
Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists - barry-cotter
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-government-universities-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-high-tech-workers
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barry-cotter
> it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US
> scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed
> themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working
> scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining
> power through labor market intervention and manipulation.

> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower
> wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic
> study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the
> flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private
> economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and
> demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the
> bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a
> bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the
> literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release
> of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for
> the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of
> documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the
> NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.

> The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a
> highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning
> of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being
> solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers
> had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to
> US Ph.D.s with other options. The study’s aim was not to locate talent but
> to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to
> undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s

