The STEM Fetishists

Given the way that most people's understanding of the word "fetish" has, as with so many words, apparently vanished save for the term's sexual sense it seems fair to speak of other, more fundamental meanings from which the term derives. What is most relevant here is (using the word choices the authors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary employ in their definition) an object's commanding an "irrational," "obsessive," "extravagant" and often "superstitious" devotion because they believe it has powers that can only be described as "magical." (In line with this basis the term in its sexual sense likewise refers to irrational and extreme fixation on an object which might be in a looser sense described as having "magical" qualities for the devotee.)

So does it go with many of those who rant ceaselessly about STEM--Science, Technology, Engineering, Math--education. Their rhetoric implies that producing enough STEM majors guarantees industrial success, and that a lack of industrial success is a result of not having enough STEM graduates. One thing must lead to the other--magically.

This reflects the fact that they do indeed think about the economy in magical terms--as believers in the "magic of the market" who see no need for any such thing as (are indeed, ferociously hostile to) the industrial policy that has always been necessary to translate skilled labor, and other resources, into actual industrial development. The view of the world in question has the advantage of simplicity, as the more popular forms of magical thinking tend to do, while its adherents find it easier, safer and frankly more satisfying to blame the nation's industrial woes on presumably lazy or incompetent teachers and students than the policymakers who set the rules of the economic game in line with the desires of those who want the economy to be nothing but a colossal casino of the kind that pays so well for the rich, and so poorly for everyone else--in part because the latter are endlessly required to do so by the Timothy Geitners and Larry Summerses and Ben Bernankes to cover the losses of the former "for their own good.