Sex and Nerds

Matt Yglesias flags this ridiculous ad campaign:

Via the Poor Man Institute, the latest in abstinence advocacy:

If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex.

Exactly exactly totally right. Without any data, but with plenty of anecdotal evidence, I
can confidently say that this is one of the big reasons people in rich countries are reluctant to become scientists and engineers. If nerds don't get laid, who wants to be a nerd?

(I also think this is the biggest reason behind the lack of women in science and engineering, if you replace "getting laid" with "lack of social interaction, which includes but is by no means limited to getting laid," but that's a blog post for another day.)

Economically, this makes sense. In poor countries, everybody has to work hard, so being an engineer doesn't condemn you to celibacy any more than any other job - in fact, the higher salary an engineer is expected to earn probably makes nerds better prospects. But in rich countries, there's a ton of alternatives to an engineering career that don't involve spending 70 hours a week in an office or lab - and thus don't crimp your style.

So what do we do to increase interest in science and engineering? Japan tries to solve the problem by having companies buy their engineers tons of hookers, but that doesn't really work (and causes plenty of social problems). America, though, has come up with a better solution - college. College is the best place to study science and engineering, and the best place to get laid as well. And Americans know this.

(In economics-ese, college replaces consumption-leisure complementarities with investment-leisure complementarities, thus creating an incentive for human capital investment.)

Making college more selective and rigorous, while expanding the capacity of colleges and providing more financial aid, is in my opinion the best way to get Americans to want to be engineers.