The Supply Side-Mentality and the STEM Cult

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.

It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.

The tendency to overlook that reality reflects something all too rarely spelled out about the chant, which is its essentially supply-side nature. The thinking seems to be that the country gets more people to study STEM--and then somehow its manufacturing base is supposed to flourish, just like that. Where the long-term investment in the relevant sectors and plant to put the STEM-trained to work is supposed to come from does not arise--in spite of the fact that, as examination of the statistics shows, for a half century now American investors have, in spite of the union-breaking and tax cuts and deregulation that Reagan promised would mean an American manufacturing renaissance, and the consistent hewing of his successors to such policies, been little interested in manufacturing, preferring speculation in real estate and financial instruments and so on (with the country's deindustrialization, of course, confirming this in detail). The idea that having some more engineering majors looking for jobs is supposed to all by itself make investors' money flood into manufacturing is a piety of the market fundamentalism still prevailing--and as piety so often is, a diversion from actualities that elites regard as best unconsidered by the general public.