Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator and current CEO of OpenAI, recently wrote this provocative tweet:
It was part of a broader thread (worth reading in its entirety) about viewing economic growth as a way to enlarge the pie and benefit everyone’s material situation. But I’d like to focus on this tweet in particular, because I think it highlights a trend that’s been driving our discourse with too little explicit acknowledgement. Personally, I’m someone who’s benefitted from the American economy’s increasing reliance on STEM-dominated industries, but I still think the “anti-STEM” crowd has legitimate frustrations. (And even if they didn’t, we still share a country with them, and their votes and complaints can potentially affect those of us in STEM, so it behooves us to listen to them as members of a liberal democracy.)
As a preliminary, let’s first establish that this war is actually happening and investigate who its targets are. The conflict’s single most obvious target is Elon Musk.
Musk can be personally abrasive and juvenile, and Gonzalez Fletcher makes valid critiques of Tesla’s treatment of its blue collar workers in the rest of her thread. But where are the “F*ck the Walton family” tweets, given their history of union busting and the Walton heirs’ vast wealth maintained through their continued ownership of Walmart? We could also ask this question of other non-STEM billionaires like Phil Knight (of Nike, which lobbied against a bill that proposed a ban on imported goods made from forced labor in Xinjiang) and members of the Koch family (whose politics are more opposed to Gonzalez Fletcher’s than Musk’s are). Perhaps Gonzalez Fletcher was in a poor mood that day and tweeted out of anger, which is a common thing to do. But why does Elon Musk arouse so much more anger than billionaires who became rich through companies with worse histories on workers’ rights than Tesla?
My answer is that the method in which he became rich complicates two currently fashionable narratives on the left. The first that it’s impossible to succeed in the US in this day and age without coming from financial privilege. Yes, he still came from a successful family, and perhaps he wouldn’t have made a bunch of money from PayPal if he’d had a poor education growing up, thus preventing him from having enough capital to start Tesla and SpaceX. But one could envision a bright young American from a middle class family working as a software engineer at a FAANG company for a decade or two, living frugally (especially now with WFH opportunities), investing in low-cost index funds, and accumulating enough money to bootstrap a proof of concept that could get an electric car startup a seed round of funding. (Check out some engineers who saved/are saving a significant portion of their paychecks to retire early here and here; it’s feasible that they instead could’ve used those assets to bootstrap a startup.)
The second narrative that Musk complicates is the claim of inherent tension between social good and individuals becoming wealthy. This narrative has two components, and his story contradicts both of them. The first component is that a profit motive is incompatible with environmental stewardship. Tesla is leading the way in electric vehicle sales in the US (79% of all EVs sold in 2020). Even though traditional car companies are starting to catch up, one has to wonder what state the electric car market would be in without Tesla. And we need to electrify transportation badly; it accounts for the plurality of our greenhouse gas emissions in the US. We can encourage riding bikes and mass transit all we want (endeavors I personally support!), but we’re still a low-density country that’s less compatible with mass transit, and we still have to figure out how to electrify most of our buses even with mass transit. The second component of the tension that Musk disproves is that the “pie” of wealth is a fixed size (Altman also talks a bit about this in his thread). Tesla has created billions of dollars of wealth that didn’t exist before it started building electric vehicles. In the same way that a carpenter creates wealth by crafting a chair out of wood, Tesla created wealth by creating vehicles consumers previously couldn’t purchase and innovating advancements on them along the way.
The war on STEM isn’t limited to personal attacks on individuals, though. We can see it in attacks on institutions that prepare students for careers in STEM. Consider the proposed new educational standards in California, which would eliminate tracking until 10th grade and lock students out of taking algebra in middle school, thus making it difficult for them to take calculus in high school. We also see similar pushes happening in other parts of the country and at other educational levels. New York City is trying to eliminate its gifted program instead of expanding it to more majority-black schools, which many black students at its selective high schools support. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia eliminated its standardized admissions test. The University of California system, which includes leading STEM research institutions like Berkeley and UCLA, is eliminating standardized tests from its admissions process. They’re eliminating these tests even though they were more strongly predictive of student performance at the UC schools than GPAs, and they enabled students (disproportionately black and Hispanic ones) who went to schools that lacked some courses the UC schools expected to see on applications to still get admitted.
So the first question we need to answer is: why is this conflict happening? In my view, there are two main factors. The first is that STEM success in general complicates the same narratives that Elon Musk in particular (as I explained above) contradicts. The second is that as our economy rewards quantitative/technical skills more and verbal skills less, people with strong verbal abilities but weaker quantitative abilities feel resentful. They’ve been told how smart they are their whole lives, but they’re financially struggling. They see their peers who majored in computer science getting wealthy, and they resent that they’re comparatively less successful.
One indication of the declining returns to verbal skills is enrollment at law schools. There was a steady increase in the number of first-year law students from 1970 (about 34,000 students) to 2010 (about 52,000 students). From 2010 to 2019, there was a significant decrease as more stories about the dire job prospects of law grads came out. But numbers are trending up significantly in the wake of COVID-19 disruptions; about 13% more students applied to law schools for the 2021 enrollment year than the 2020 enrollment year. It’s too early to know for sure what this spike means, but it’s feasible that many young Americans with good verbal skills surveyed their job prospects during a time of economic uncertainty and figured their best bet was to enter one of the few professional fields with an opportunity to make significant money from verbal skills.
Another sign is the trend of humanities graduates teaching themselves how to program on their own or going to coding bootcamps. Many of them have poor employment prospects based on the strength of their degrees alone, but they’ve been successful transitioning to careers in software. Here are a few of their stories, along with some figures indicating how much they’ve increased their salaries after doing a bootcamp (anthropology and history majors more than doubled their average earnings, from $36,440 to $75,115). Not all humanities grads have the interest or ability to pursue such careers, but the ones who do tend to find them much more lucrative.
Ok, so perhaps people with strong verbal skills but weaker quantitative skills are struggling in this economy, but struggle doesn’t necessarily lead to jealousy. My analysis here is a bit more speculative, but I personally believe that many of these humanities grads are (understandably!) resentful of STEM success. The first phenomenon relevant to this resentment I observed was the “gifted kid burnout” claims I saw on social media. Search Twitter for “gifted kid burnout,” and you’ll find that nearly all of the accounts claiming to experience this feeling belong to artists, writers, or other people in similar specialties. I admit that there could be some confounding variables lurking here; for example, women comprise 65% of the 10% of Twitter users who tweet the most, and women are more likely to study the humanities, so perhaps the most prolific tweeters on any topic are more likely to be in the humanities than average. But I’ve never seen a person in a lucrative STEM field claim that they’re experiencing gifted kid burnout.
The second phenomenon I’ve observed is a desire to funnel money from individuals/companies who’ve become wealthy through STEM pursuits to specific government programs that tend to employ people with weaker quantitative skills. Here we have a more famous politician harping on Musk and Jeff Bezos as well, saying that “it is not acceptable” for them to lead efforts to return to the Moon:
One could, of course, present a good-faith case for why Musk and Bezos aren’t the best individuals to lead such an effort. But instead, Sen. Sanders simply claims that their wealth (earned through founding tech companies) uniquely disqualifies them! Despite his advanced age, Bernie is actually sort of an archetype for the kind of high verbal/mediocre quantitative skills millennial/zoomer I’m thinking of. Though he earned a degree (in political science) from the prestigious University of Chicago, his young adulthood was filled with low-paying jobs, some of which politicians like him would propose funding through government programs. “He did a stint on a kibbutz in Israel, worked as an aide at a psychiatric hospital, taught in a Head Start program, and had a carpentry business with a few other guys in New York.” Is it really that surprising that he supports universal pre-K and a single-payer health care system given his early career? Of course, if Bernie’s hope is that more tax revenue from Bezos and Musk can increase NASA’s funding, their office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (presumably staffed primarily by employees with stronger verbal skills) will probably get more money and provide more jobs to people with cognitive profiles like his own.
It can be tempting to mock politicians who trade on this anti-STEM resentment, but I don’t think that impulse is productive. I think people with cognitive skills similar to Bernie’s have a valuable place in our society, and they’re falling behind their quantitatively gifted peers. (Of course, it goes without saying that Americans who have neither strong verbal nor strong quantitative abilities are getting shafted even worse, and they deserve more consideration in our policies. I’m encouraged by recent books like Freddie deBoer’s The Cult of Smart and Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery on that front, even though I disagree with them on some matters.) So how can we ensure that the verbally skilled still have a respected place at the table of our society?
The first thing we can do, though it might seem a bit counter-intuitive, is to provide better STEM education to the verbally gifted. They don’t all need to major in computer science, but there are careers at tech companies that don’t require top-tier quantitative abilities yet still need some computational training while rewarding excellent verbal abilities. Maybe the verbally talented could get away with studying history and ignoring technical courses in the past, but they could still do well today by taking business courses along with a smattering of computer science and pursuing careers in product management.
The second step we could take is encouraging an atmosphere of intellectual openness. Traditional journalism, long a refuge for the verbally gifted, is struggling for many reasons. But one is the intellectual conformity at many mainstream outlets; readers don’t want to pay $10 a month for a collection of takes essentially recycling the same opinions. Luckily, platforms like this one are providing a path forward for intellectually courageous writers.
The third thing we can do is provide better career training for all Americans who don’t have top-tier quantitative skills (both those with strong verbal skills and those without). A student with a passion for history might be a bit disappointed to become a wind turbine mechanic, but such a career would probably be more lucrative than pursuing an academic career in history, and it’d leave them with time and resources to study history for fun during the weekends and evenings. (Maybe they could even have a Substack about their favorite historical topics and make some money on the side!) We also need to stop fetishizing careers that require college degrees; being a mechanic, electrician, or machinist is dignified work that is crucial to the functioning of our society.
Hopefully these three steps can cool the STEM wars, and we can come to a mutual understanding of how we can all work together to make a country that values all kinds of talents.