An inexhaustible supply of... demand?

In the April 30 of The New York Review of Books, Andrew Hacker reviews the work of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, the authors of The Race Between Technology & Education. (Hacker's article requires a subscription to NYRB).

Goldin and Katz, as I've discussed, attempt to quantify the advantages of an open, forgiving, evolving educational system in relation to economic growth. Their primary findings are that additional education returns higher incomes, a condition that increases demand for education; secondarily, this supply of highly skilled labor at its best evolves to meet the needs of the economy for a more technically skilled, analytically competent workforce.

But is any of this true? (And is it more true or less true of non-OECD countries?)

To counter the statements of Gilpin and Katz, Hacker cites the US government's Occupational Outlook Handbook, produced by the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, which projects growth of 1,400 occupations "from aerobics instructors to zoologists": 

In view of Goldin and Katz's concerns, it is relevant to ask if there is actually a demand for more people with technology-linked degrees.... I was surprised to learn that in 2006 the nation altogether had only 17,000 paid positions for physicists, apart from teachers, and that only 1,000 more openings are envisaged for 2016. The number of employed mathematicians is expected to rise from 3,000 to 3,300.... Employment for engineers is slated to grow from 1,512,000 to 1,671,000, about the same percentage of growth as for the workforce as a whole. Indeed, at current rates, 650,000 new engineers will have received degrees by 2016, four times the predicted number of openings. (Emphasis added - Ed)

At a minimum, these figures should give us pause in relation to the rush to promote STEM curricula (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics--which occupies a core part of the conventional wisdom around education reform in the U.S.). 

I checked in the Handbook on the 10-year outlook for computer programmers: a 4% drop from 435,000 programmers employed in 2006 to 417,000 employed in 2016. 

So what gives? Is the United States going to be offshoring jobs for professionals at such a high rate in 2016 that, well, its best and brightest will be emigrating to find employment? (Possibly....) 

But as Hacker opines, there are other significant opportunities for employment. The Handbook: 

...lists hundreds of jobs involved with high-tech instruments, including installing, repairing, and debugging them. These workers outnumber college-trained scientists, and even engineers. Here are some of the things they do: gynecologic sonography, geodetic surveying, avionic equipment mechanics, semiconductor processing, air traffic controlling, laboratory phlebotomy, blood bank clinical work, cryptanalysis keying. Yet these technicians are most often only high school graduates, sometimes with community college credits. Moreover, the knowledge they need is acquired mainly on the job, because that's where the equipment is.

Not all high-tech employers look for workers with degrees. By now, we can agree that European and Asian car-makers have taken the lead in using computer chips for ignition timing, fuel injection, and cylinder control. These devices must be expertly installed. And they are, by hourly workers on the assembly line.

Hacker goes on to cite four foreign carmakers who located plants in the U.S., and he provides the high-school drop-out rates for the counties where the plants landed: Nissan went for Tennesse (26.3%), BMW for South Carolina (26.9%), Honda for Alabama (28.7%), and Toyota for Mississippi (31.5%). And Hacker notes: 

...[T]hey look for states that offer tax waivers, are unwelcoming toward unions, and have pay rates below the national norm. But it apparently hasn't bothered BMW and Toyota that the countries they chose offer less-than-stellar schooling. Rather, they've found that even workers who were indifferent students can learn what's needed technically in the factory, as happens in the companies' home countries. 

All of this makes sense -- even while it discounts any other possible advantages that might accrue to individuals as a result of increased education. Per Gilpin and Katz, those advantages include higher wages; per boatloads of health-related studies, those advantages include improved health and longevity. But of course sorting out causation, as Gilpin and Katz purport to do, is much trickier than proving association. 

In any event, Gilpin and Katz in their book skip over compelling evidence as to the value of non-academic skills and knowledge in relation to economic performance and, to a lesser extent, individual wealth.