What's a STEM crisis?
I've recently been reading a bit about a possible "STEM crisis", or lack of one, mostly in IEEE Spectrum, but also on The Conversation. "STEM" is an acronym for "Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics", and the crisis, if it exists, is supposed to be caused by a shortage of graduates in STEM disciplines.
The disputants seem to me to be asking two somewhat different questions. STEM enthusiasts like professional societies and chief scientists start with the assumption that STEM is a good thing that we should be doing more of, and argue that we should therefore have more STEM graduates to do it. Economists and out-of-work STEM graduates start with the observation that there are already numerous un- and under-employed STEM graduates, and argue that we should therefore have less of them.
These two views are perfectly consistent if one accepts that we, as a society, ought to be doing more STEM. If so, the enthusiasts are really saying that there is a crisis in the amount of STEM being undertaken. STEM graduates experience this crisis as an inability to find work.
How much STEM should we be doing? In the Conversation article cited above, Andrew Norton assumes that we should be doing exactly that STEM for which buyers are willing to pay (manifested in Norton's article by how many STEM graduates employers are willing to hire). Taken at face value, this is more or less the answer one gets from basic free market economics: if doing some STEM gets the greatest value out of all the ways buyers could use the resources involved, the buyers will pay for that STEM. If doing something else with those resources gives the buyers a greater benefit, the buyers will do something else.
I think that most people, however, would agree that a significant proportion of STEM has the character of what economists call a "public good". Public goods are items like defence forces and street lighting for which is difficult or impossible to charge people according to their individual use. Markets may under-invest in public goods since would-be investors can't extract payment for them even though buyers exist who would actually use them.
Norton implicitly assumes that the government has estimated the value of public STEM and invested a suitable amount of tax money into it, creating a matching demand for STEM graduates in government-funded programmes. I suspect that the enthusiasts, however, place more or less infinite value on STEM. For them, there will always be a "STEM crisis" because no amount of government or industry investment can ever realise such a value.
