Engineering

Are engineers more important than businessmen? This age old question is a misleading one, partially because it presents a false dichotomy and partially because it shows that the proponents of the “yes” answer of this question have little understanding of economics. The argument that engineers are more important than businessmen is fixated around the belief that profits are an unnecessary middleman to production. Engineers are preoccupied with creating things while businessmen are consumed with marking those products up and limiting their production to limit costs and make profits. Such is the movement around this belief that there is a term for it:artificial scarcity. The problem with this view is that it makes no sense in a broad, long-term macroeconomic view. Consider socks. An engineer could sit and design socks all day and factory workers can produce socks,but without an economic template for how many socks they should produce, the engineers and factory workers will keep doing their jobs and producing socks. In this scenario, we would have socks in such abundance that they would essentially cost nothing. However, because we have dedicated all of our resources to making socks, there is now no shelter, no food, no water, no anything else. There would only be jobs for sock designers and factory workers, and the only hope this nation would have would be trading away socks for other goods. Saying that profits are unecessary to production is like cooking a ton of inedible food-you have cooked a lot, but no one can eat it.