Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process:
I’m consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I’d love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and science education is increased by an increase in the number of Asian scientists and engineers. If anything, it should be the reverse, right? If engineers are scarce, then a country with a lot of engineers will be a country with a lot of relatively well-compensated people. But if the supply of foreign engineers is going to increase at an astounding rate in the near future, then engineering won’t be as relatively lucrative as it is today so it makes sense to cut back on our investment in educating engineers.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the logic, other than being the sort of blind “I took Econ 101 and will now apply it to everything” argument that drives me up the wall, but there’s a hidden bad assumption that makes the whole thing fall apart. This argument implicitly assumes that the demand for scientists and engineers is fixed.
This is a terrible assumption, though. If anything, the demand for scientists and engineers ought to be increasing. As countries like China and India (and eventually, one hopes, the vast mass of Africa) increase their level of technology, there will be more for engineers to do, both in those countries, and in the rest of the world. Engineering skills should become more valuable, as the number of places they can be employed increases.
Now, it’s true that there’s no particular reason why those scientists and engineers need to come from the US. It happens to be convenient at the moment, given that we already have the technological and educational infrastructure to do the job, and the relative level of investmenet needed to push that forward is small. But we could perfectly well scale back our investment in educating engineers, as Matt suggests, and allow the increased demand to be met by an increased supply of engineers from elsewhere in the world.
The question then becomes one of whether the number of jobs in the smartass pundit sector can grow fast enough to soak up the large supply of innumerate humanities grads.