoped that the best scientist and engineers would be motivated by something more than just money.
I bet a lot of management types are hoping the same thing.
-- Terry
Plenty of academics do not produce anything useful in their lifetime according to the popular myopic perspective. The Production / consumption religion is not the world and some people manage to grow up surrounded in it and grow out of it.
Just like the "soft sciences" the results are fuzzy, indirect and often not provable but statistical or inductive at best. Something a few steps removed that is worthless may contribute to something bigger; but all too often people limit themselves on some topics to only directly connected proven tangible products (which are marketable and ranked by profitability.)
The general idea many I've expressed to me: there are a few smart or lucky (inclusive or) ones who do something new or big. The rest do slow plodding grunt work trying to understand the results, describe, test, and nit-pick everything they can because they didn't do something of that caliber. Since many things start out without knowing the results that may come from it-- a lot of people try things hoping to stumble onto something; in which case, a great scientist may not ever find something "useful" other than to show what does not work (which could be useful to others in ways beyond their imagination but not a "valuable product.")
This short termed simple thinking led to culture that caused many problems over the last generation (from bridges to banks falling.)
I have talked with plenty who think there is a degradation in education at all levels in different ways. From lack of spacial skills, mechanics, science to the "core" subjects and creativity-- especially a HUGE drop in creativity... to laziness, or the even lack of eugenics. I could easily fill up pages worth on these. I would like to say there is an element of bias to much of it-- old people who've lost realistic memories of their time. That said, I think there is some truth to most of it but to what degree? Personally, I've come to the conclusion it is largely cultural and we contribute to it as we move towards "A Brave New World."
Bean counters are the high priests of corporate run society.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The so-called study is biased. The sociologists that run the study are anti-Science.
1. A strong nation needs scientists and mathematicians more than anything else.
2. The idea of not increasing native-born scientists on the basis that "employers ain't gonna pay more if there is an over-supply of scientists" is totally bullshit.
3. Most of the scientists in America are foreign born. And those foreign-born scientists have no difficulties in going back to their homeland if they can live better back home.
4. Imagine the scenario of foreign born scientists leaving America while there are not enough native-born scientists to fill the posts, what type of future America gonna have?
4. Does that anti-science sociologist want America to become another Zimbabwe?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Over the last two years, the only jobs whose salary haven't been seriously eroded are members of the board of directors of large corporations, and government officials. Everybody else is either losing their job, afraid of losing their job, or is being faced with all kinds of ridiculous contortion to hold on to what little they've still got. Our current system seems to see the middle class as pointless and irrelevant, and is committedly working to make it vanish.
Scientist are simply one more group being loaded into the breach. There're tremendously too few young people becoming scientists, to face the challenges besetting mankind today. The fact that our society would rather devote billions upon endless billions on the most shallow and ridiculous of human endeavors, and then fail to make even the most mediocre contributions to solving the problems of our day suggests that our society's priorities and focus, and very much in the wrong place.
It's about disincentive... these kids who are good at science and math are not idiots. They can see that our culture does not value their talents and prefers to ship their work overseas to low-cost countries where scientists and engineers can be had at a slave's wages. They can see early on that corporations see them as a money hole, not as the producers of the innovative products that the world needs.
in a study published by the Institute for the Study of International Migration.
Not exactly unbiased, eh?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Um....duh?
I guess it's important to prove it analytically, but isn't this pretty much the basic misunderstanding of capitalism that our policymakers have had since the Great Society/War on Poverty nonsense since the 60's (at least)?
- We are dismayed by the heavy use of drugs so instead of addressing WHY people use drugs (or really, the "user" end of the equation at all) we try to build procedural walls around our country out of money. LOTS of money.
- We are dismayed by the poverty we witness across the country, so instead of addressing why we have a nearly permanent underclass, we simply legislate that 'companies have to pay them more', which doesn't solve anything - companies just pass these costs on and everyone has to pay more to subsidize the poor as well as now creating an even larger, more permanently-fixed underclass dependent on government largesse.
- We see the worldwide spread of a sexually-transmitted disease that is extremely lethal, and 100% totally avoidable. So we throw $billions at the idea of curing said disease, instead of rightly addressing the conduct that causes its spread.
We are a nation of consequence avoiders; we want to act heedless of the results of our actions and then seem to insist that somehow we 'deserve' someone to save our sorry asses. I mean, we're wealthy-enough that we can throw $billions at problems and when nothing improves, we just shrug and throw MORE dollars at it.
This is precisely the same situation - there are 'calls' for science majors to be paid more, without really addressing that we've morphed into a nonproductive economy where the obsession over THIS MONTH'S or THIS QUARTER'S financial numbers mean that there isn't much focus on long-term, general benefit research.
Of course, some will read this and misunderstand again, saying that 'we need to open some government-run general research institutions'...instead of recognizing that Adam Smith pulls, he never pushes. If you feel a push, it's more likely Darwin than Smith.
-Styopa
Or maybe we should make H1B much more costly, thereby increasing the incentive to hire US labor. (Yeah, I know then they just outsource the whole project to a foreign country)
such people should probably be starting [...]
Why?
Why should education have a particular return on investment?
For education to have a particular return on investment, the market value of educated people has to be at a particular level. What good comes from that market value being high?
I would like my education to have a high return on investment (oh well, it's free, I'm even making money and saving some, and it's been five+ fun years so far). But I don't think that's a good argument.
So tell me again: why is it good if education has a high ROI? Make sure that you're not arguing why it has a high ROI, or why education is good, but why it should be good.
I'm not dictating any such thing. I'm not advocating government wage fixing or anything like that. But, we all, when thinking about making any investment, or selling or buying goods, have to come up with a rational basis of what something *should* be worth in the market.
When economists talk about economics, I often hear them talk about efficient pricing and such concepts. There is, generally, an idea even among the most free-market libertarians that there is a price that things are worth.
On an individual level, it's something all of us do frequently. Most of us, anyhow, when we go shopping for just about anything, whether it's food, clothes, household items, or housing, we consider what the price of a thing *should* be when we decide whether the price the seller is asking is reasonable or not.
If the education costs more than you will ever hope to make back (i.e. has a negative ROI), or you only ever break even, then education is not economically rational, and becomes a 'luxury' that only the rich can afford.
The price that anything *should* be worth is a price at which both buyer and seller get some amount of positive value from the transaction. Of course, market economics don't always allow us to buy and sell things at the price they *should* be at, but in the long run, prices usually end up being somewhere near the price they should be.
Nothing kicks start technology advancement like a war.
Even if it means nuclear winter, so be it. The incompetent deserve to die.
I'm also an assistant professor in a technical field. I feel a bit swindled at having to work ridiculously hard trying to get papers out while teaching and applying for grants. I work much harder than my grad-school friends who went into law, business, or finance, and they are all making > $120,000/year. Furthermore, the tenure process at many institutions is so broken that it rewards lots of crap papers with incremental results much more than a single good paper. (And if you happen to spend time working on a problem that interests you, but which you don't solve, then you're screwed.)
I'm lucky in that I have decent social skills, so I've reduced my efforts to something commensurate with the salary. If I don't make tenure, I'll leave academia and go into a more lucrative field.
I believe that most engineers don't get the respect they deserve. It's always the stupid managers that don't know their had from their ass who get respect while the brilliant engineers who do all the innovative thinking don't get any respect at all. This lack of respect can often result in lower wages as well, not to mention a cubicle or tiny hole in the wall office with no windows. When you look at the engineer and business management positions from the outside, which route would you rather take? After all, why would you chose to work your ass off and keep yourself so well read and learned when you can be stupid and boss people around and get paid more?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd like to add one thing to the many great points above:
The United States has a higher-than-average GDP and wage structure. If you assume that science skills and language/culture skills are evenly distributed, then you would expect to find science fields disproportionately populated by immigrants.
The reason for this is that scientific skill translate across the cultural barrier much more easily than other skills. The theory of comparative advantage (the only important result in all of economics, some think), then points out that native citizens will tend to populate fields where their advantage over immigrants is largest. That's law, business, etc., and not science and engineering.
Another way to say this is that, even if Americans are better at science than the average immigrant, the immigrants still enjoy a comparative advantage in science, due to the smaller absolute difference in scientific versus cultural skills.
One result of this is that wages in technical disciplines will tend to revert to the world average far more quickly than wages in nontechnical disciplines.
I agree completely. I used to have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people with CS degrees, since I do programming with a math background, no formal CS. Since I discovered the number of people with masters degrees in CS who can't give reasonable answers to trivial CS interview questions I've chilled out.
I'd almost say anyone with a masters in CS is likely to not be much of a coder; if they were good at it, why did they stick around in school longer then they had to, when they could go get paid well to solve interesting problems?
Credentialist restrictions are much more common in science, so getting a post-graduate degree there might make slightly more sense, and thus have a more positive correlation with qualities you want in a scientist.
Hey, everybody! We're not as screwed up as China and Mexico! USA! USA!
Just tax the living crap out of extremely high incomes. We'd solve our budgetary problems and reduce the incentive to award obscenely huge and unjustified salaries, bonuses, etc, etc, all at one stroke.
... was not to provide advice to individual people about what career field they should go into. It was to provide advice to policymakers about how much they should encourage people to select a certain field. The conventional wisdom has been that there's a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country, and accordingly, career counselors, etc, have been motivated to try to get people to enter this field. Now it turns out that the conventional wisdom might be wrong. That's something career counselors would need to know. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything to YOU - obviously, the need for scientists and engineers > 0, so if that's what you need to do with your life, then knock yourself out. But you would probably also be interested in finding out if the field is less lucrative than what you thought.
there is a reason you are not allowed to withdraw your 401k dollars and that the government gives you a tax advantage to invest via 401k instead of your own trading account. It increases the amount of money in mutual funds and thus gives a greater liquidity to the market.
Seriously, you don't know much about 401ks or mutual funds. In a 401k investors are not restricted to just investing in mutual funds. Perhaps you don't recall it but many Enron workers lost money because they had their 401ks invested in Enron stocks. But even if people have money in mutual funds, the funds are not of a single mind. There are aggressive growth, growth, income, and value funds. Aggressive growth funds invest in businesses that growing fast whereas income funds invest in corporations that pay dividends for income. Funds may invest in stocks, bonds, or both. Then there are also SRI, Socially Responsible Investing, funds. These funds use various screens to decide what to invest in. Some screen for companies that they feel treat their employees and or the locations they are located in well. Some focus on the environment, and others will not invest is so called sin industries. Such as military contractors or weapons makers, alcohol businesses, or tobacco companies.
All that 401k money (and the proxy votes) are controlled by an elite class of money managers who then wield enormous leverage over corporate boards.
Every one who owns stocks can decide for themselves who will vote as their their proxy, or can vote for themselves. There is such a thing as activist shareholders. Apartheid in South Africa very well may of ended in part because of shareholder activism, shareholders in the US as well as around the world pressured their companies to not invest in or pull out from South Africa in efforts to end apartheid. Now activist shareholders are pressuring their corporations to oppose Israel's construction of the Apartheid, er Separation, Wall. Chief among them are funds and groups that invest on a religious basis.
The owners of companies are changing so rapidly that it is nearly impossible to tell who actually owns what.
After more than 10 years Steve Jobsis still a member of Walt Disney's board. Ted Turner spent years on Time Warner's board. And as of 2001 and 2002 the Packard and Hewlett families still had seats on the HP board.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"lowest paid layer of employees in technology companies" are not considered stable career. In fact, any job in the private sector is not considered stable and should be avoided at all cost by l337-speaking species.
New Economic Perspectives
"Hey, didn't Jimmy Wales do that?"
Please give me examples of similar success by NON-WHITES in America.
New Economic Perspectives
Why would you want to study and work your ass off when you'll just end up being the bitch of some retarded MBA douchebag who spent his college days drinking and chasing skirts. Fuck that. I'd rather be the boss.
So, in terms of being "objective, quantitative, repeatable", etc... climatology == phrenology? Ooookay. I'll calibrate my acceptance of the rest of your argument accordingly.
Don't you see *any* problem with THAT? Of course, no one is talking about success as a problem. Nor is anyone suggesting taxing people so much that there's no incentive to succeed. What we're talking about is taxing them until there's no incentive to provide obscenely high compensation for CEOs and the like, when their jobs evidently could be done just as well by bums off the street. Income taxes are very low now compared to what they were in, say, the fifties... and the economy during the fifties was doing just fine, thank you very much.
not a scientist, teachers have gotten the shaft in this country since its' inception. Try private industry and your salary will go up, your hours will go down and your quality of life will improve beyond measure. It is a sad fact that though teachers should rank near the top of the salary charts, they are in fact used and abused because so many teach for the love of the job vs. the money to be made. If your employer KNOWS you won't leave what is their incentive to give you a raise, then add to it the fact that cheap a$$ taxpayers are responsible for insuring there is enough money for teachers and you have a recipe for disaster, sadly...
Signed,
a former JR college chemistry teacher
and voila! :)
even better...
As a recipient of a PhD in computational physics, all I have to say is, "Thank heavens I learned something useful in all of those wasted years getting a physics degree - i.e. programming, and writing software."
I have told more than my share of students not to waste their time on science or even advanced degrees unless they are being paid to go to school and have a guarantee of a return on their investment. Today's America depends on a large number of highly skilled people who cannot get a job, to stoke research academia. That is the real shortage - slave labor for research. Whenever you hear about a "shortage" it's from those that make their living by exploiting those people who are working toward an advanced degree for some promise that it'll all be worthwhile at some point in the future - it won't be. It is wasted time and effort, and people are learning that. It really is that simple.
I make my living writing software, and managing people who write software - my PhD is essentially worthless. Until that changes there is no reason for anyone to waste their time, effort, and money getting a degree that is a waste of their time.
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There's no conflict bw science and many (most?) organized religions; it's only SOME organized religions that create problems. For example, I'm a (bad :) catholic and I've never seen it opposed to science (the church changed a lot after 1960 or so, and I was born in 1972 :). I've seen some people within the church opposed to some scientific ideas (or doing many other dumb things :) but not coming from the catholic church.
But if it doesn't love you back, are you a sap?