From Politics to Porcelain

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

–John Adams

Think of the market as a set of magnets, pulling people into dense clusters. 80 percent of the population of the US lives in a large city’s metropolitan area, and the top 10 metropolitan areas alone account for a quarter of the population. Cities like Chicago and New York pull people not only from all over the country, but from all over the world. As new people are born and raised in each metropolitan area, the market sorts out where their skills would best be put to use. If it’s somewhere other than where they are, the magnet is engaged to pull them to the new destination.

People are not only pulled towards locations, but towards careers and towards investing in particular skillsets.

The actual mechanism in the place of the figurative magnets is not always as straightforward as offering more money to live in one place than another, or to take one career track over another, but it often is. There are other things, too, such as what professional development courses and training your current employer is willing to pay for you to take.

Taking as my inspiration the John Adams quote at the top of this post, I’m going to argue that the mechanisms the market uses to pull people into particular locations and career paths grow weaker as a population grows wealthier.

Where Have All the STEM Majors Gone?

It’s a disconcerting question for many an analyst of education in the US–why are we graduating so few majors in science, technology, engineering, and math? Alex Tabarrok has the numbers:

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

Anyone can see that the average computer science major is going to make more money than the average visual arts major. The market has engaged the magnets and students aren’t budging.

Education isn’t the only area where the magnets’ strength are waning. According to the New York Times:

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit.

What is going on?

Lower Stakes, Greater Sacrifice

Let’s compare two hypothetical individuals, Tom and Harry. Tom is a 20 year old living 50 years ago, and Harry is a 20 year old today. My general hypothesis is that there are lower stakes for Harry’s decisions than for Tom’s, and that anything which requires a great deal of time and effort requires Harry to give up more than Tom had to.

Let’s consider Harry first. In the immediate term, he has an enormous amount of options for how to spend his time. There’s cable TV, the internet, video games; a whole myriad of stuff. Any field of study that takes up a lot of his time means giving up time doing any of that. As Tabarrok described, the average individual like Harry today chooses majors that not only demand less of his time–thus giving him more time to play video games–but are also enjoyable in themselves, such as the visual arts. After college, if he can’t get a job in anything resembling what he majored in, he can probably live with his parents, where he’ll still be able to enjoy many of the things he was already doing with his free time.

Now consider Tom. Sure, he probably had access to TV, but it wasn’t as pervasive as it is today, and it had like three channels. There were no video games, there was no internet or web; there weren’t even personal computers. If he picked a major that was a dud in the marketplace, maybe he could live with his parents–though he was less likely on average than Harry to be able to, as parents today are much wealthier than parents were fifty years ago–but what would he do there? Fifty years ago you needed more money to be able to get anything approaching the level of options that Harry has available almost by default.

Consider the different stakes: if Tom doesn’t get his career going, he becomes a burden on a family that might not be able to afford it, and he is also probably bored out of his mind and increasingly isolated. Harry, on the other hand, is much more likely to have parents who can afford that burden, and he has much more to do while he lives with them. He can entertain himself, and he can talk to people online; you may argue that the latter isn’t as fulfilling as in-person socializing, but it’s far less lonely than having no one to talk to.

Now consider what each has to give up by pursuing a STEM career: Harry loses out on hours of gaming, movies, TV, browsing the web, talking to people on Twitter, and so on. Tom doesn’t have any of that to lose.

The decline in the portion of men who are employed has been a secular trend for decades.

It has been hidden in the general population employment ratio because of the entering of women into the workforce. Note, however, that though the portion of women who are employed has grown, it still has never reached the level that men have fallen to now, during a soft labor market.

The good news is that we are so wealthy as a society that fewer men need to work than they used to. The bad news is that our wealth is making it harder to convince people to do the difficult work required to make the kinds of material breakthroughs that people in the STEM fields are able to make. It has likewise grown harder to convince them to move away from their friends and family in order to go to the city where their particular skillset might have the greatest impact.

Studying Porcelain

John Adams was right–the mathematical, architectural, and commercial know-how of our ancestors has made it possible for more of us to study poetry and comparative literature. When people are bemoaning the lack of STEM majors and labor mobility, they should remember that the whole point of wealth is to provide us with more options. If someone is more satisfied spending their time reading and writing fiction rather than learning statistics or trigonometry, there is nothing wrong with that. They can increase our overall wealth just as much as a scientist can, if they produce things that are valued by a lot of other people.

On the other hand, it takes STEM skillsets to cure cancer or build self-driving cars, and the per-capita amount of people with those skillsets continues to fall in this country.

Still, I’m not too concerned. The vast majority of the world is nowhere near as wealthy as we are. Engineers, programmers, and chemists are being trained in unprecedented numbers in countries like China and India, and for the most part the whole world will benefit from their advances. As those countries grow wealthier, they’ll experience the same phenomena, but we’ll still be talking about enormous numbers of people with STEM skillsets. And we’re a long ways off from the developing world reaching a level of wealth comparable to the US or Western Europe.

Semi-Related Reading:

Comments

10 responses to “From Politics to Porcelain”

May 10, 2012

A Generic User

Very, interesting post. I was wondering are you taking into account how the internet is making information more readily available? This makes a costly degree less valuable. If someone can learn something like programming from a free online community, why should they pay for a piece of paper? I have not graduated yet, but I’m less than a semester away. However, I have learned to program better than a significant number of people who finished their degree already. I have programmed with a lot of people, who recently graduated with BS’s in Computer Science, and I find myself wondering if they ever really took the time to learn programming skills.

P.S. I decided to slow down at school because I had a great job offer, and I am still at that company.

1. May 10, 2012
  
  AdamGurri
  
  So the debate around the role of education–whether it’s to actually learn real, applicable skills or whether it’s just to signal you’re a certain sort of person–complicates the evidence I present here, but my theory still basically stands.
  
  Let’s assume a future where everyone in a STEM career doesn’t bother with college at all, but does some kind of self-teaching/online learning that doesn’t even give them a diploma or certificate of any sort. Learning those skills still means investing a lot of your time in it, though maybe less time than is arguably wasted in the course of getting a college degree. The analysis still remains the same–Harry still faces a higher opportunity cost for that time than Tom would have. And he still faces lower stakes pushing him towards making a more practical choice.
  
  1. May 10, 2012
    
    A Generic User
    
    I can agree with the point of higher opportunity cost for Harry. Maybe the solution is combining activities. For example, learn program through video game development.
    
    1. May 10, 2012
      
      AdamGurri
      
      I think online learning is definitely a good start–anything we can do to lower the cost of getting technical skills is a step in the right direction. ESPECIALLY if we can lower the cost in terms of time required.
      
May 10, 2012

Peter Van Valkenburgh

Very well thought-out post. One thing that occurred to me though is how we can apply Bryan Caplan’s typical intellectual elitism to call this a complete non-issue.

The old (which now means like 1980s-old — like ….!? us!) model of technology and education is that we should educate everyone so that there are more individuals positioned to make the big discoveries that will change the future so beneficently.

The background assumption here seems to be that world-shifting innovation is something that randomly descends upon a base-level educated individual within society, and that this fortuitous event happens with some statistical regularity. Accordingly, brilliant inventions are rare but occur indiscriminately within the population of STEM-educated people and these inventions appear regularly through time — measured by aggregate moments of individual effort rather than time in an absolute sense.

The basic metaphor is that some Greek god is playing a game of darts. She is able to throw an unlimited number of darts within a given time period, but the number of darts available to her depends on the number of people who go to college (or self-educate) for STEM. Bulls-eyes are brilliant new inventions that push humanity to greater welfare.

If this was how innovation happened, then yes, we should worry about under-investment in STEM education. We are depleting the God’s supply of darts and over time we will get fewer bulls-eyes.

But, what if most darts (even after STEM training) are just never going to hit a bulls-eye? They have dull points, bent shafts, or mangy feather fletches.

And what if there were always only a handful of really sharp darts. And what if they usually self-identified and DID find their way to a proper education regardless of the economic trade-offs or cultural climate.

If you recognize yourself as a potentially very sharp dart then the possible gains from a hugely successful invention still vastly out-weigh the marginal increase in comfort from TV, Video Games and the like.

Essentially, If we accept that (A) the sort of people who are capable of great innovation as compared to the general population is a power distribution. AND (B) people in the top of that distribution have always and will always self-select, work hard, and position themselves for a lightening strike of innovation. Then what do we care what the rest of the population studies? Basket-weaving is great if it keeps them happy and non-violent.

I see this as a valid Caplanian critique of your theory. Thoughts?

———————————–
More generally:

Even the French think that Adams is silly:

Also: on the decline in male employment (and perhaps marriageability) “Where have all the men Gone” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html

And a more amusing look at Men becoming “Guys.” The always hilarious Dave Barry http://www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Barry%20-%20Guys%20vs%20Men.html

1. May 10, 2012
  
  AdamGurri
  
  I think this is a very real possibility, and I also think this isn’t so much a critique of my theory; the two can be harmonized.
  
  Consider: Tom may not have been a sharp dart. But because of the scenario he was in, as described above, he still applied himself to get a STEM degree, even though he ultimately ended up not making it in a STEM career at all; he ended up as a salesman or a mid-level manager in a big corporation, or something.
  
  This is why, while I think there’s probably something to my theory, I’m not sure that it implies anything has gotten worse. It could be that fewer important breakthroughs are being made. Or it could be that most of the drop in per capita STEM degrees is made up of people who couldn’t have made it in those fields anyway.
  
December 27, 2012

Joakim

I think the case Peter put forth is the reality, ie the inventors who come up with the breakthroughs are self-selected and the number of STEM degrees is an irrelevant distraction. Further, I’d posit that the bottleneck has not been inventions for a long time now: it’s the ability to weave together disparate strands of information in this information economy and come up with original analysis. The poster boy today might be Steve Jobs: he never got a STEM degree or wrote a line of code, yet he was able to integrate insights in business, media, and tech to great success at both Pixar and Apple. That is the truly rare skill these days, the ability to learn about different fields and integrate that knowledge together to reach original insights, like what to make the latest Pixar movie about and when to launch the iPad.

As for your case that Harry has a lot more to do with his free time and a family with the income to indulge him, perhaps, but there is still a social stigma for such guys, as there was back then. What do these guys say to that now working woman they’re trying to hook up with, “I play video games and browse the web in my parents’ living room all day?” Doubt that works, so there’s still that impetus to get out and do something with their lives.

1. December 27, 2012
  
  AdamGurri
  
  I agree with your skepticism of the actual value of a STEM degree, but I was mostly using it as a simplifying proxy for something else. You can discard that and still ask the question: are the innovators a smaller proportion of the population than they used to be?
  
  It could be that they’re self-selecting etc, but why would the proportion (vs absolute number) of them decline over time? (If you believe such is the case, as I think there’s an argument to be made).
  
  And there may be social stigma, but if it’s the same as it was back then, and other costs of that behavior has fallen…then all else being equal, we would predict an increase in said home-dwelling video-gamers.
  
  1. December 27, 2012
    
    Joakim
    
    I see little indication that “the innovators [are] a smaller proportion of the population than they used to be.” Yes, we don’t have flying cars yet, but there is a great deal of innovation that goes into commercializing FinFETs at Intel or writing efficient code to organize the world’s information, with MapReduce at Google. As the knowledge frontier grows, the likelihood of finding an entirely new lode, a breakthrough, goes down, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t equally capable innovators today, mining existing veins and building on past discoveries.
    
    But you may also be right that a rich society grows self-satisfied and complacent, as an extremely high proportion of those tech innovators are imported from the poor Asian countries you mention. So the global proportion of innovators might not be declining, increasing in fact, but the American proportion could be declining, though I would question even that. And it’s not just that other costs of staying at home have fallen, the social stigma has probably also fallen over the years.
    
    I am similarly sanguine about these shifts, but perhaps for different reasons. As I said, the number of STEM degrees is irrelevant, because those skills are not the rare commodity these days. In fact, there’s likely going to be much more demand for Vimeo video producers and actors over the coming decades than for engineers, ie that visual arts degree may not be so useless after all. 😉
    
    1. December 27, 2012
      
      AdamGurri
      
      Clearly one day the majority of us will be porcelain majors.