
What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers? - robg
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/what-shortage-of-scientists-and-engineers/
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biohacker42
Excellent article.

Governments around the world have intervened massively on the supply side.

Because in their flawed logic, more science and engineering graduates == more
innovation and prosperity for everybody!

But anyone who knows economics 101 knows how silly that is, all that this
massive intervention on the supply side has done, is depress pay for
scientists and engineers.

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Dilpil
And anyone who has ever written a line of code knows how silly what you just
wrote is.

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biohacker42
What does coding have to do with an oversupply of engineers?

Do you mean that coding is hard and thus we need more coders? Don't you think
it might be better if we had better, not more coders?

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Dilpil
By coding applications people want, you create wealth. There is not some fixed
amount of software to be written, the rewards of which need to be distributed
equitably. There is an infinite amount of wealth ready to be created.

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pasbesoin
There is a shortage of work in the U.S. And despite the work being
redistributed worldwide, the ability to travel to take that work is limited
(various and numerous reasons; legal, social, and practical). Another aspect
of the fallacy of describing the current world-wide economic system as "free
trade".

So, once again, we (this comment is U.S. centric) mortgage our future to pay
for the present. This time, our intellectual and productive (as in real
things, as opposed to words and paper) future. When we have no products to
offer in return, we will be reduced to selling our capital -- the country
itself -- in order to pay for the things we need. All the more so as other
economies continue to develop both the legal structures and "service sector"
workers to do to jobs that we were -- in grotesquely misinformed and/or
misleading descriptions -- supposed to retain.

Not to mention that, even if we did retain such work indefinitely, there's not
enough of it to go around. Furthermore, not everyone's inclination nor ability
lies in being a banker or a lawyer. A society consists of a diverse
population; it is morally reprehensible to disenfranchise entire segments via
such unsustainable market imbalances.

