Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

"We can no longer take America's scientific and technological pre-eminence for granted... the United States ranks 17th among nations surveyed in the share of 18 to 24-year-olds who earn natural science and engineering degrees."

That's been true for 20 or 30 years now, hasn't it?

Every time I see this type of article I am reminded of the debates during the last governors
race in Mass. The libertarian candidate ended her speech with the comments that the private sector, not the government, invented the semiconductor and the internet. Maybe worse than this is that none of the other 4 candidates on the stage knew enough to call her on that statement by pointing out that semis were developed by NASA and the internet by the Pentagon.

Hoy, whatever came of Intelligent Transport Systems any way? Or IVHS Intelligent Vehicle and Highway Systems?

The culture has really changed...

DARPA has changed substantially under Dr Tether's watch. From being mostly focusted towards long term research, it is now being focused towards short-term development. Since most of the development is for items directly usable by the DoD, alot more funding has become classified-only.

"We know we're in trouble when the main funder of academic computer security research is the National Science Foundation"

oOPS, Spencer. Semiconductors were invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

I think bright young students are rational economic actors. They see the writing on the wall. Engineers, biological scientists, and chemists can all be outsourced these days. Speaking as a Phd in molecular neurobiology from the Salk institute, you would be against your own economic best interest these days to get a Phd in any kind of biology. Faculty positions are few and far between, grants are a winner take all scheme where a few get lots and most get none, and biotech has been in a severe prolonged jobs drought for the last 4 years, with no sign of recovery in sight. I don't blame all of them for going into law, real estate, and financial services.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a Phd political scientist at a cal state university, whose father was an MD researcher in the 1940s and 1950s. At that time public sector researchers got paid equivalently or more than clinicians. Now, as a researcher you not only get a very poor base salary, but are dependent upon winning competitive external funding sources for your salary, your lab, and your job. It's not that there is a lack of bright kids interested in science. It's that we as a society are increasingly not willing to pay for them to do what they are trained to do. Foreign postdocs are not usually better trained or harder working than americans. But they are willing to work for less, since they don't have other opportunities to make more money, by, say selling cars or real estate.

Chuck's right about Bell Labs, though the lab itself was the result of the massive profits at AT&T (disbursement of which was limited by pricing and rate of return regulation), which allowed it to fund the nearly pure-science lab.

Creating a monopoly wasn't the best way for the government to fund basic R&D, but given the big positive externalities and spillovers, it may have still been a net positive move.

Non-Economist: the data just don't support your claim that outsourcing is to blame. Outsourcing is a fairly small part of the decline in jobs whereas the decline in science degrees -- apart from a surge during the tech boom -- is a long-run trend that has occured in tandem with a shift in federal funds from basic to applied research.

AB

I think a lot of students just... y'know, don't want to do that much science. Even if they get a low paying job, or the U.S. loses it's technological lead, that might not be a bad thing if they're really a lot happier being, say, somewhat poor historians. Not that all revealed preferences are just, good, and optimal, but sometimes they are.

Seems like you've been having an unusually familial blog week, Brad. First you link to your dad, then you link to your cousin.

"Non-Economist: the data just don't support your claim that outsourcing is to blame. Outsourcing is a fairly small part of the decline in jobs whereas the decline in science degrees -- apart from a surge during the tech boom -- is a long-run trend that has occured in tandem with a shift in federal funds from basic to applied research.

AB"

Typical of an academic economist with no real world experience. If I have to pay upwards of $140,000 for an education, you damn well bet I'm going to study a subject I have some chance of getting a job in when I graduate. The company I work for recently signed a contract for IT development with a company in the Phillipines, thereby bypassing American workers and there high salaries. This is a real world fact. The company could have hired Americans, but they chose not to. I myself am setting up some data so some work can be outsourced, and I expect to lose my job soon. So AB take your data points and stick 'em.

Thanks for the comment AB. I didn't mean to imply that outsourcing was entirely responsible, but I can see how one might have come to that conclusion. I find your analysis that the change is linked to a change in funding priorities, from basic to applied research to be very interesting. However, science still attracts lots of bright people who go into it for the love of the discipline. But when we are comparing a career in biotechnology to having an equal long term career potential as, say a career in history, we are not going to see a lot of dynamic, bright movers and shakers go into the field.

After all, as people who post here know, most scientists are rational economic actors as well, and when they realize that they will have to work twice as hard with little long term stability for half the pay, why should we expect a 'first world' scientific infrastructure anyways?

Wow, your cousin invented Google *and* Inktomi. Amazing. ;)

Under the administration's most recent budget proposal, science funding in 21 out of 24 agencies would be cut over the next five years.

Given that they have all the answers, this is understandable

"Given that they have all the answers, this is understandable"
LOL

The semi was invented at Bell, but it was NASA money that first took it from a lab experiment to practical use.

All,
This reminds me of the focus taken at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in DC last month. After a short discussion on discretionary spending in the '05 budget, there was an enormous amount of handwringing over the lack of funding for research that would yield such long-developing technology advances as Google. By "starving the beast", we end up starving US innovation.

It's a bit hard to worry about a lack of graduate engineers when we still have 30% of our third graders failing arithmetic and reading.

To the extent that leaving the children behind is a rational strategy -- and that we should focus on economic incentives that divert a larger share of competent young adult college students toward engineering : what fields shoud we divert these folks AWAY from?

Medicine? Better that we research chips than cells?

Law? Better that we focus on material structures than social ones?

Just a thought: How many folks here would agree increased scholarships for engineering students should be funded by abolishing all gov't financial support to students of divinity, theology, etc?

Did your cousin Tom Kalil grow up in Madison?

ARPA's credit for founding the Internet is grossly over-rated.

The technology of ARPAnet was essentially the same as the technology of Digital Equipment Corporation's "Usenet," (not the same as the Usenet "mail" newtwork that exists today.) a serice made available to all DEC customers.

At the time when ARPAnet had seven nodes in 1971, and I was roughly user number 300, DEC's Usenet had about 400 nodes and perhaps 10,000 users, a difference of two orders of magnitude.

The main contractor for both at the time was Bolt, Beranek and Newman, today's BBN, and it has always been my suspicion that ARPAnet was Dick Bolt's clever ruse to get Joe Lickleider to pay a second time for a bunch of stuff that he'd already sold to DEC.

The problem with government funded R&D is that it enables high-tech, capital intensive firms to profit at taxpayer expense. That means that government-created incentives encourage the adoption of such forms of production beyond Pareto optimal levels, and that corporations disproportionally engaged in such forms of production profit at the expense of low-tech, labor intensive forms of production.

Don't you think government subsidies to such shifts in production technology have a lot to do with the manufacturing sector's massive downsizings in the '90s, and the technological unemployment that goes with it?

As Chomsky put it, it's an example of the taxpayers paying to screw themselves.

To William Verick:

He is, indeed, the Tom Kalil who grew up in Madison in the late 70's (unless there was more than one). Many of us who Knew Him When are still a little boggled at how he turned out.

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