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126 comments on Thursday Open Thread...

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Leanan on December 8, 2005 - 1:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yeah, I can't help wondering if all this outsourcing is going to come back to bite us.  Steel, cement, glass, plastic, fertilizer, aluminum, chemicals, semiconductors.  We're counting on the rest of the world to support us, while we become a "service economy."  I could foresee a future where we desperately want to build wind turbines, nuclear facilities, or solar panels, only we don't have the materials, and no one will sell them to us, being too busy building their own alternate energy infrastructure.  
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LevinK on December 8, 2005 - 2:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Forget about materials, human knowledge and expertise is lost. Anybody can tell me the ratio between lawyers and engineers graduating universities? I suspect it won't be very pretty... It might be a gross generalisation but IMHO whatever this country is producing/building is largely due to the ageing babyboomers generation and more recently on the imported cheap labor.
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TJ on December 8, 2005 - 3:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You just hit on one of HO's prime bitches since last March.  He was talking about the drilling end, but I think it's pretty generalized throughout all disciplines.
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adamdschneider on December 8, 2005 - 4:29pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ok, I was interested, so I dug up some numbers. The data is a little spotty, but I got it from the Digest of Education Statistics

The oldest and latest data for which engineering bachelor's degrees and graduate law degrees (LL.B and J.D.) overlap in the tables that I could see come from 1985-86 and 2000-01, respectively.

In 1985-86, we apparently graduated 35,844 lawyers and 77,391 engineers. In 2000-01 we graduated 37,904 lawyers and 58,315 engineers. Unless I'm a math doof--which is entirely possible--this represents a 5.75% increase in lawyers and a 24.65% reduction in engineers. The ratio between the two fell from 2.16:1 in favor of engineers to 1.54:1, still in favor of engineers. In other words, although the gap between them is shrinking, we still have more engineers than lawyers (although in my opinion we still have way too many lawyers).

However, I would like to caution you to look at the data yourself. That 1985-86 year seems to be an anomalous spike in the number of engineers. The stats seem to put the mode around 62k, making the 2000-01 decline only about 6%. Also, in the first year the table I used covers (1970-71), we graduated only about 45k engineers, making the 2000-01 year about a 22% improvement!

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copperweaver on December 8, 2005 - 4:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Does the data state if the graduates were american citizens?
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adamdschneider on December 8, 2005 - 4:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well, it does, but only for limited data sets.  The most recent data come from 2002-03, and state that out of a total of 62,611 graduating engineers, 4,291--or about 6.85%--were "nonresident aliens".
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LevinK on December 8, 2005 - 5:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hmmm very interesting statistics, thanks.
But I think we are looking at different data for the engineers. I think the right table is:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_282.asp

The engineers data is pretty much speaking for itself. With economy growth, the number of graduated engineers steadily grew to 97,099 until 1985-86, which by some coincidence is exactly 5 years after RR entered the White House.
Later we obviously decided that our economy does not need them because the number steadily drops to 77,267 in 2003, while in the same time the population and economy were supposedly growing.

The lawyers numbers stalled around 40K during the previous 15 years, which I interpret as the labor market was already too saturated with them.

But think of it this way. If in your company you have 30 people to project, build and maintain the buildings and the equipment, to design and monitor the production process, to solve production problems and to engineer new products and processes; and 20 people to prepare your documentation and to represent you in court (whom you pay twice as much as the other 30 people), I'd definately say that your company will not survive long.

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TJ on December 8, 2005 - 5:20pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I seem to recall seeing somewhere that China expects to graduate 400,000 engineers this year.
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Leanan on December 8, 2005 - 8:59pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I think China will kick our butts, scientifically.  In China, everyone learns calculus.  It's expected, just as everyone here is expected to learn how to drive.  (While here, we get "Math is hard" Barbie.)    

Plus, I suspect the next big thing will be genetic engineering, and we're at a huge disadvantage there.  We try to teach biology without talking about evolution, which is kind of like trying to teach physics without mentioning Newton's laws of motion.  And work with stem cells, cloning, etc., is blocked by the abortion issue.  The new Lysenkoism...

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LevinK on December 8, 2005 - 11:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
We try to teach biology without talking about evolution..

Sorry for my off-topic and lack of info about some ills of the day, but is this really being done now in schools?

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mikeB on December 9, 2005 - 5:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes.

I teach evolution vs creationism as a writing project in my university freshman comp. class.

When I inquire into my students' backgrounds, it turns out several have had no instruction in either Darwin or the Bible.

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Leanan on December 9, 2005 - 11:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes, and the reason is the "free market."  Textbook publishers must cater to the religious right, or lose a huge chunk of marketshare.  Basically, if Texas won't buy the books, it's not profitable to publish them.  So even communities where evolution is widely accepted find their choices limited.
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step back on December 9, 2005 - 12:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The "Invisible Hand" is once again providing the magical, optimal solution for all of us. In our society, greed-for-profits trumps over any notion of truth, justice and honor. The bottom line is therfore, that our system of free-for-all self-governance (the Adam Smith approach) forces us to swallow stupidity (Creationalism, Intelligent Drugsign) and to smile as we do it.
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adamdschneider on December 8, 2005 - 5:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ah, that's a much, much better table. I used table 250, which is all bachelor's degrees by division, so I didn't count master's or doctorate degrees in engineering, nor did I include engineering technologies, which would have boosted the engineering numbers significantly. Bottom line, anyone interested in the numbers should have a glance at them themselves.


However, we both agree that no matter how you shake the numbers we have too many lawyers. I tend to think we just have too much law. Our perpetual lawmakers just churn out too much paper. Some of the Founders were fearful of havign a standing army. Maybe they should have equally feared a standing legislature?

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Leanan on December 8, 2005 - 8:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The mid-'80s was brutal for engineers.  The economy was bad, and worse, they were cutting back government spending, including the military.  I don't know if my college was typical, but until then, 40% of engineers from my school got jobs in defense-related programs.  Either directly to the military via ROTC, or with defense contractors.  When they suddenly stopped hiring, it was a real shock.  Even people who got jobs found themselves laid off after six months.  

I suspect engineering was never the quite same after that.  

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step back on December 9, 2005 - 12:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Our "system" presents American college students with some tough tough choices:

A) Party, get drunk, and take basket weaving courses, or

B) Work your ass off day and night studying physics, chemistry, thermodynamics; miss all the parties and then when you graduate, you still won't get a job.

If you pick option A, you might become President of the USA or something like that. If you pick B, you probably will not be President of anything. Presidents need to know how to lie, smile, play golf, and manipulate other people into doing insane, unscientific things like believing "victory" is around the corner if only we pray harder and keep wishing upon that star, no matter who we are.

Doh !!!

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davidsmi on December 8, 2005 - 2:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
And Naval ships! I read not so long ago that nearly all of our new naval ships are being built outside the U.S. (though a quick google search didn't find anything specific). One wonders how the navy will deal with the coming resource wars under such a situation.
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astronomer1 on December 8, 2005 - 4:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
 Googling DDX destroyer construction reveals that the new DDX destroyers will be built by Northrop Grumman and/or General Dynamics.
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pat driscoll on December 8, 2005 - 5:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You may be confusing merchant ships with U.S. Navy vessels. According to the U.S. Maritime Administration, the U.S. ranks 6th in terms of ownership. Also, reviewing the World Order Book against the fleet Age Profile indicates world tanker construction is barely keeping up with replacing aging vessels, much less growing to accomodate any increase in oil supply.
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126 comments on Thursday Open Thread...

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