Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, Michael S. Teitelbaum, Princeton University Press, 2014. $29.95 (280 pp.). ISBN 978-0-691-15466-4 Buy at Amazon
The US will soon have a large oversupply of scientists. Or maybe it will have an undersupply. American graduate education is failing, and research accomplishment will soon decline. Or maybe the opposite is true. If you read any of the many reports whose distinguished panels of authors say one or another of those things, you had better also check the citations to determine whether the methodology behind the claim has any validity.
One recent and illuminating contribution to the discussion is Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent by Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. The book provides a clear, documented, and readable account of the many booms and busts in the number of scientists entering the US workforce over the past 70 years; the cycles frequently correspond to increases and decreases in government funding. Teitelbaum finds scant justification for the repeated claims of shortage. He discusses difficulties in determining an optimal flow of science students in the workforce pipeline, in relating the overall numbers of scientists to those for subspecialties, in comparing the US research population to other nations’, in counting the number of postdocs in the US, and even in deciding whether to use the definition of “scientist” from NSF, the US Department of Labor, or another source.
Many reports in the past decade have presented troubling claims. Most notably, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, produced in 2005 by the National Research Council, warned of the diminishing quantity and quality of US students going into science and engineering. Congress passed the America COMPETES Act in 2007, partly in response to those alarming reports, and authorized large research-funding increases for NSF and the Department of Energy. The idea was planted in the minds of policymakers that our country’s scientific workforce and scientific output were falling behind.
Although the actual appropriation for America COMPETES was derailed by partisan fights over the debt ceiling and the sequestering of federal funds, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus”) did result in a surge of additional federal funding—tens of billions of dollars—to research agencies. But that is only the most recent occurrence in roller-coaster rhetoric and policy concerning the scientific workforce. Teitelbaum shows how similar the recent alarms are to those sounded over the decades, such as in the early years of the Cold War, following the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite, and in the early 1980s during President Reagan’s defense buildup.
Falling Behind? chronicles five episodes of alarms followed by funding increases to support more scientists, followed by downturns that sometimes led to hard landings. Finding flaws in the methodology used by those perennial alarms, Teitelbaum cites reliable independent studies to show that the calls for training more scientists were not based on well-founded estimates of supply and demand.
Despite methodological flaws in estimating the actual and desirable number of scientists, the recommendations of those jeremiad reports may still make sense. For example, there is always a need to educate the best students better and to close the achievement gaps in K–12 education. Also, foreign students who earn undergraduate or graduate degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics should be encouraged to remain in the US, rather than being forced out.
Even lacking a good economic analysis of the supply of US scientists, people from various perspectives will advance arguments for increasing the numbers. However, rather than general arguments about the military, industrial, or institutional advantages of having more scientists, Teitelbaum would prefer sound economic analysis. Whatever the justification, says Teitelbaum, funding agencies should pay more attention to the motivations and career paths of young scientists, whether or not they are likely to remain in the research workforce.
Teitelbaum makes clear that support for science should have a more rational basis than is frequently the case. He suggests that the principles advanced by Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report establishing the US model for scientific funding, were good then and should be followed more consistently now. That is, funding for research should be awarded by peer review of proposals and administered primarily through universities and research institutes. Moreover, such funding should be stable, Teitelbaum insists, and not subject to boom-and-bust patterns.
With Teitelbaum’s account of all the fuzzy thinking and unfounded claims about the scientific workforce over the years, Falling Behind? should add to the growing realization in policy circles that this country needs an independent institute for analysis of, and advocacy for, the scientific enterprise.
Rush Holt, a PhD plasma physicist and recently retired US Congressman (D-NJ), is the new CEO for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of Science, AAAS’s flagship journal.
