This is a phenomenal piece. I was in college from 2014-2018. Not quite during the genesis of the term STEM but I was there when STEAM reared its ugly head. I have never seen someone distill my experience and my cohort's experience into such a cohesive piece. I went to a large & esteemed school, where almost all the engineering programs were ranked top 10 in the world. I got a degree in chemical engineering. I've never really used my degree directly in my work. One of the most valuable courses (I didn't know it at the time) was an Intro to Materials Science course. I basically built a career around that one.
I am now pursuing an MBA, as you suggest a motivated STEM major might. Even as an engineering student, I could see on the horizon that there is no engineer making $500,000+/yr. I understood that the average business major might make $45k/yr out of school, but 1/100 might make $500,000 somehow. I expected to hit the job market, make an obscene amount of money for a 22 year old, and worry about that later. Well, I'm worrying about it now.
Many of my former classmates are underemployed, or employed in a different field like me. I only know of maybe 1 person who became a certified PE. Chemical engineers do not live glamorous lives, they often work in massive industrial processes wearing jumpsuits and hardhats. Some work on/off 16 hours shifts on oil rigs. The only thing worse than not using my degree would've been actually using it. I was in somewhat of a minority too-- I actually thought our classes were really cool and interesting. I would look at a lab partner and say, "that's so fucking cool" and some of my classmates would stare back like I was a freak.
Would I advise my 18 year old self any differently? No, I suppose not. I was not yet prepared to go into business. Even if the chemE curriculum had better coursework for professional writing, business, and other much-needed soft skills, I was such an elitist I would have scoffed at it all and tried my best not to learn any of it.
Making STEM more Art and Humanities-ish while making Trades more STEM-ish and gatekeeping the Art and Humanities to suppress elite overproduction would be better
Thanks for writing this. I find it persuasive and clearly written. I think the underlying problem is that a tremendous share of economically validated activity in the postwar American system - especially when weighted by money moved per unit of time demanded - is bullshit. This is best understood in the context of an ongoing transition from the behavioral complex of meeting exogenous performance demands (e.g. food scarcity, hot war), to the behavioral complex of patronage coalitions seeking rents. (My writing on the subject is here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/)
The correct frame of analysis is unfortunately antimemetic (here's recent testimony to that effect https://x.com/imhinesmi/status/1815412843983806741 ), in part because people are directly discouraged from thinking about it, but probably mostly because these coalitions have a strong survival incentive to confound any attempt to cleanly categorize them.
One way these coalitions confuse people is to coopt any attempt to represent and advocate for a class of people doing real work by including both real and simulacral versions of it in their coalition.
A straightforward example is the "labor" movement, which may have started as an attempt by productive workers to organize collective bargaining power to mitigate unjust exploitation by state-backed labor monopsonists , but gradually became just another sort of political pressure group, and for decades it's a commonplace idea that union rules are frequently a sort of goldbricking that require extraneous, i.e. bullshit, "labor."
Likewise, the term "scientist" derives its legitimacy from things like the activities of the Royal Society, but now mostly describes paper-pushing careerist academics whose published output interests no one, and exists mostly to satisfy institutional demands for publications as a simulacral metric of productivity.
Nominally for-profit businesses include low-margin businesses in competitive fields, entrepreneurial innovators developing new products that displace old monopolies. Both categories can only employ people because they are, or are expected to be, profitable. But the category also includes implicitly state-backed corporations that can collectively count on bailouts to keep them long-run financially sustainable. They're profitable because they employ so many people.
Another way to confuse people is to coopt attempts to discuss the problem by promoting simplistic distinctions that fail to capture the true problem. Grifters in STEM benefit from the promotion of the STEM vs Humanities dichotomy as a substitute for the general distinction between needful and pretend work, and grifters in the Humanities can likewise recruit well-intentioned allies on the basis of the mistakes built into the pro-STEM point of view.
David Graeber's otherwise excellent essay and book "Bullshit Jobs" suffer from these sorts of confusion. He can muster plenty of persuasive evidence that bullshit work exists and is atrociously common, but is constantly tempted to try to cleanly categorize particular *sorts of jobs* as bullshit and each time gets it wrong, because the bullshit strategic behavioral complex is actively optimizing to make itself hard to cleanly distinguish from the outside with simple distinctions.
One thing I appreciate very much about your piece is that it does not make this sort of mistake; you're being quite careful to make only true and valid criticisms of false propositions, without filling out a political identity as anti-STEM or even pro-Humanities. You're just arguing to correct errors.
I think you’re missing one key element of STEM that plays an underappreciated role: STEM is good for intellectual competition because it’s easier to determine when someone has a correct answer than in the humanities.
Now, you might think intellectual competition is a bad thing, and while I would disagree with you, it’s not really the point I want to make. The point is that society has a need for competition and if it weren’t STEM, it would be something else (chess, maybe?)
While I need to go back and more fully read your piece, and I’m pretty sure I agree with it more than I disagree, it seems to me you left out one *important* signaling piece of *substance* that favors STEM over non-STEM:
Most non-STEM majors have been infused by wokeness, while most STEM majors have not.
Hence someone choosing a STEM major has signaled at least on the margin that they are not into wokeness, and substantively we know that - again, on average - they are less likely to have been infected by the counterproductive misinformation that is wokeness, and are more likely to be capable of independent critical thought.
And re: intellectual enrichment, I’d argue quite strongly that staying away from woke majors is in fact a positive factor on that front.
Surely a reasonable person will acknowledge that this counts for something.
It's not just STEM but everything. You in the US at least managed to avoid the bullshit that is called trade school in my neck of Europe. There is a trade school for waiters. They learn how to serve at the most elite diplomatic banquets or how to recommend wine sommelier style. Then they proceed to never doing it.
This isn't even signalling. They are waiters.
This is just the assumption that we have to keep people in schools for whatever reason, and then struggling to fill out the time with something.
This is a phenomenal piece. I was in college from 2014-2018. Not quite during the genesis of the term STEM but I was there when STEAM reared its ugly head. I have never seen someone distill my experience and my cohort's experience into such a cohesive piece. I went to a large & esteemed school, where almost all the engineering programs were ranked top 10 in the world. I got a degree in chemical engineering. I've never really used my degree directly in my work. One of the most valuable courses (I didn't know it at the time) was an Intro to Materials Science course. I basically built a career around that one.
I am now pursuing an MBA, as you suggest a motivated STEM major might. Even as an engineering student, I could see on the horizon that there is no engineer making $500,000+/yr. I understood that the average business major might make $45k/yr out of school, but 1/100 might make $500,000 somehow. I expected to hit the job market, make an obscene amount of money for a 22 year old, and worry about that later. Well, I'm worrying about it now.
Many of my former classmates are underemployed, or employed in a different field like me. I only know of maybe 1 person who became a certified PE. Chemical engineers do not live glamorous lives, they often work in massive industrial processes wearing jumpsuits and hardhats. Some work on/off 16 hours shifts on oil rigs. The only thing worse than not using my degree would've been actually using it. I was in somewhat of a minority too-- I actually thought our classes were really cool and interesting. I would look at a lab partner and say, "that's so fucking cool" and some of my classmates would stare back like I was a freak.
Would I advise my 18 year old self any differently? No, I suppose not. I was not yet prepared to go into business. Even if the chemE curriculum had better coursework for professional writing, business, and other much-needed soft skills, I was such an elitist I would have scoffed at it all and tried my best not to learn any of it.
Making STEM more Art and Humanities-ish while making Trades more STEM-ish and gatekeeping the Art and Humanities to suppress elite overproduction would be better
China has a government run by STEM majors. We have a government run by lawyers and car dealers.
China has been doing rather well lately...
Thanks for writing this. I find it persuasive and clearly written. I think the underlying problem is that a tremendous share of economically validated activity in the postwar American system - especially when weighted by money moved per unit of time demanded - is bullshit. This is best understood in the context of an ongoing transition from the behavioral complex of meeting exogenous performance demands (e.g. food scarcity, hot war), to the behavioral complex of patronage coalitions seeking rents. (My writing on the subject is here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/)
The correct frame of analysis is unfortunately antimemetic (here's recent testimony to that effect https://x.com/imhinesmi/status/1815412843983806741 ), in part because people are directly discouraged from thinking about it, but probably mostly because these coalitions have a strong survival incentive to confound any attempt to cleanly categorize them.
One way these coalitions confuse people is to coopt any attempt to represent and advocate for a class of people doing real work by including both real and simulacral versions of it in their coalition.
A straightforward example is the "labor" movement, which may have started as an attempt by productive workers to organize collective bargaining power to mitigate unjust exploitation by state-backed labor monopsonists , but gradually became just another sort of political pressure group, and for decades it's a commonplace idea that union rules are frequently a sort of goldbricking that require extraneous, i.e. bullshit, "labor."
Likewise, the term "scientist" derives its legitimacy from things like the activities of the Royal Society, but now mostly describes paper-pushing careerist academics whose published output interests no one, and exists mostly to satisfy institutional demands for publications as a simulacral metric of productivity.
Nominally for-profit businesses include low-margin businesses in competitive fields, entrepreneurial innovators developing new products that displace old monopolies. Both categories can only employ people because they are, or are expected to be, profitable. But the category also includes implicitly state-backed corporations that can collectively count on bailouts to keep them long-run financially sustainable. They're profitable because they employ so many people.
Another way to confuse people is to coopt attempts to discuss the problem by promoting simplistic distinctions that fail to capture the true problem. Grifters in STEM benefit from the promotion of the STEM vs Humanities dichotomy as a substitute for the general distinction between needful and pretend work, and grifters in the Humanities can likewise recruit well-intentioned allies on the basis of the mistakes built into the pro-STEM point of view.
David Graeber's otherwise excellent essay and book "Bullshit Jobs" suffer from these sorts of confusion. He can muster plenty of persuasive evidence that bullshit work exists and is atrociously common, but is constantly tempted to try to cleanly categorize particular *sorts of jobs* as bullshit and each time gets it wrong, because the bullshit strategic behavioral complex is actively optimizing to make itself hard to cleanly distinguish from the outside with simple distinctions.
One thing I appreciate very much about your piece is that it does not make this sort of mistake; you're being quite careful to make only true and valid criticisms of false propositions, without filling out a political identity as anti-STEM or even pro-Humanities. You're just arguing to correct errors.
I think you’re missing one key element of STEM that plays an underappreciated role: STEM is good for intellectual competition because it’s easier to determine when someone has a correct answer than in the humanities.
Now, you might think intellectual competition is a bad thing, and while I would disagree with you, it’s not really the point I want to make. The point is that society has a need for competition and if it weren’t STEM, it would be something else (chess, maybe?)
While I need to go back and more fully read your piece, and I’m pretty sure I agree with it more than I disagree, it seems to me you left out one *important* signaling piece of *substance* that favors STEM over non-STEM:
Most non-STEM majors have been infused by wokeness, while most STEM majors have not.
Hence someone choosing a STEM major has signaled at least on the margin that they are not into wokeness, and substantively we know that - again, on average - they are less likely to have been infected by the counterproductive misinformation that is wokeness, and are more likely to be capable of independent critical thought.
And re: intellectual enrichment, I’d argue quite strongly that staying away from woke majors is in fact a positive factor on that front.
Surely a reasonable person will acknowledge that this counts for something.
It's not just STEM but everything. You in the US at least managed to avoid the bullshit that is called trade school in my neck of Europe. There is a trade school for waiters. They learn how to serve at the most elite diplomatic banquets or how to recommend wine sommelier style. Then they proceed to never doing it.
This isn't even signalling. They are waiters.
This is just the assumption that we have to keep people in schools for whatever reason, and then struggling to fill out the time with something.