Hi all, I know of studies that relate engineering to extremist mindsets, but is there any statistics about the number/percentage of engineers voting republican/libertarian?
Or is this an old-wives tale? Bryan
See the table on p. 33. Engineering/comp. sci. professors are the most Republican / least Democratic of all the disciplines (except business).
Keep in mind this is a sample of engineering professors, not engineers. I would guess private-sector engineers would be even more conservative.
SA
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Hey, no wives tale for me. My second stepfather was an electronic engineer who worked in the LA electronic industries. He was a strange combination of libertarian, john birch weirdo from an old Maryland family. His father had been a republican state senator and small mill and farm owner.
We were sitting at the dinner table around 1959 and I said something dismissive of the Constitution, know it all sixteen. He took a swing at me and we ended up in a fist fight in the kitchen. He knocked me over and I hit my head on the dish waster, scrambling up blood running dwon my neck and took a round house at him, missing. He turn his head hard and slammed into an open cabinet door and broke his glasses and cracked his nose. My mother was jumping up and down screaming like a small dog barking. I ran out the door ... He thought I had connected.
So, yes, they can get pretty extreme.
Years later, I think I figured him out. He was a very creative guy and was always working on some invention. The odd thing was if we were working on one of his projects, we got along. One of his other past times was figuring graphs on commodity futures with a slide rule.
He had several circuit designs he tried to get patents for, but was rejected.
See? He wanted to be Thomas Edison, make money and become a famous inventor. He was a small business man at heart. I think this is a very common engineering dream. You can see it reproduced again and again with each new tech wave.
He went to Carnegie. If you open up an engineering text, they usually have little history boxes over to the side of the text that tells these small inventor makes it big stories. So this whole mythos builds up.
Just glancing through SA's posted paper, you can see that academics are much better positioned, because of their contacts with local industries, especially when there are theoretical leaps to cash in on.
CG