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If economic benefit is all that matters to educational resources, you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians, who rarely produce anything useful in th
by coldcode 6y ago
If economic benefit is all that matters to educational resources, you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians, who rarely produce anything useful in the same generation. Yet what they do might bring massive new technologies or other improvements to society decades later. You can make the same argument about lots of degrees. Value to society is rarely obvious. Steve Jobs audited a class in calligraphy which seems utterly useless, let it lead to the Mac and the importance of fonts and graphics in computers in general.
- Rochus 6y ago> Value to society is rarely obvious It's rather obvious. There are even offices that collect the relevant statistical data. > you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians No. Both disciplines are required by a lot of companies today. If you have a look at www.indeed.com there are currently 3.5k jobs for physicists. There are subjects where there might be a dozen jobs per year per thousand graduates. But engineers are missing everywhere.
- PeterisP 6y agoThere's lots of mathematical and physics research with clear near or mid-term applications - a good example is DARPA grants, which are motivated by specific government needs, and which "feed" many mathematicians and physicists.