STEM, jobs, education, modernity

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics.  STEM, by the acronym.  The acronym is actually pretty good – short, makes an actual word, uses only the first letters of each word.  It is an acronym that abounds in print these days.  We need more people who know STEM in the workplace, some ungodly fraction of new jobs will be in STEM, America is not producing enough STEM people so we need to import them.  (Google the subject for any number of articles.)

Are these statements accurate?  If not, who would benefit from providing such inaccuracies?

To address these questions, we first need to know what is so special about people who pursue STEM, at any level.  The answer, often times, is nothing (despite what Internet pundits and commenters would have us believe).  Many who study STEM fields at college (be it at the bachelors level, associates level, or certification) are simply in it because of the job prospects.  While we are often told that majoring in a STEM field requires logical thinking and huge amounts of skill, most actual jobs in STEM do not actually require them and many jobs outside of STEM do.  Computer-aided drafting (CAD), running a premade mass spectrometer, depositing thin films, performing PCR amplifications, and numerous other industrial tasks require one to push buttons and flip switches – not any more complicated than, say, running the espresso machine at Starbuck’s.  Most of the jobs in STEM are not creative, knowledge worker jobs; they are jobs that we simply do not have robots to perform yet.  (As a note, some jobs in research do require more knowledge and critical thinking, and most require a Ph.D. or equivalent.  Though, in my opinion and experience, many jobs that list a Ph.D. as a requirement do not actually require such high-level skills.)  

Employment and wage data shows no clear lack of STEM individuals in the labor force.  What may be lacking is people willing to do STEM related jobs at low wages, or people willing to do STEM “grunt work” as described above.  We are all told that we should search for fulfillment in our work and should want to get ahead and advance, but many of these STEM jobs simply do not offer that and many are boring and repetitive – the same problems that data entry and fast food workers encounter.  The only way past this is to brainwash young people into thinking STEM jobs are awesome, exciting, so difficult that no one else can do them, and one way to accomplish this is through media claims of shortages and lies about work quality enjoyed by STEM employees.

Another reason for this rhetoric is to push young people away from studying non-STEM fields, such as literature and history.  (The majority of literature, history, etc. majors would be able, with minimal training, to perform the basics of many STEM tasks, and many STEM majors would be able to perform human resources and accounting tasks given the opportunity.  The economy even agrees, http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/)  Much study of the humanities and social sciences these days focuses on parts of the so-called liberal agenda – oppression, privilege, cultural relativism.  From a humanist standpoint, knowing about these aspects of society and being able to identify them is important.  It is important for informed voters to know, for example, that “traditional marriage” cannot be defined in a pluralistic society.  From a business standpoint, employees knowing such information can lead to complaints of sexual harassment and gender suppression, complaints about wages and compensation fairness, complaints about the company’s environmental record, and other similar undesirables.  Most engineering and technology curricula do not dwell on these aspects (they are more interested in “pure” information) and thus corporations prefer people who have studied them.  Note that this argument goes hand in hand with some recent pushes to remove diversity requirements from the requirements for a bachelor’s degree (required in some form at most institutions of higher learning).  

Should there be a place for people only interested in job training?  Certainly.  We should have some schools dedicated to pure technical training for those who want it – as well as apprenticeship programs and the like.  We should remove the stigma associated with this choice – currently, white-collar, office jobs that usually have a bachelors’s degree as a requirement are seen as “good jobs” whereas service-based and low education, technical jobs are seen as lesser.  This needs to change, as well as the pay scales for such jobs which are often not correlated with true economic productivity.  However, I think that people should also be encouraged to continue learning, even if outside of a traditional academic institution.

Would we be better off as a society if we focused on job training instead of broad, liberal education in college and high school, or limited such study to those able to pass certain tests at a certain age (as is the case in many other developed countries)?  That depends on how “better off” is defined.  We might be more efficient at work tasks, and be more compliant, and suffer less boredom at work – largely because ignorance is bliss and we would not think about life alternatives.  Maybe most people would be happier in this scenario, but most people would not be living up to, or even trying to live up to, their potential.  For a peaceful society at our current stage this might not be a problem, since we do not have the resources for everyone to be as productive as they could possibly be. 

I do not know if this is a problem or not.  I do know that people with knowledge across the spectrum of academic disciplines are more interesting to interact with, and the existence of many people with that quality increase my personal quality of life.  I can not say for certain that it is the same for everybody.  We, as a society, do have the resources and the privilege to be able to educate most people beyond simply what they need to know to do a certain job.  We would not be operating at maximum economic efficiency, but sometimes that seems like a small price to pay for opportunity and knowledge.

Guns

This post has been inspired by a friend’s question on Facebook, the response to which is simply too long to post on a comments thread.  The question was how to reduce (or stop) gun violence in the United States, in response to the numerous recent shootings.  I am not sure that I have a good, working answer – it is a complicated problem that requires cultural change that will not happen over night.  However, I can add some discussion of the problems and think about what needs to change.

Gun violence will disappear if nobody has guns.  That much is certain, almost by definition.  (As a note, guns are not a tool, and I will not entertain the possibility that they are.  They have no useful purpose beyond maiming, likely to the point of death.  This is not like a knife, hammer, screwdriver, ax, etc. all of which, though weaponizable, have useful purposes beyond hurting another individual – within which I categorize hunted nonhuman animals.)  however, complete eradication of guns in the US is politically and culturally (with the understanding that politics and culture are highly intertwined in a democratic society) infeasible.  What makes people, fairly ordinary people, want to own a gun?  We can gain some insight by looking at the arguments people use for gun ownership.  The number one (well, only) reason why a supposedly law-abiding citizen needs a gun is protection – one needs a gun to defend one’s self, family and property from others who do not respect rights to life, property and ownership.  This reason is indicative of large-scale distrust – not only in one’s fellow humans (though the untrustworthy ones generally belong to a different demographic, to put it as vaguely as possible) who will apparently attack one for no reason, but also in the system (i.e. Government) which fails to protect against such violations.  We end up with much unneeded violence because people see threats everywhere (but especially from people known to be untrustworthy, such as those with a different skin tone or accent) take a shoot-first attitude, backed up by laws supporting such action.  I will note the hypocrisy in a lot of incidents, such as one in Boulder soon after I moved here, or the recent incident in Montana, where people did not take the most basic precaution of locking their doors, and instead turned to guns for protection.  Violence should be a last resort, not the initial line of defense, yet we have societal attitudes that say differently.  These attitudes stem from the belief that you can trust a very limited number of people yet you need to interact with a much larger number of people on a regular basis.

Part of the problem is that we in the US still have beliefs that are holdovers from 19th century frontier times.  Back then, at the edge of “civilization,” there was no state sponsored police force to help ordinary citizens (or there was, but it was incredibly corrupt, more on that aspect later) and threats from outsiders, bandits, etc were commonplace.  In this environment one needed a gun for survival, and everyone had at least one gun.  It was also an incredibly violent, by today’s standards, place.  Society consisted of small, almost tribal cliques/clans with mutual distrust/distaste (similar to how societies have fragmented throughout history across the globe).  We have moved to a much more urbanized, high-density, pluralistic lifestyle since then, but many of the attitudes from them remain – and for many people, on the “fringes” of society, these attitudes are still necessary.  (Possible a blog post later –  how 19th century homesteading attitudes, apparently still in existence, affect what we do about the unemployed, homeless, and otherwise economically marginalized segments of the population.)

(Mistrust in the government is another subset of this argument for gun ownership – one needs a gun in case the government gets out of control and starts seizing property, taking people to salve camps, etc.  Sometimes it seems people think we in the US are in a near-dictatorship, instead of a very healthy democratic republic.  But I digress.). 

We can see evidence for this in terms of which people support gun control.  By and large, these people are white, middle to upper class, urban to suburban.  These are people who are most protected by the system – people who can afford insurance, who can feel safe calling the police for help, of whom the police will not question citizenship rights.  Many people do not have this level of protection, due to systematic corruption, racism, or location.  Note that the same demographic – the “liberal elite” – call for gun control as well as more government involvement in people’s lives and the economy.  This is because such people have some semblance of faith that the system works how it should, largely because historically, for their demographic, it has.  For people outside of this demographic, distrust of systematic protection still exists.  Many of these people still adhere to the more tribalistic aspects of societal arrangement (think of turf wars) and guns are necessary for protection.  Of course, once “those people” have guns, others need guns to protect themselves, fulfilling the logical circle.

Purging the modern USA of guns and gun violence will therefore require systemic changes, as well as attitude changes.  Full integration in cities will help.  Prosecution of people who shoot first should also alleviate some gun violence.  But mostly, we need to be able to trust our fellow citizens, of all demographics, and especially trust that the government is there to protect and help us if we need it.  Without that basic trust in the system, there is no point in having the system, and our society devolves.