A bit of an oldie (forgive me, work’s been a beeyatch). Economist Robert Samuelson writing for MSNBC, hits an issue recently discussed on Sepia Mutiny - the much feared Science & Engineering gap with India & China.

Samuelson’s retort is multi-pronged. First, the gap with India/China isn’t as crazy as the numbers might suggest it to be -

Judged realistically, China and India aren’t yet out-producing the United States in engineers. Widely publicized figures have them graduating 600,000 and 350,000 engineers a year respectively, from six to 10 times the U.S. level. But researchers at Duke University found the Chinese and Indian figures misleading. They include graduates with two- or three-year degrees—similar to “associate degrees” from U.S. community colleges. And the American figures excluded computer science graduates. Adjusted for these differences, the U.S. degrees jump to 222,335. Per million people, the United States graduates slightly more engineers with four-year degrees than China and three times as many as India.

…Only about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce consists of scientists and engineers.

Secondly, even if the gap is real, econ 101 would dictate that the “shortage” should reveal itself in engineering salaries (on average). And yet….

..On average, American lawyers make 42 percent more than chemical engineers. At elite levels, huge pay gaps also exist. In 2005 the median starting salary for a new Harvard University MBA was $100,000. An MBA is a two-year degree. By contrast, a science or engineering PhD can take five to 10 years, with a few years of “post-doc” lab work. At a Business Roundtable press briefing, one CEO said his company might start this sort of scientist at $90,000. Does anyone wonder why some budding physicists switch to Wall Street?

From 1993 to 2003, the median salary of engineers with bachelor’s degrees and one to five years’ experience rose 34 percent (after inflation), to $58,000, the NSF’s Regets says. Among math and computer science graduates, the increase was 28 percent, to $50,000. By contrast, the average increase for non-S&E college graduates was only 7.7 percent, to $37,000.

Despite being utterly enthralled by the romance of tech, the hard-headed economist in me loathes to try to influence national policy without looking first at these sorts of numbers. I’m certainly far more apt to believe that lawyers are paid too much (and attack our “surplus demand” there) before I conclude that engineers are paid too little - the latter live within a far more efficient / dynamic market.

All the while, of course, an Indian tech salary rockets you into the top 1% of the country while an American one merely gets you comfortably into middle class (on average). Is there any doubt why so many desi’s are positively hungry for our tech work? And is this such a bad thing? Econ - unlike the space race or cold war - isn’t a zero-sum game.