US innovation, US unemployment
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010077
I spent last week at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco. During my stay there I read the local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which, in its 27 January edition, included an opinion piece by the Chronicle‘s regular conservative columnist, Debra Saunders.
Entitled “Obama’s Take on US Innovation,” the piece criticized President Obama’s claim that America’s slumping economy can be revived with more government-funded innovation. She quoted from the president’s State of the Union speech of that week:
We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean-energy technology—an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people.
I agree with Obama that investing in innovation, especially in basic research, is a good thing. What is not clear, as Saunders pointed out, is whether that investment will help solve the recession’s main problem: near-10% unemployment.
Indeed, there are reasons to share Saunders’s skepticism about the potential for “innovation” jobs to boost employment in the near future. So-called green jobs, according to Saunders, account for only 1% of California’s workforce, despite “years of subsidies and special treatment.”
Moreover, Saunders contended, boosting funding for R&D “means funneling government money into high-profile projects staffed by like-minded college graduates, a group with an unemployment rate of about 5%.”
Whether or not you agree with Saunders’s characterization, the 5% figure is probably accurate and may even be an under-estimate. On the same day as her column appeared, NSF issued a press release with the admirably descriptive title “Unemployment Among Doctoral Scientists and Engineers Was Lower Than Among the General Population in 2008.” The subject of the press release, an NSF survey, put the unemployment rate of science and technology PhDs in 2008 at just 1.7%, 4.9 percentage points lower than that of the general US population.
As the publication of President Obama’s 2012 budget nears, advocates for increased funding for science are pleading their case. Those advocates should keep in mind that when so many Americans are out of work now, arguments based on the creation of future jobs will seem less compelling.
