Friday, September 5, 2008

The techie gap

Why are there so few (and fewer than once) American-born computer programmers and, in college, computer science majors? In How our Culture Keeps Students out of Science, Peter Wood (starting from a story about Bill Gates lobbying for H1B visas to feed his need for programmers, but then broadening his scope to all science) argues that it's a combination of sloth, misplaced priorities and maleducation. That's the conservative view, of course. Others will say we'd produce more Einsteins (or Richard Stallmans?) if we gave every public school student a laptop and their teachers a "reduced class size".

I don't happen to think this "shortage" (alone) is a social problem worth worrying about, but as long as people are going to talk about it, I'll propose a theory inspired by the economics of international trade: People are sorting themselves into professions in a way that reflects comparative advantage. In international trade, the idea is (oversimplifying greatly) that if an acre of English land can produce 10 tons of wool or 10 tons of milk, and an acre of Portuguese land can produce 5 tons of wool or 8 tons of milk, England will raise mostly sheep and export wool to Portugal while importing milk from Portugal, even though England could, if it really wanted to, produce milk even more efficiently than Portugal can. Turning, then, to the market for skilled labor: bright college-age Americans can become computer programmers but they can also cash in on their American language and social skills to become lawyers, bankers, journalists, politicians, clinical psychologists etc. Meanwhile a bright college-age resident of India or China, looking to emigrate to the USA, enjoys a comparative (even if not absolute) advantage in those fields that don't require native-level English language and American social skills.

The old days, when the engineers looked just like the lawyers and the bankers (except for the pocket protectors and other fashion faux pas), reflected a period of labor market autarky.

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