{"id":384,"date":"2012-02-14T11:41:08","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T16:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=384"},"modified":"2012-02-14T13:02:11","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T18:02:11","slug":"are-scientists-underrepresented-in-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2012\/02\/14\/are-scientists-underrepresented-in-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"Are scientists underrepresented in Congress?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Various scientists I know have been linking to a NY Times blog post<\/a>\u00a0bemoaning the fact that scientists are underrepresented in the US government. The author, John Allen Paulos<\/a>, is a justly celebrated advocate for numeracy, so you’d expect him to get the numbers right. But as far as I can tell, his central claim is numerically unjustified.<\/p>\n

As evidence for this underrepresenation, Paulos writes<\/p>\n

Among the 435 members of the House, for example, there are one physicist, one chemist, one microbiologist, six engineers and nearly two dozen representatives with medical training.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To decide if that’s underrepresentation, we have to know what population we’re comparing to. And there are three different categories mentioned here: scientists, engineers, and medical people. Let’s take them in turn.<\/p>\n

“Pure” science\u00a0.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The physicist, chemist, and microbiologist are in fact two people with Ph.D.’s and one with a masters degree.<\/p>\n

Two Ph.D. scientists is actually an overrepresentation<\/em>\u00a0compared to the US population as a whole. Eyeballing a graph from a Nature<\/em>\u00a0article\u00a0here<\/a>, there were fewer than 15000 Ph.D.’s per year awarded in the sciences in the US back in the 1980s and 1990s (when most members of Congress were presumably being educated). The age cohort of people in their 50s (which I take to be the typical age of a member of Congress) has about 5 million people per year (this time eyeballing a graph<\/a> from the US Census).\u00a0So if all of those Ph.D.’s went to US citizens, about 0.3% of the relevant population has Ph.D.’s in science. A lot of US Ph.D.’s go to foreigners, so the real number is significantly less. Two out of 435 is about 0.45%, so there are too many Ph.D. scientists in Congress.<\/p>\n

Presumably more people have masters degrees than Ph.D.’s, so if you define “scientist” as someone with either a masters or a Ph.D. in science, then it might be true that scientists are underrepresented in Congress. I couldn’t quickly find the relevant data on numbers of masters degrees in the sciences. In physics, it’s very few — about as many Ph.D.’s are granted as masters degrees in any given year, according to the American Institute of Physics<\/a>. But it’s probably more in other disciplines.<\/p>\n

So I’m quite prepared to believe that \u00a0having 3 out of 435 members of Congress in the category of “people with masters or Ph.D.’s in the sciences” means that that group is underrepresented. But I’m not convinced that that’s an interesting group to talk about. In particular, if you’re trying to count the number of people with some sort of advanced scientific training, it makes no sense to exclude physicians from the count.<\/p>\n

Engineers<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says<\/a> that there are about 1.6 million engineering jobs in the US. The work force is probably something like 200 million workers, so engineers constitute less than 1% of the work force, but they’re more than 1% of the House (6\/435). So engineers are overrepresented too.<\/p>\n

Physicians<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Doctors are even more heavily overrepresented: there are about a million doctors <\/a>in the US, which is about 0.5% of the work force, but “people with medical training” are about 5% of Congress. (Some of those aren’t physicians — for instance, one is a veterinarian — but most are.)<\/p>\n

So what?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As a simple statement of fact, it is not true that scientists are underrepresented in Congress. What, then, is Paulos claiming? I can only guess that he intends to make a normative rather than a factual statement (that is, an “ought” rather than an “is”). Scientists are underrepresented in comparison to what he he thinks the number ought to be<\/em>. Personally, my instinct would be to be sympathetic to such a claim. Unfortunately, he neither states this claim clearly nor provides much of an argument in support of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Various scientists I know have been linking to a NY Times blog post\u00a0bemoaning the fact that scientists are underrepresented in the US government. The author, John Allen Paulos, is a justly celebrated advocate for numeracy, so you’d expect him to get the numbers right. But as far as I can tell, his central claim is … Continue reading Are scientists underrepresented in Congress?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}