Mises Daily  Home | Library | The Myth of the Math and Science
Shortage  The Myth of the Math and Science Shortage  February 7,
2006   Why do we keep falling for this? Once in every second-
term presidency, the chief executive lectures the country about
the impending disaster of a shortage of mathematicians and
scientists. People think: oh no, we'd better get on the stick
and create some in a hurry!  Thus does the President want to
spend $50 billion over 10 years — a figure these people made up
out of whole cloth — and we are all supposed to submit, cough
up, and turn our sons and daughters into natural-science
brainiacs. And the President is just sure that his great job-
training mission is not limited to Silicon Valley but extends to
all cities, rural areas, and ghettos in America.  He is not only
raising false hopes, diverting career paths, and wasting money,
he is raising a non-problem and purporting to solve it with a
non-solution. The central-planning approach to boosting science
was tried and failed in e