It has long been the conventional wisdom that the United States has suffered from a shortage of personnel trained in "STEM" (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), with a damaging effect on its competitiveness as a manufacturer --and indeed, concern with the issue has seen a recent uptick in this period of reviving mercantilism, pandemic and war-induced supply chain disruption, and national security-oriented reshoring.
Still, as is so often the case the conventional wisdom, while certainly living up to the expectation that it be "conventional," is less persuasive as "wisdom"--the actual evidence for such shortage shaky for as long as such claims have been made, starting with the fact that for all its aura of tough-minded precision the term STEM so glibly tossed about may mean less than it appears to do. In actuality STEM is a very ill-defined category--with some seeming to have in mind a quite limited category of engineers, computer scientists and very closely associated occupations oriented to quantitative and/or physical science study, requiring at least a bachelor's degree and devoted to the application of theoretical scientific knowledge to the production of high-technology manufactured goods, where others think in terms of a wider range of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math-utilizing activity. (For example, are medical professionals STEM workers? What about machinists who may have attended technical training institutes and done apprenticeships instead of going the college route? What about those teachers providing training in STEM subjects--with this category possibly including not just the university math professor but the elementary school teacher imparting the foundations to the very young? Etc., etc., etc.--all before getting into still more complex subjects as whether, as some seem to be demanding, economics ought to be reclassified as a STEM major.)
The result is that the proportion of workers considered to be STEM personnel ranges wildly depending on whom one asks. One analysis published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) remarked that the proportion varies from as little as 5 to as much as 20 percent depending on who does the defining, while I have seen still higher estimates. FTI Consulting, for instance, put the figure at one-third of U.S. workers.
That extreme range of ways of defining STEM by itself virtually guarantees that analysts will come up with wildly differing estimates, even when acting in perfectly good faith. However, making matters worse is the fact that the matter of a "STEM worker shortage" is also ill-defined. Do we mean STEM workers across the range of categories (whatever we may consider those categories to be), or just workers as a proportion of the total? (For instance, would we be justified in speaking of an overall "STEM shortage" in a situation where there were only really shortages in a few categories of workers, or even just one--for instance, a scarcity of petroleum engineers?) In any case, what proportion would that be? How many jobs would have to go unfilled for how long a time for this to be considered an issue--and would it matter if there were reasons other than a plain and simple shortage of workers for those positions being unfilled? (Even if it is obviously a "shortage" if a company or a sector does not have all the people it needs, at what point does an inconvenience as supply and demand shift turn into an emergency? And what about extenuating circumstances? Would it still be a real "shortage" of petroleum engineers if the number of jobs in that area suddenly exploded because of an oil boom after many years of low prices and low employment encouraging engineering students to concentrate on other fields, and laid-off petroleum engineers to pursue other careers--and likely not leave them afterward?)
Meanwhile, going by the existing studies, there is always plenty of evidence that STEM personnel are simply not in the kind of demand that the word "shortage" implies. We see very large numbers of people with STEM backgrounds in non-STEM occupations--and these not only veterans who used to work in STEM but moved on after some years (a common pattern due to rapid skills obsolescence and a quickly falling wage "premium" in areas like computer science), but of the freshly graduated who are more "in demand" also doing so, implying that employers in those very areas where they specialized offered no more than employers in those areas for which they did not have training. Indeed, a report from the Economic Policy Institute from some years ago noted that in those especially "hard" STEM fields of computer/information science and engineering "U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year," with a majority of those who do not enter the "IT workforce" saying either that they had better opportunities outside that occupation, and one-third saying that IT jobs were simply not available. This is no evidence of some great unmet demand, but rather the opposite--the more in as this has generally been an era not of rising wages across the board but prolonged and deep stagnation in this area, and one could conceivably say the same of how companies have treated their workers these past many years. (If STEM workers were so scarce, would the workplace culture at companies like Netflix and the post-Musk Twitter be so brutal? Would companies be so high-handed, and workers so disadvantaged, in the argument over "remote work?" Would the news be so replete with reports of mass layoff of such workers from company after company, given what those layoffs will necessarily cost them in terms of longer-term, deeper, functionality?)
Of course, in considering all this there is the fact that those talking about shortages are often not talking about a shortage at the moment, but a projected one over some time frame--for instance, the next decade. However, the projections sometimes turning out to be quite far off the mark--with the deficit of STEM workers wildly exaggerated, and, again, the extreme opposite sometimes the case, Ron Hira pointing out that the BLS estimated that in 2000-2010 there would be 2 million new jobs for people in the "computer and mathematical occupations" category--four times as much as were actually to be seen in those years.
Of course, if the claims for a STEM shortage are so shaky it may seem odd that we hear the claim made so frequently.
One possible explanation for the pervasiveness and persistence of the idea of such a shortage is that it is a simple, easy-to-understand explanation for the problems of a country with a long-declining manufacturing base, and thus easily accepted and repeated over and over again. And there may well be some truth to this.
Yet it seems to me that we are on firmer ground when we consider the matter of hard interest. While employers may easily succumb to unrealistic expectations about how quickly the labor market will adapt to their ever-changing short-run demands (seemingly oblivious to what a long investment of time and money a degree in anything is for the student), the reality remains that for them labor, highly skilled labor included, can never be too cheap, abundant, disposable and deferential--one element in which is that, as many an engineer (who naturally has a different idea about engineers being cheap and disposable) remarks whenever the subject comes up, the idea of a STEM shortage in America is an excellent excuse to import workers on H-1B visas, or simply offshore or outsource the work. More broadly, the idea that not enough students are studying STEM is, politically, a far safer answer that policies of free trade, financial deregulation, passivity in the face of industrial decline, and much else, have encouraged investors to put their money elsewhere--to not only offshore production but to avoid production altogether, eschewing "real economy" investments in things like factories to instead buy up other companies, or pump-and-dump their own stock, or speculate in insecure securities, or do any of the other things that have gone with an age of "financialization"--and that they have acted on that incentive. (Indeed, this makes it doubly sanctimonious when commentators on the subject malign STEM majors for going into finance rather than, for example, engineering. Those policies created the context--and the situation where Wall Street offered more--but they blame the young person looking for their first job rather than the businesses and officials that actually hold the power in the situation.)
Meanwhile, claims about STEM shortages raise the question of why there are not more STEM graduates--with the list of the usual suspects likewise conveniently fitting many an agenda. The idea that it is a matter of the faults of K-12 education is grist to the mill of the crush-the-teacher's-unions-and-privatize-everything crowd. The idea that it is a matter of able students being lured away from practical and useful majors toward "useless" studies in the humanities is likewise grist to the mills of the chronic humanities-bashers, from college and government budget-cutters, to culture warriors contemptuous of what they imagine (falsely) to be radical left dominance of such programs, to, for that matter, administrators of STEM-relevant programs angling to increase their budgets and staff (or simply ward off reductions in them) within a context of unending austerity--while it all plays very well with the Know-Nothing anti-intellectuals who are never few in any walk of life. One may add that this is also a convenient excuse for those who want to explain why college graduates may be getting less return on their "investment" than promised--and rebuff their requests for help with their crushing student loan debt, while practitioners of intergenerational warfare generally derive satisfaction from the thought of young people being lazy and fuzzy-minded implied in their eschewing STEM in favor of "pointless" soft subjects.
Indeed, all of this has me thinking back to the reports we heard last year of a possible shortage of teaching faculty in the United States. Certainly those claims also got widespread coverage in the U.S.--but the mainstream press afforded plenty of space to the skeptics at the time (as the right-wing press provided still more space), while I at least have the impression that the concern proved short-lived. But the expectation of the STEM shortage has had the status of "conventional wisdom," and to such a degree that one has to go much more out of their way to find a critical view as we hear about it again and again and again, week in, week out, year in, year out.
Considering this one should note that by and large those who wanted the public to take the idea of a teacher shortage seriously have been pretty much on the opposite side of the political line from those who wanted the public to take the idea of a STEM worker shortage seriously. By and large the people who sell the idea of a STEM shortage are also those that the news media, which gushes that anyone who allegedly has a billion dollars is a "genius," is predisposed to treat with far, far, far more respect than anyone else. And that this has made all the difference.
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Federal Subsidies and the U.S. Shipbuilding Industry: A Few Remarks
While economists, and economic historians of orthodox ideas, are ever speaking of "free markets" and private "entrepreneurship" are the only way in which countries "succeed," with anything and everything else at best getting in the way, the actual historical record regarding industrialization is very different. When it comes to building up a large, high-capital, high-technology industry one invariably sees behind the businessmen to whom such give all the credit a robust industrial policy likely to entail massive monetary backing, including direct subsidy on a significant scale to those sectors whose development it deems important to the country's flourishing economically.
And when that policy and that monetary backing go, so does the success.
Certainly this was Britain's historical experience--that country ascending to the status of industrial-commercial superpower on the basis of rigorously mercantilist policies (the more formidable still when one considers the country's navally-centered military-industrial complex, which actually goes back far past the day of "Jackie" Fisher to the days of wooden sailing ships and iron cannonballs). And when those policies came to a halt the country's industrial supremacy turned to now notorious decline (underlined by how Margaret Thatcher's policies, which she had promised would rescue British manufacturing, dealt another massive blow to that manufacturing base, with her successors' faithfully following in her footsteps only increasing the damage).
Thus has it also gone in American history, with the neoliberal era from the late 1970s forward. That broad decline has been gradual, offset by success in a few areas (computers, for a while, and more enduringly, aerospace-defense, petroleum/coal products, chemicals--not incidentally those benefiting most from past and present defense outlays, and the shale boom). However, it has still been very much there, as reflected in the data on manufacturing output. Adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index one finds that they have staggered in the aggregate, and fallen significantly in per capita terms, by about a fifth between the 1979 recession and the outbreak of the pandemic, with the heavy/Fordist-type industries--primary metals and fabricated metal goods, machinery, electrical equipment, autos--suffering a two-fifths drop.
While I did not treat it as a distinct category, it seems safe to say that the situation in regard to American shipping has been far worse, that sector disappearing--with the history behind it confirming, again, government backing's determining effect on its trajectory.
In contrast with other areas, like the railroads that did so much to integrate the economy of the east and enable the settlement of the west, the sea does not seem to have been a subject of great public interest in the nineteenth century (when American business was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the country's internal development), with the result, unsurprisingly, that the country's once-mighty merchant marine was an old memory at that point. But concern for having one revived with the "end of the frontier" in the 1890s and the outward turn of American business as the "next frontier," and the beginnings of a host of legislation intended to promote the development of an American merchant marine--and with it, the shipbuilding sector that would supply it with ships and support it with repair and rebuilding services. Thus the Military Cargo Preference Act 1904 reserved to available American merchant vessels the carriage of all U.S. military cargo. Later, after World War I (with its massive economic expansion, and general paving of the way for a more globally involved America, economically as in other ways), the provisions of the Merchant Marine Act 1920 (aka the Jones Act) gave American-owned, -flagged and -manned vessels a monopoly on port-to-port trade in the U.S., with this even extended to U.S. territories and possessions (which, as these included a significant number of islands in the Caribbean and western Pacific, necessarily encompassed a fair bit of oceangoing traffic).* Moreover, as the indirect subsidy constituted by these preferences was not quite enough to get America's shipbuilding where it was wanted, there followed the Merchant Marine Act 1936, and its significant direct subsidy for ship construction and operation. (Historian Gabriel Kolko reported that in 1947-1961 alone the value of the direct subsidy came to $1 billion, which translated into today's terms as a portion of Gross Domestic Product would work out to somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion for those years alone.)
The U.S. shipbuilding sector, and the country's merchant marine (which as late as the outbreak of World War II ran a distant second to Britain's in spite of the U.S. having long overtaken Britain industrially), got further help from by the massive shipbuilding (and privatization of said ships) of the World War II period, and the increasing extent and significance of government preferences (with the U.S. now maintaining a massive, globally deployed military establishment with its heightened shipping demands, and the Cargo Preference Act 1954 extending the reservation to at least 50 percent of civilian cargo as well), became the world's strongest under this regime.**
Of course, it was also the case that after all the wartime construction, and the recovery and economic development ongoing elsewhere where many a rival had a local advantage (with Britain, for instance, positioned to meet European demand, with a Japan which had been a significant builder pre-war making rapid progress in this area), the American market was glutted and the world market very crowded indeed. Meanwhile the U.S. Navy's orders were in this period still vast (the post-Korean War defense boom seeing the U.S. Navy's active ship force nearly double from 634 vessels in 1950 to 1,122 in 1953, and remain at an elevated level through subsequent decades, averaging 895 ships in 1951-1968, and this increasingly consisting of larger and more capable vessels as the age of the guided missile and nuclear navy dawned, affording plenty of naval work for the yards).
The result was that American shipbuilders produced only a relatively small number of commercial vessels in these years. However, the government continued to take an interest in specifically commercial shipbuilding, with the U.S. Maritime Administration's "Mariner" program contracting shipyards to produce cargo ships of new designs and taking on itself the responsibility for selling them, and the Merchant Marine Act 1970 modifying the earlier program to include tankers and dry bulk carriers. The latter in particular left the American shipbuilding industry "as healthy as it had been at any time since the war," American shipyards having their hands so full with "commercial work that for several years at the end of this period, the Navy could not find enough interested shipbuilders to build all the ships for which funds had been appropriated."
As is oft-noted the boost that the 1970 Act was supposed to provide was greatly diminished by a collapse in demand just a few years down the road, with the most-cited single factor the energy crisis' effect on demand for oil and therefore the tankers that hauled them, and the weaker economic outlook generally as the post-war boom turned to bust. (One might add that the '70s was also a period of naval contraction, with all that implied for relief from that direction--the U.S. Navy shrinking from 933 to 743 vessels in 1968-1970, and 530 in 1980, while its combatant tonnage tumbled from 9.4 million tons in 1960 to 7.6 million tons in 1970 and just 4.2 million tons in 1980.)
Still, as with so much else the real turn in policy came in the Reagan era. Much of the aforementioned legislation stayed on the books (the Jones Act, for example, still around, witness neoliberal publications and "think tanks"' ceaseless condemnation of the law today in line with their hatred of all "protectionism"), but the direct subsidies vanished. In line with Reagan's tendency to present a more moderate face with regard to neoliberal reform, when on the campaign trail in 1980 he promised to protect the sector, but then in office set about revising the Merchant Marine Act 1936 in exactly the opposite fashion--actually making U.S. ship operators eligible for subsidies when getting ships from foreign yards (a provision buried in the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconcilation Act), and eventually doing away with Titles V, VI and XI of the Act altogether (the subsidies for the construction and operation of the vessels, and the mortgage insurance component of the legislation, respectively). There was, of course, an expansion of naval ship-building as part of the rearmament of the "Second Cold War," but, reflecting the changes in naval technology (and particularly the fact that more and more of the outlay has gone to high-tech electronic systems rather than ship construction per se), more a matter of a small number of very advanced (and expensive) vessels rather than colossal orders for craft, and amid the extreme competition for that handful of jobs "the number of active shipyards . . . [fell] by 40 percent" in the following five years.*** And afterward the naval contracts started drying up too (as the defense boom gave way to tighter budgets again), and the world once again tipped into a historic recession.
In short, left to sink or swim the industry sank--as usually happens, with, of course, succeeding presidential administrations not reversing course. The idea of a broad, robust, explicit industrial policy was discussed only tepidly amid the limited debate over the country's economic course seen in the late '80s and early '90s, became that much less plausible after the election of 1992 (when from virtually the start it was clear that neoliberalism remained the order of the day under Bill Clinton).
Still, four decades on, amid undeniable and massive anti-neoliberal backlash from below, the supply disruptions of the pandemic and after, and the spread of an increasingly militarized view of the relations between the great powers, not only is the matter of America's commercial shipbuilding sector being discussed again, but even in mainstream fora one sometimes finds something other than neoliberal denunciations of any and all action that might plausibly redress the situation.
Of course, per usual there is far more talk than action; while I have my doubts that shipbuilding will rise anywhere near so high on the agenda as action on microchips. Nevertheless, that the subject is being talked about at all does seem another sign of the times, in which, if governments and the commentariat remain committed to neoliberal policies, they are still more willing to make pragmatic adjustments to satisfy the demands of a more complicated situation than prevailed in the vacation from reality that was the late '90s for such types.
* Section 27 of the text reads that "No merchandise . . . shall be transported by water, or by land and water . . . between points in the United States, including Districts, Territories, and possessions thereof embraced within the coastwise laws, either directly or via a foreign port, or for any part of the transportation, in any other vessel than a vessel built in and documented under the laws of the United States and owned by persons who are citizens of the United States . . ." with any ship previously under a foreign flag or rebuilt elsewhere ineligible.
** It is worth acknowledging that not all the beneficiaries of the post-war sell-off of wartime shipping were American--under the Merchant Ship Sales Act 1946 numerous foreign buyers acquiring large numbers of vessels (such vessels playing an important role in, for example, Aristotle Onassis' building of his fortune).
*** The U.S. Navy's ship count, from trough to peak, went from 521 in 1981 to 594 in 1987, while the Navy in 1990 had even less combatant tonnage than it had in 1980 (down from 4.19 million to 4.04 million tons).
And when that policy and that monetary backing go, so does the success.
While I did not treat it as a distinct category, it seems safe to say that the situation in regard to American shipping has been far worse, that sector disappearing--with the history behind it confirming, again, government backing's determining effect on its trajectory.
In contrast with other areas, like the railroads that did so much to integrate the economy of the east and enable the settlement of the west, the sea does not seem to have been a subject of great public interest in the nineteenth century (when American business was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the country's internal development), with the result, unsurprisingly, that the country's once-mighty merchant marine was an old memory at that point. But concern for having one revived with the "end of the frontier" in the 1890s and the outward turn of American business as the "next frontier," and the beginnings of a host of legislation intended to promote the development of an American merchant marine--and with it, the shipbuilding sector that would supply it with ships and support it with repair and rebuilding services. Thus the Military Cargo Preference Act 1904 reserved to available American merchant vessels the carriage of all U.S. military cargo. Later, after World War I (with its massive economic expansion, and general paving of the way for a more globally involved America, economically as in other ways), the provisions of the Merchant Marine Act 1920 (aka the Jones Act) gave American-owned, -flagged and -manned vessels a monopoly on port-to-port trade in the U.S., with this even extended to U.S. territories and possessions (which, as these included a significant number of islands in the Caribbean and western Pacific, necessarily encompassed a fair bit of oceangoing traffic).* Moreover, as the indirect subsidy constituted by these preferences was not quite enough to get America's shipbuilding where it was wanted, there followed the Merchant Marine Act 1936, and its significant direct subsidy for ship construction and operation. (Historian Gabriel Kolko reported that in 1947-1961 alone the value of the direct subsidy came to $1 billion, which translated into today's terms as a portion of Gross Domestic Product would work out to somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion for those years alone.)
The U.S. shipbuilding sector, and the country's merchant marine (which as late as the outbreak of World War II ran a distant second to Britain's in spite of the U.S. having long overtaken Britain industrially), got further help from by the massive shipbuilding (and privatization of said ships) of the World War II period, and the increasing extent and significance of government preferences (with the U.S. now maintaining a massive, globally deployed military establishment with its heightened shipping demands, and the Cargo Preference Act 1954 extending the reservation to at least 50 percent of civilian cargo as well), became the world's strongest under this regime.**
Of course, it was also the case that after all the wartime construction, and the recovery and economic development ongoing elsewhere where many a rival had a local advantage (with Britain, for instance, positioned to meet European demand, with a Japan which had been a significant builder pre-war making rapid progress in this area), the American market was glutted and the world market very crowded indeed. Meanwhile the U.S. Navy's orders were in this period still vast (the post-Korean War defense boom seeing the U.S. Navy's active ship force nearly double from 634 vessels in 1950 to 1,122 in 1953, and remain at an elevated level through subsequent decades, averaging 895 ships in 1951-1968, and this increasingly consisting of larger and more capable vessels as the age of the guided missile and nuclear navy dawned, affording plenty of naval work for the yards).
The result was that American shipbuilders produced only a relatively small number of commercial vessels in these years. However, the government continued to take an interest in specifically commercial shipbuilding, with the U.S. Maritime Administration's "Mariner" program contracting shipyards to produce cargo ships of new designs and taking on itself the responsibility for selling them, and the Merchant Marine Act 1970 modifying the earlier program to include tankers and dry bulk carriers. The latter in particular left the American shipbuilding industry "as healthy as it had been at any time since the war," American shipyards having their hands so full with "commercial work that for several years at the end of this period, the Navy could not find enough interested shipbuilders to build all the ships for which funds had been appropriated."
As is oft-noted the boost that the 1970 Act was supposed to provide was greatly diminished by a collapse in demand just a few years down the road, with the most-cited single factor the energy crisis' effect on demand for oil and therefore the tankers that hauled them, and the weaker economic outlook generally as the post-war boom turned to bust. (One might add that the '70s was also a period of naval contraction, with all that implied for relief from that direction--the U.S. Navy shrinking from 933 to 743 vessels in 1968-1970, and 530 in 1980, while its combatant tonnage tumbled from 9.4 million tons in 1960 to 7.6 million tons in 1970 and just 4.2 million tons in 1980.)
Still, as with so much else the real turn in policy came in the Reagan era. Much of the aforementioned legislation stayed on the books (the Jones Act, for example, still around, witness neoliberal publications and "think tanks"' ceaseless condemnation of the law today in line with their hatred of all "protectionism"), but the direct subsidies vanished. In line with Reagan's tendency to present a more moderate face with regard to neoliberal reform, when on the campaign trail in 1980 he promised to protect the sector, but then in office set about revising the Merchant Marine Act 1936 in exactly the opposite fashion--actually making U.S. ship operators eligible for subsidies when getting ships from foreign yards (a provision buried in the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconcilation Act), and eventually doing away with Titles V, VI and XI of the Act altogether (the subsidies for the construction and operation of the vessels, and the mortgage insurance component of the legislation, respectively). There was, of course, an expansion of naval ship-building as part of the rearmament of the "Second Cold War," but, reflecting the changes in naval technology (and particularly the fact that more and more of the outlay has gone to high-tech electronic systems rather than ship construction per se), more a matter of a small number of very advanced (and expensive) vessels rather than colossal orders for craft, and amid the extreme competition for that handful of jobs "the number of active shipyards . . . [fell] by 40 percent" in the following five years.*** And afterward the naval contracts started drying up too (as the defense boom gave way to tighter budgets again), and the world once again tipped into a historic recession.
In short, left to sink or swim the industry sank--as usually happens, with, of course, succeeding presidential administrations not reversing course. The idea of a broad, robust, explicit industrial policy was discussed only tepidly amid the limited debate over the country's economic course seen in the late '80s and early '90s, became that much less plausible after the election of 1992 (when from virtually the start it was clear that neoliberalism remained the order of the day under Bill Clinton).
Still, four decades on, amid undeniable and massive anti-neoliberal backlash from below, the supply disruptions of the pandemic and after, and the spread of an increasingly militarized view of the relations between the great powers, not only is the matter of America's commercial shipbuilding sector being discussed again, but even in mainstream fora one sometimes finds something other than neoliberal denunciations of any and all action that might plausibly redress the situation.
Of course, per usual there is far more talk than action; while I have my doubts that shipbuilding will rise anywhere near so high on the agenda as action on microchips. Nevertheless, that the subject is being talked about at all does seem another sign of the times, in which, if governments and the commentariat remain committed to neoliberal policies, they are still more willing to make pragmatic adjustments to satisfy the demands of a more complicated situation than prevailed in the vacation from reality that was the late '90s for such types.
* Section 27 of the text reads that "No merchandise . . . shall be transported by water, or by land and water . . . between points in the United States, including Districts, Territories, and possessions thereof embraced within the coastwise laws, either directly or via a foreign port, or for any part of the transportation, in any other vessel than a vessel built in and documented under the laws of the United States and owned by persons who are citizens of the United States . . ." with any ship previously under a foreign flag or rebuilt elsewhere ineligible.
** It is worth acknowledging that not all the beneficiaries of the post-war sell-off of wartime shipping were American--under the Merchant Ship Sales Act 1946 numerous foreign buyers acquiring large numbers of vessels (such vessels playing an important role in, for example, Aristotle Onassis' building of his fortune).
*** The U.S. Navy's ship count, from trough to peak, went from 521 in 1981 to 594 in 1987, while the Navy in 1990 had even less combatant tonnage than it had in 1980 (down from 4.19 million to 4.04 million tons).
Monday, January 23, 2023
Why I'm Sick of Hearing About STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)
I am also not going to complain about the tendency to see college as an "investment" given that, while I do believe in the value of a trained and cultured mind, and of a broad and deep education in producing such a mind, it is the hope of a "better job" alone that can provide practical justification for the time and energy that cash-strapped, hard-pressed working class persons unable to afford intellectual and cultural "luxuries" are expected to put into getting a college degree. And I am not going to deny the validity of STEM as a career choice, not only because the work is important, but because those starting out in it admittedly do have higher chances of finding a job in their field, and having a higher starting salary.
Rather my initial reaction against the chatter about STEM was my usual suspicion when anything is reduced to a slogan glibly and ubiquitously uttered in that way more indicative of piety than thinking, with the endurance of glib talk about STEM striking me as irksome in three particular ways:
1. By way of its handy slogan-ness, the raving about STEM has played its part in perpetuating that foolish and harmful insistence on making a hierarchy of intellectual endeavor that has math, computers and physics at the top, other physical sciences below (those lowly medical researchers!), still other social sciences below them (no matter how much science, technology and math knowledge they actually involve, which can be quite a lot), humanities below that (because clearly only morons would bother to read books and learn languages), and art dead last (because it's all just the brain-farts of the floopy). Well-educated people may not think in such simple-minded and frankly stupid ways--may even deny that anyone does (certainly many who answered my "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures" essay denied it to a degree that made me wonder just how cut off they were from the political-cultural mainstream)--but it is the "conventional wisdom," and if one takes "conventional wisdom" to mainly mean "what stupid people think about something" the fact that most of those who live in the world certainly espouse opinions that can be called stupid, and certainly most of those who have any significant amount of power in the world give every evidence of being stupid to a sub-human degree, makes the stupidity in question something one does better to acknowledge, and if possible debunk, rather than dismiss. This is all the more the case in that the hierarchy of intellectual endeavor has had social consequences, not least with regard to the justification of inequality and callousness toward the less fortunate--with "tech billionaires" worshipped as demigods and the disenfranchised sneeringly told "learn to code," with those who will not, or cannot, do so deserving what they get. One can even add that all this has been bad for STEM itself--science, in the end, a philosophy, and the inability to understand the premises of that philosophy for lack of the proper training has been cited as a factor in the reality that so much of the scientific work now ongoing by fully credentialed and employed scientists is of such poor quality as to cripple the productivity of their fields.
2. The glib STEM talk has enabled obfuscation of the bigger issue of individual returns to higher education generally. It has seemed to me for some time that the formula college=middle classness, which may always have had an element of blinkeredness, wishful thinking or outright evasion about it (e.g. telling people to take out loans for college instead of doing things that directly help working people, because that's not what they're really about), and which has been taken so far as to produce a situation of financial bubble in significant respects, is in an advanced state of decay. Putting it bluntly, people go to college, more often than not make somewhat more money as a result, but fall far short of the comfortable life they are led to expect. And the fuss over STEM, again, makes it easy to pretend that it is a matter of people "studying the wrong things" rather than the flaws of the bigger conception, from which STEM graduates have not been immune. If they are less likely to be underemployed than their peers in other fields 1 in 3 STEM majors still finds their first job after college in a non-STEM field, while if their starting salaries are better their longer-run earnings are not--because in contrast with someone in a non-STEM field who can expect to get more proficient at their task with experience, in a good many such fields (e.g. information technology) skills obsolesce quickly. The result is that if their skills are especially valuable in the job market at the outset the "premium" on them quickly falls away, earnings growth slows, while at any rate they rise into management jobs where their actual STEM skills are less relevant than skills of other types, or (because of the comparative lack of reward) leave their field altogether. At that stage of things they are no better off than the non-STEM types--which is just one reminder that the issue of what working people can expect today is far, far more complicated than the question of their having picked their majors "poorly" or "wisely." Pretending otherwise makes the issue that much less likely to be addressed.
3. The STEM talk has aided in the diversion of the public from substantive discussion of the causes of economic problems. As we have been seeing since at least the decline of Britain as a manufacturing power over a century ago talk of "education," while acknowledging an essential to a country's engineering prowess, can easily be a cheap way of avoiding the larger subject. One should also not forget that there are many ways of thinking about the problem of improving education in STEM or any other area, while even if one does a sound job here it takes a lot more than a well-educated work force for a country to succeed as an industrial power. Quite the contrary, attention to a whole complex of issues is required--with, as a practical matter, a thoroughgoing industrial policy typically required for development, and countries which abandon that, and leave their manufacturing to sink or swim on its own usually seeing it do the former rather than the latter (as the records of Britain and the U.S. in particular have shown, especially when measured against those of Germany and Japan). Indeed, for as long as I can remember talk of "education" has played this part in the U.S., enabling our neoliberal politicians and media to overlook how, for example, government policies in such areas as trade, infrastructure, regulation of the financial sector and the distribution of "corporate welfare" have produced a financialized, speculation-oriented economy about "making money from money" in favor of flinging accusations at schoolteachers as incompetent gold-brickers (the better to advance the crush-the-public-unions-and-privatize-everything agenda so dear to them), and maligning young people as lazily steering clear of "tough" STEM majors in favor of "soft" subjects. And in making those accusations the accusers (Public Intellectuals who studied the same soft subjects themselves, and did very well out of their careers or we wouldn't have to hear their idiocies) can lay it on very thick indeed.
That such nonsense is treated with respect says a great deal about the abysmal intellectual level of public debate and the news media so crucial to it--which no amount of STEM education would alleviate by itself.
Were the '90s Declinists Right About Germany and Japan?
The anxieties about American competitiveness during the late 1980s and early 1990s were for the most part about American competitiveness vis-a-vis Germany and Japan. In looking back at that period one should not make the dialogue out to be any more sophisticated or daring than it was. Considering it I am struck by its superficiality--by the extent to which such things as the history of the German and Japanese economies was neglected in favor of the speaking of much drivel about "management style," and the lazy, shallow, frankly self-serving way of explaining industrial success that reduces everything to "culture" (mainly because one could no longer speak of "race" and still be respectable). In the process those who did so attributed to both countries strengths and faults they did not possess.
Still, for all its failings it was an acknowledgment that the "American way" of doing things was not necessarily perfect, that the country may have had some things to learn from others in the manufacturing field on which Americans had long prided themselves as the world's leaders (for a long time, very justly), and that perhaps change was called for. Of course, such concerns came to seem passé amid the tech boom, amid Eurosclerosis and Japan's "lost decade," but a generation on the situation looks rather different from how it did in the mainstream's "vacation from reality" of the late '90s.
In fairness, neither Germany nor Japan did so well as some hoped and some feared they would do. Germany gained less by reunification than some expected. Japan's "lost decade" turned into a "lost generation." And indeed, recently considering the implications of a devotion of a larger portion of their Gross Domestic Product to defense spending it seemed to me worth pointing out that the two countries are, in terms of their weight in the world's economic life and power potential relative to others, a long way from where they had been circa 1995 (when an Eamonn Fingleton could make the case for Japan's becoming the biggest economy on Earth by the end of the decade, and get Bill Clinton's own endorsement on the dust jacket of the book in which he made that case).
Still, the two countries have had their successes--not least in that manufacturing arena. Germany proved itself a force to be reckoned with here, as made clear by any look at the list of the world's "hidden champions"--while it fostered the development of an economic "greater Germany" across Central and Eastern Europe that has given it the scale of a superpower in this sphere (the more in as it enables it to leverage the still-larger European Union in its preferred direction), all of which has compelled Anglosphere commentators of even the most sneering type to show some respect. Japan does not seem to have done much less well. (We talk about who is installing the most industrial robots, but would do well to remember that Japan is the number one builder of those robots, accounting for almost half the global production. And while microchips are talked about as "the new oil," it is worth remembering which country leads in making the silicon wafers and photoresist chemicals and any number of other products essential to chipmaking--Japan again.) Indeed, when one controls for their demographic profiles, adjusting the figures for their working-age populations, one finds that in the twenty-first century Germany was actually faster-growing than the U.S. or Britain, and Japan did about as well as those two states. By contrast the dominant trend in those years has (in the case of the U.S., in spite of the lift it got from its immense defense spending and its shale boom), generally been a matter of a stagnant or eroding manufacturing base (in Britain's case, fairly steadily eroding since the financial crisis of 2007), as they owe such gains as they seem to make to FIRE sectors a lot less solid than the manufacturing successes of the others.
Indeed, if the twenty-first century has been a less than thoroughly booming period for Germany and Japan, just as it has generally been for the advanced industrialized nations, or for that matter the world at large, it seems possible to say that those who argued for Germany and Japan as sowing the seeds for manufacturing success in a way that the U.S. and Britain were not--for all the limits to their understanding of what Germany and Japan were actually doing--can claim at least some validation from how things have actually gone this century.
Still, for all its failings it was an acknowledgment that the "American way" of doing things was not necessarily perfect, that the country may have had some things to learn from others in the manufacturing field on which Americans had long prided themselves as the world's leaders (for a long time, very justly), and that perhaps change was called for. Of course, such concerns came to seem passé amid the tech boom, amid Eurosclerosis and Japan's "lost decade," but a generation on the situation looks rather different from how it did in the mainstream's "vacation from reality" of the late '90s.
In fairness, neither Germany nor Japan did so well as some hoped and some feared they would do. Germany gained less by reunification than some expected. Japan's "lost decade" turned into a "lost generation." And indeed, recently considering the implications of a devotion of a larger portion of their Gross Domestic Product to defense spending it seemed to me worth pointing out that the two countries are, in terms of their weight in the world's economic life and power potential relative to others, a long way from where they had been circa 1995 (when an Eamonn Fingleton could make the case for Japan's becoming the biggest economy on Earth by the end of the decade, and get Bill Clinton's own endorsement on the dust jacket of the book in which he made that case).
Still, the two countries have had their successes--not least in that manufacturing arena. Germany proved itself a force to be reckoned with here, as made clear by any look at the list of the world's "hidden champions"--while it fostered the development of an economic "greater Germany" across Central and Eastern Europe that has given it the scale of a superpower in this sphere (the more in as it enables it to leverage the still-larger European Union in its preferred direction), all of which has compelled Anglosphere commentators of even the most sneering type to show some respect. Japan does not seem to have done much less well. (We talk about who is installing the most industrial robots, but would do well to remember that Japan is the number one builder of those robots, accounting for almost half the global production. And while microchips are talked about as "the new oil," it is worth remembering which country leads in making the silicon wafers and photoresist chemicals and any number of other products essential to chipmaking--Japan again.) Indeed, when one controls for their demographic profiles, adjusting the figures for their working-age populations, one finds that in the twenty-first century Germany was actually faster-growing than the U.S. or Britain, and Japan did about as well as those two states. By contrast the dominant trend in those years has (in the case of the U.S., in spite of the lift it got from its immense defense spending and its shale boom), generally been a matter of a stagnant or eroding manufacturing base (in Britain's case, fairly steadily eroding since the financial crisis of 2007), as they owe such gains as they seem to make to FIRE sectors a lot less solid than the manufacturing successes of the others.
Indeed, if the twenty-first century has been a less than thoroughly booming period for Germany and Japan, just as it has generally been for the advanced industrialized nations, or for that matter the world at large, it seems possible to say that those who argued for Germany and Japan as sowing the seeds for manufacturing success in a way that the U.S. and Britain were not--for all the limits to their understanding of what Germany and Japan were actually doing--can claim at least some validation from how things have actually gone this century.
Centrism and the Debates of the Early '90s
To those old enough to remember the period the early '90s can seem like a time of relatively vigorous public debate in the U.S. over the country's economic and social life, certainly compared with what came afterward. Indeed, Emmanuel Todd speaks of debate over the economy in the U.S. having come to an end in 1995, which exactly matches my personal memory of the time.
Still, considering that debate critically in recent years I have been struck by just how limited that debate was--and indeed, limited in very specific ways, conducted according to the centrist pattern in the neoliberal and rightward-moving America of the '90s. Four featurs of that pattern stand out in my memory as particularly relevant, namely
1. A hostility to big picture, theoretically-informed, systemic thinking, and indeed a disapproval of those who find connections between one thing and another and important realities beneath the surface. All of this reduces the problems of our collective life from, for example, the failings of an economic system to a handful of disconnected concrete problems to be separately treated. (One can speak of, for example, the problem of housing or health care--but one had best leave the economic system out of the discussion.)
2. A view of politics as properly "pluralist," "pragmatic" and "civil," which means that ethical judgments about such matters as inequality and injustice are not welcome--society instead a collection of interests all assumed to be equally legitimate, and none of which are assumed to have more power than the others. (Significantly the claims of the poor have no moral weight than those of the rich, of workers no more than those of investors, while the question of whether corporate interests have too much power is treated as flat-earthism. Equally one had better be very careful about accusing anyone of bad faith--for instance, using junk science to advance an anti-consumer or anti-environmental agenda.) Given equal legitimacy, the only way is compromise (with, again, no one asking questions about whether the course taken is right or wrong from an ethical perspective or even the standpoint of "solving the problem," or worrying about whether the "consensus" by which the centrist sets so much store is not simply the powerful doing what they want and then saying it's what everyone wants).
3. In line with all of the above, an inclination toward minimalism in the address of said issues--opting for course adjustment rather than deeper reform. (If the job report is disappointing adjusting monetary policy to make lending to investors cheaper is one thing--but a public employment program that must be paid for with taxes is something taken much less lightly, so much so that even in the "Keynesian" era there was very little of this.) And finally,
4. The necessity of excluding anyone not accepting these rules from the discourse as an "ideologue" and an "extremist"--with the interpretation of those rules typically hitting the left, its conventional wisdom being, as none other than Irving Kristol remarked, that ideology is a leftist failing and not a conservative one.
Thus was it not only that capitalism was not up for discussion as such, but, amid a popular backlash against neoliberalism, neither was that version of it (the term little used by non-academics at this time, and virtually unheard of in the mainstream press). Thus was it that one heard of factories closing, but only rarely heard of "deindustrialization"; one heard about, for example, other countries handling their manufacturing bases differently, but less often of "industrial policy" as such, and this typically as an exotic and un-American notion with which many quite rightly said we ought have naught to do.
Likewise, while one heard complaints that the policies of the Reagan era had made "the rich richer, the poor poorer," talk of a more equal or fairer society tended to be hazy, especially in relation to many of the more concrete matters. The concern for America's perceived failings in "education" had less to do with the right of individual to develop, or equalize economic opportunity, but rather "competitiveness." So did it also go in health care, where, if it was impossible to wholly overlook the tens, even hundreds, of millions whose needs were being unmet, a prime issue was the drag that a bloated insurance sector and high bills imposed on employers and the economy at large relative to America's foreign competitors. One might add that the squeamishness about calling out the agendas of the rich and powerful was very much in evidence here, as in that matter of education--virtually no one pointing out that panic over failing schools was a matter of blaming supposedly gold-bricking or incompetent schoolteachers and kids "too lazy" to study engineering in college so as to avoid blaming the investors and executives who preferred speculation to "real economy" investment, chasing cheap labor abroad to raising productivity at home, etc., etc.; while often being a cover for the crush-the-teacher's-unions-and-privatize-everything crowd (whose agenda became so mainstream that a Democratic administration made it its first order of business in the Netflix remake of the BBC's House of Cards).
And of course those same centrist traits were evident in the slightness of the proposed remedies, reflected in a comparison of Bill Clinton's record with Jimmy Carter's sixteen years earlier. Carter delivered a stimulus package in his first month in office that expanded the public employment program he inherited from Republican Richard Nixon, and signed a Full Employment Act into law. By contrast Bill Clinton treated a comparable stimulus package as so large and radical a policy that his supporters were asked to choose between it and his health care plan (which he failed completely to deliver, and never tried to deliver again), while anything like Nixon's public employment program, let alone the Full Employment Act (which was admittedly not respected by the Carter administration, and dead by the Reagan era) was not even to be talked about.
As all this implied the dialogue was thoroughly bounded indeed, with not only the left that the centrist has always treated as the prime enemy shut out of the dialogue, but what had even been plausible for the center-right a mere fifteen years earlier (as, again, one sees when looking at Nixon's policies, and remembers that Carter was from the more conservative wing of his own party). Indeed, it does not seem unfair to say that the dialogue came down to a debate between plain old enthusiastic neoliberals, and more grudging neoliberals who tempered their neoliberalism with a bit of pragmatic economic nationalism. Clinton showed the latter face on the election trail--and in office, consistently acted the former, crowing in his administration's Reinventing Government reports that "the era of big government is over" in the most Reaganite conceivable language. In short, the change was really no change at all. And that can only make the skeptic wonder just how much substance there really was to that debate--if it was not indeed a pseudo-debate, in the end only underlining the sheer force of the neoliberal turn at the time, and what that may mean for us now as some talk of life beyond that model in a world where, love it or hate it, there is no denying the fact of the model's grinding on ever more creakily and painfully, without serious indications that the world's muddling its way toward anything else as yet.
Still, considering that debate critically in recent years I have been struck by just how limited that debate was--and indeed, limited in very specific ways, conducted according to the centrist pattern in the neoliberal and rightward-moving America of the '90s. Four featurs of that pattern stand out in my memory as particularly relevant, namely
1. A hostility to big picture, theoretically-informed, systemic thinking, and indeed a disapproval of those who find connections between one thing and another and important realities beneath the surface. All of this reduces the problems of our collective life from, for example, the failings of an economic system to a handful of disconnected concrete problems to be separately treated. (One can speak of, for example, the problem of housing or health care--but one had best leave the economic system out of the discussion.)
2. A view of politics as properly "pluralist," "pragmatic" and "civil," which means that ethical judgments about such matters as inequality and injustice are not welcome--society instead a collection of interests all assumed to be equally legitimate, and none of which are assumed to have more power than the others. (Significantly the claims of the poor have no moral weight than those of the rich, of workers no more than those of investors, while the question of whether corporate interests have too much power is treated as flat-earthism. Equally one had better be very careful about accusing anyone of bad faith--for instance, using junk science to advance an anti-consumer or anti-environmental agenda.) Given equal legitimacy, the only way is compromise (with, again, no one asking questions about whether the course taken is right or wrong from an ethical perspective or even the standpoint of "solving the problem," or worrying about whether the "consensus" by which the centrist sets so much store is not simply the powerful doing what they want and then saying it's what everyone wants).
3. In line with all of the above, an inclination toward minimalism in the address of said issues--opting for course adjustment rather than deeper reform. (If the job report is disappointing adjusting monetary policy to make lending to investors cheaper is one thing--but a public employment program that must be paid for with taxes is something taken much less lightly, so much so that even in the "Keynesian" era there was very little of this.) And finally,
4. The necessity of excluding anyone not accepting these rules from the discourse as an "ideologue" and an "extremist"--with the interpretation of those rules typically hitting the left, its conventional wisdom being, as none other than Irving Kristol remarked, that ideology is a leftist failing and not a conservative one.
Thus was it not only that capitalism was not up for discussion as such, but, amid a popular backlash against neoliberalism, neither was that version of it (the term little used by non-academics at this time, and virtually unheard of in the mainstream press). Thus was it that one heard of factories closing, but only rarely heard of "deindustrialization"; one heard about, for example, other countries handling their manufacturing bases differently, but less often of "industrial policy" as such, and this typically as an exotic and un-American notion with which many quite rightly said we ought have naught to do.
Likewise, while one heard complaints that the policies of the Reagan era had made "the rich richer, the poor poorer," talk of a more equal or fairer society tended to be hazy, especially in relation to many of the more concrete matters. The concern for America's perceived failings in "education" had less to do with the right of individual to develop, or equalize economic opportunity, but rather "competitiveness." So did it also go in health care, where, if it was impossible to wholly overlook the tens, even hundreds, of millions whose needs were being unmet, a prime issue was the drag that a bloated insurance sector and high bills imposed on employers and the economy at large relative to America's foreign competitors. One might add that the squeamishness about calling out the agendas of the rich and powerful was very much in evidence here, as in that matter of education--virtually no one pointing out that panic over failing schools was a matter of blaming supposedly gold-bricking or incompetent schoolteachers and kids "too lazy" to study engineering in college so as to avoid blaming the investors and executives who preferred speculation to "real economy" investment, chasing cheap labor abroad to raising productivity at home, etc., etc.; while often being a cover for the crush-the-teacher's-unions-and-privatize-everything crowd (whose agenda became so mainstream that a Democratic administration made it its first order of business in the Netflix remake of the BBC's House of Cards).
As all this implied the dialogue was thoroughly bounded indeed, with not only the left that the centrist has always treated as the prime enemy shut out of the dialogue, but what had even been plausible for the center-right a mere fifteen years earlier (as, again, one sees when looking at Nixon's policies, and remembers that Carter was from the more conservative wing of his own party). Indeed, it does not seem unfair to say that the dialogue came down to a debate between plain old enthusiastic neoliberals, and more grudging neoliberals who tempered their neoliberalism with a bit of pragmatic economic nationalism. Clinton showed the latter face on the election trail--and in office, consistently acted the former, crowing in his administration's Reinventing Government reports that "the era of big government is over" in the most Reaganite conceivable language. In short, the change was really no change at all. And that can only make the skeptic wonder just how much substance there really was to that debate--if it was not indeed a pseudo-debate, in the end only underlining the sheer force of the neoliberal turn at the time, and what that may mean for us now as some talk of life beyond that model in a world where, love it or hate it, there is no denying the fact of the model's grinding on ever more creakily and painfully, without serious indications that the world's muddling its way toward anything else as yet.
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