If you were the powerful Canadian science and technology lobby, how do you know when you have achieved ultimate success – I mean blow-out, smash-hit, over-the-top success?
It is when the lead editorial in The Globe and Mail states as fact something central to your beloved stance, even though the assertion is based purely on superstition. Given that science is the topic, this is particularly ironic, especially since it has been centuries since the Scientific Revolution elevated data over superstition as the basis for decision-making.
Last Tuesday, The Globe's lead editorial (The Forgotten Issue: The Productivity Gap) asserted: "The U.S. has far more postsecondary university graduates per capita. And more of those graduates excel in science and engineering." Correct on the first part. The U.S. graduated about 26 per cent more per capita from university in 2002/2003, the latest year that good comparative statistics are available.
The second part is false -- absolutely false.
But it is exactly what the science-and-technology lobby wants everybody, including The Globe and Mail, to believe and propagate. The facts: Canada enjoys a 13-per-cent greater stock of scientists and engineers per capita than the U.S., and Canada produces a 6-per-cent greater annual flow of newly graduated scientists and engineers.
Perhaps by including the word "excel," The Globe is trying to make the point that while Canada graduates 14 per cent more at the BSc level, the U.S. graduates 19 per cent more with an MSc (PhDs in science and technology are tied) and that is a big problem.
However, this is hardly the advanced education problem for Canada to focus on. Across all fields, the U.S. graduates more than double our number of masters and 33 per cent more PhDs every year -- so Canada does disproportionately way better in advanced degrees in science and engineering than all other fields.
Why is all of this important?
It is because Canada's whole innovation and commercialization strategy (such as it is) is predicated and resourced on a flawed notion of Canada's problem -- that we are not investing enough in either science and technology education or science and technology research.
The science-and-technology lobby has done a brilliant job of convincing important policy players -- from the federal government all the way to The Globe editorial page -- to ignore the facts.
Contrary to superstition, we educate more scientists and engineers than the U.S. In addition, proportionate to our economy, we have higher funding than the U.S. of university research -- the vast majority of which is directed to science and technology research. Yet the overwhelming majority of new federal government funding into education and research continues to be in -- you guessed it -- science and technology.
We hold near and dear to our hearts that the U.S. is richer than us because of their high-tech economy. Pure superstition. Across the entire U.S. economy, a mere 1.9 per cent of jobs are in the following combined sectors generally considered to represent all of "high tech": IT or information technology (hardware and software); communications equipment; aerospace vehicles and aerospace engines; medical devices, and pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. In Canada, the number is 1.6 per cent.
What would be the effect if we were to make our jobs distribution as high tech-intensive as the U.S. by magically raising our total to 1.9 per cent of jobs and raise the wages in the extra 0.3 per cent from the average of all sectors to the average of the six high tech sectors?
Answer: it would reduce our prosperity gap with the U.S. from the current 15.7 per cent by 0.1 per cent to 15.6 per cent - a number that most data-oriented folks would call a "rounding error."
