alt Hacker NewsThat’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.
Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
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One would also have to consider the calibre of the individuals hired to replace them, or not, and whether functions such as the National Science Foundation add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen to increase its spending on...
What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.
The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more.
I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?