(Son of) English White Boy Engineer

The April issue of Technology Review has a brief article by Ed Tenner on the relationship between engineers and political power:

"According to a Congressional Quarterly survey of the 109th Congress, there are just four engineers in the House and one in the Senate. When the engineering specialties in the 2004–2005 Statistical Abstract of the United States are combined, there are 2.12 million engineers in the U.S. versus 952,000 lawyers and 819,000 doctors; yet 10 physicians now sit in the House and two in the Senate, and CQ lists 160 representatives and 58 senators with legal backgrounds."

No surprise there.


"But in many other cultures, especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, engineers have been in the thick of power. The’ve been prominent in Marxist movements, such as the brief Hungarian Communist revolution of 1919. They became influential enough in the early Soviet Union that Stalin directed one of his first purges against them. Later, scientists and engineers were put to work in the gulags’ special research prisons, the sharashkas. After Stalin’s death, engineering degrees became desirable credentials for the politically ambitious."

and


"In 2004, almost all two dozen members of China’s ruling Politburo had engineering degrees, including all nine members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee."

I have a souvenir somewhere from my first trip to Cuba in 1997. The Havanatur guide who tooks us to the May Day parade gave me his business card: "Engineer Roniel Gonzales" (I'm guessing at the surname off the top of my head). I remember being struck by the formal title and reflecting how nice it would have been for my dad to have been able to have included it on his business card; had he ever had one.