U.S. programs in Afghanistan correspond to STEM promotion at home?

by philg

“Corruption in Afghanistan All but Cripples Women’s Team Sports” (nytimes) chronicles the failure of American do-gooders plus American tax dollars to make a difference (but perhaps they “raised awareness”?) in Afghanistan. Blame is pinned squarely on old male Afghanis who are corrupt and/or enjoy having sex with young women, with a slight hint of blame at the end attached to female Afghanis: “The national team has lost more members to marriage than anything else, she said, because Afghan women are considered too old to wed after their early 20s, and their husbands typically refuse to allow them to play.”

It makes us feel good to point at foreigners and say “Look how bad they are” or “Look how bad they are at accomplishing X” but I wonder if we’ve been running a similar program here at home: STEM promotion. A lot of money and do-gooder time is invested to get young Americans interested in STEM when they would rather be studying or working in other areas. Has there been any tracking of the effects of these programs? The desperation of tech employers to bring in H1-B visa holders would suggest that the needle has not been moved.

[Disclosure: I am tutoring some local high school students in AP Statistics, Calculus, and Physics. However, they signed up for these classes without any input from me.]

Some interesting reader comments on the nytimes site:

  • Syed Abbas, Dearborn, MI: The question everyone on this discussion Board is asking – why did we go there and why are we still there? Simple answer – someone here is making a bundle of money in all this mess, laughing all the way to the bank at our expense. And that will keep us there no matter how much we howl.
  • Southern Boy, Spring Hill, TN: Most of the comments reflect a western bias against traditional Afghan life and culture. The west calls for cultural diversity and inclusion, an appreciation of other cultures, as way to understand and appreciate the variety that characterizes the globe. However, the goal of appreciation stops when the cultures fall short of meeting the West’s expectations of equality, especially when the cultures fails to promote gender equality. In that sense all the talk about diversity and inclusion is a crock. Thank you.
  • Emile, New York: … There’s no way to reconcile our declared respect for other deeply entrenched cultures with our own deeply held Enlightenment values that see women as equal to men. If we decide part of our values is to proselytize the rights of women, and push for them in other cultures, the best idea is the pragmatic one–to slowly nudge them toward more respect for women by empowering women through the most tried and true route of all: literacy.
  • tbrucia, Houston, TX: Interesting that the word ‘sports’ is immediately followed by the words ‘money’ and ‘dollars’. You don’t need very much money to buy a soccer ball or a cricket bat or even a bicycle. Throwing money around and forming teams and organizations just attracts buzzards and flies. Sports themselves just require will, determination, a few friends together, and really basic equipment. The West’s obsession with commercialization misses the point of sports: competition and fun.
  • Brown, Detroit: Under the Soviet regime, women wore mini skirts to coed classes at university. Our progressive policies put an end to that! [see “Why can’t governments apologize?” (2004) for my suggestion “Could we offer a sincere apology today to the Russians and offer Afghanistan back to them?”]

7 thoughts on “U.S. programs in Afghanistan correspond to STEM promotion at home?”

  1. The hunger for H1-B talent has nothing to do with the availability of skilled tech workers and everything to do with their price. Haven’t you written several articles about how hard it is for middle-aged programmers to get hired?

  2. The desperation of tech employers to bring in H1-B visa holders …..

    But they are not so desperate as to offer to pay their employees more? Is there really NO market clearing wage for American born programmers? NO amount of money that would bring forth enough supply, nothing that could get all those MIT grads who are taking jobs with Wall St. and consulting firms to apply their talents to coding instead?

  3. superMike: Agreed. However if there were a flood of additional young Americans who’d been drawn into tech by the various government and NGO STEM-promotion programs, wouldn’t we expect to see employers less desperate for H1-B workers? Instead of going through all of the bureaucracy to get a low-cost foreigner, a company could get a low-cost 22-year-old American who, at age 18, was persuaded to choose a STEM college major rather than social science or humanities.

    I wouldn’t expect tech employers to lose their allergy to hiring anyone over 50 (better to move an operation to the Philippines before going to that desperate length!). But I do think that H1-Bs would be less sought-after if young Americans were being successfully hectored into changing their STEM-averse ways.

  5. Employers still have reasons to prefer H1-Bs even at the same wage. H1-Bs are easier to mistreat, less likely (or even capable) of moving to other jobs. You can’t threaten to send an American 22 year old back to India. Also many IT shops are becoming ethnic (South Asian) enclaves and they prefer people of the same ethnicity.

    As for the hectoring working, there are a number of factors. As you may have found out from your tutoring, not everyone is cut out in the brains dept. for STEM work. Even among those who are, STEM requires a lot of hard work – it’s much easier to be an English or poli-sci major where you don’t have to stay up all night doing p-sets. Even if you do convince people to go the STEM route, they may still end up in non-STEM careers if the pay is better. I asked my daughter what kind of jobs her fellow MIT seniors were getting and she said that many of them (not just those in Course 15) were taking jobs with investment banks and business consulting firms because they were the ones paying the highest wages and these employers wanted people with strong mathematical and analytical problem solving ability. Ellen Pao has a bachelors in electrical engineering but she never worked a day as an engineer.

    On the flip side, to some extent the hectoring HAS worked in terms of, for example, the # of physics PhDs that get turned out. It has worked so well than most of these folks will NEVER get a tenure track position and will spend half their life as penniless post-docs before they give up trying.

  6. Matthew Yglesias has an interesting theory on the continuing desperation of tech employers:

    Put this all together [the winner-take-all markets that high-tech companies are competing in, the Mythical Man Month problem] and you can see that there is an enormous need not just for skills, but for people who are motivated to work long hours. And there is a short supply of these people.

    The conventional solution to a labor supply crunch is to offer to pay people more money. But here’s the problem. A person with the skills that a high-flying tech company is looking for has plenty of perfectly good employment options outside the realm of high-flying tech companies. Lots of companies are looking to employ computer programmers, and lots of those companies aren’t engaged in the same kind of frenetic competition as the high-fliers. Yes, they won’t pay you as much. But you’d work shorter, less-intense hours and likely live in a cheaper city with shorter commutes. And you’d still be making a very decent living.

    It’s just not clear that there’s any amount of money you could really pay an already comfortable person with a family to switch into a role that requires 70-hour work-weeks. Worse than that, if someone was clearly reluctant to go switch into your more-demanding job, you would be reluctant to tempt him into it with an insane salary offer — worrying that he wouldn’t really have his heart in it and would end up being a drain on team morale.

    … This whole dynamic is going to look to employers and their funders like a skills shortage, but it’s also not going to generate skyrocketing wages.

  7. Some hiring tips from the game industry:

    Be on the look out for the holy-grail… the undiscovered Asperger’s engineer. (usually found on open source forums)
    • They have no social skills
    • They generally marry the first girl they date
    • Can’t make eye contact
    • Resume and educational background is a mess… because they have no social skills
    • They work like machines, don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs

    http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf

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