Category Archives: Economics

Posts exploring the economic impacts of science and engineering. The value of strong science and engineering practice has many benefits to the economy – directly and indirectly. Many countries are focusing their future economic plans on advancing their scientific, engineering and technology communities and creating environments that support scientists and engineers.

Funding Basic Research

The West has lost the will to fund basic research by William Brody.

In the US, university basic research has withered in many important fields, especially in the physical and information sciences and engineering.
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Industrial basic research has failed to demonstrate a return on investment that satisfies the ravenous appetite of financial markets for short-term earnings growth. As a result, companies have been directing capital to applied research and development, rather than basic invention and innovation.

The writer is president of the Johns Hopkhins University, the co-founder of three medical device companies and co-chairman of the US Council on Competitiveness’s National Innovation Initiative.

Science and Engineering Doctoral Degrees Worldwide

Lagging Engineer Degrees a Crisis by Kevin Hall:

Relative to the sizes of their populations, Asian nations are graduating five times as many undergraduate students in engineering as the United States. A study by Engineering Trends determined that the United States ranks 16th per capita in the number of doctoral graduates and 25th in engineering undergraduates per million citizens.
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U.S. universities continue awarding more doctoral degrees in engineering than universities anywhere else. But the American Association of Engineering Societies said foreign nationals received 58 percent of the U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering last year: 3,766 degrees out of 6,504. A decade earlier, they accounted for less than half.

I doubt that US universities are awarding more doctoral degrees than others are. Even if that is true I doubt it will last for even 5 more years. You might measure this in various ways including: absolute number of doctoral degrees awarded or using a per capita number. I believe several European countries are ahead today on a per capita basis. On an absolute basis I would be surprised if China or India isn’t already ahead. But if neither is, that will not true for long. I tried to find some good data online and wasn’t able to find anything certain in the time I took. Lost Dominance in Ph.D. Production sites a National Bureau of Economic Research report:
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Stanford Students Win $10,000 for Aneurysm Treatment

Stanford students win $10,000 for aneurysm treatment (sigh they removed the page – poor usability):

The students won the first Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design Award conducted by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, an alliance of approximately 200 colleges and universities in the United States established in 1995 to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education.
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The Stanford team designed a porous balloon mechanism, which they named Embolune. To use the new invention, a surgeon navigates the balloon to the site of the aneurysm, where it is detached. A hardening polymer substance is then released into the aneurysm space to create a permanent clot and stifle further growth.

Science and Engineering Fellowships Legislation

Senators will propose legislation to spur innovation from InfoWorld:

John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat with support announced by four other senators will propose legislation that establishes 5,000 science and engineering fellowships, redirects 3 percent of government agency R&D spending to specific areas of research and provides automatic green cards for graduate engineering students, the senators said Wednesday.

And on the same topic, Senators Promise ‘Brain Drain’ Bill:

According to Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), the U.S. is averaging 50,000 engineering graduates a year, with 40 percent of those from overseas. India is averaging 150,000 engineering graduates a year while China is graduating 250,000 engineers every year.

Even Tech Execs Can’t Get Kids to Be Engineers

Even Tech Execs Can’t Get Kids to Be Engineers by Ann Grimes:

Silicon Valley is doing a lot of hand-wringing these days about a coming engineer shortage. Tech leaders such as Cisco Systems Inc.’s John Chambers and Stanford University President John Hennessey warn that the U.S. will lose its edge without homegrown talent. The U.S. now ranks 17th world-wide in the number of undergraduate engineers and natural scientists it produces, they point out; that’s down from 1975, when the U.S. was No. 3 (after Japan and Finland).

But some of the nation’s tech elite — including many immigrants who benefited greatly from engineering careers — are finding even their own children shun engineering. One oft-cited reason: concern that dad and his contemporaries will ship such jobs overseas.

Appropriate Technology

Technology is not only about new breakthroughs. In some cases the technology used is nothing special, the impact is made in applying the technology well. Many opportunities exist for breakthroughs using technology that has been around for a long time.

I was reminded of my father‘s work by the article: From Stanford Engineering to Social Innovation (broken link):

In 1991, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon founded ApproTEC, a non-profit organization that develops technologies for alleviating poverty. More than 36,000 farmers in Kenya have now used their low-cost water pumps to create their own small businesses. They hope to take 400,000 people out of poverty in the next few years.

From the ApproTEC web site (broken link – it sure gets annoying how many people fail to follow basic web usability guidelines such as keeping links alive – organization now called KickStart):

ApproTEC’s Impacts To Date
Over:

35,000 new businesses started * 800 new businesses per month
$35 million a year in new profits and wages generated by the new businesses
New incomes account for over 0.5% of Kenya’s GDP and 0.2% of Tanzania’s GDP

On a related note, TrickleUp is my favorite charity. Their mission: to help the lowest income people worldwide take the first steps up out of poverty, by providing conditional seed capital, business training and relevant support services essential to the launch or expansion of a microenterprise.

John Hunter

Science Funding Dips In U.S. While Soaring In China

Science Funding Dips In U.S. While Soaring In China by Cynthia Tucker, Editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Writing this month in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., and Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics, said:

“As a percentage of GDP, federal investment in physical science research is half of what it was in 1970. (By contrast), in China, R&D expenditures rose 350 percent between 1991 and 2001, and the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s soared 535 percent.”

Update: link broken so removed the link to the original article.