Where does the top Mechanical Engineering talent in the US work?

[sakky]

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No, sakky. I did not ask how engineers at John Deere or Apple should be compensated relative to investment bankers, or anesthesiologists, or Subway Sandwich Artists. For as long as I have been a part of this forum - over three years now - you have tirelessly argued that engineers ought to be compensated according to “the value they provide to the world.” But it is clear that not all engineers perform the same tasks. I am asking you: does an electrical engineer at Apple or John Deere provide more ‘value’ to the world? And how much of a salary difference should exist based on this disparity?

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<p>Actually, you have actually answered your own question: value is subjective. Sure, not all engineers perform the same tasks, but not all investment bankers perform the same tasks. I therefore must return to the original statement that it is not at all clear why investment bankers should be paid more than engineers, when it is certainly not clear that they provide more value to the world. “Value” is fundamentally speaking a political and social judgment, not merely an economic one. </p>

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Why? Compare the number of investment bankers and management consultants to the number of engineers. Clearly, you cannot redistribute those earnings in a fashion that would have more than a few engineers earning those top wages. Why should the rest of us care?

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<p>Uh, how’s that? While the absolute numbers of bankers and consultants may be small, the financial power that each one possesses relative to engineers is absolutely yawning, indeed, often times larger by an order of magnitude (or, in the case of bankers, sometimes by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude). </p>

<p>Put another way, according to the BLS, there are around 1.5 mn engineers in the nation. Imagine if instead of bailing out the finance industry to the tune of $700 billion, we could have distributed that sum to the the engineers instead. That would represent nothing less than a whopping $400,000 “lump-sum bonus payment” for every single engineer in the country. And that’s just the funding associated with the bailout, that doesn’t even count all of the regular revenue/profits that the finance industry enjoys. Why exactly is the nation unable to afford to improve engineering pay, when it apparently can conjure nearly a trillion dollars at will to rescue the bankers? </p>

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Only 1% of a population can be in the top 1%. Certainly, jobs at Apple are competitive. But one need not get a job at Apple to have an income well above the national average as an engineer.

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<p>An income as high as the other industries in question? </p>

<p>And that’s precisely the point. Talented people have a choice about which industry they should enter. As long as engineering refuses to pay its employees better relative to other industries, then talented people will inevitably prefer those other industries.</p>