<p>Replace every politician, warlord, cleric, lawyer, banker, financier, and hedge fund manager with an engineer, what would the world look like?
World peace or world disorder?
Engineers with power become corrupt?
This can be funny or serious.</p>
<p>We’d be screwed.</p>
<p>Japan tried to do something of the sort: they put the smartest people in the country in charge. </p>
<p>To an extent, it works well - they made one of the most successful economies in the world. They only recently were passed over by China, a country many times bigger than them. </p>
<p>Smart people (and engineers, smart or not), however, have one very significant weakness: hubris. Often they are quite unable to acknowledge their own mistakes, and if given the opportunity, they will screw up big time with everyone else being none the wiser because they foolishly trust those smarter than them. That’s what happened to Japan - they had a big crash, and their economy is stagnant because they aren’t willing to change.</p>
<p>Engineers specifically have a really bad case of this. They think they are smarter than everyone else and activities such as business and writing are beneath them. For the most part, politicians, lawyers, etc. don’t have this problem - they’re just OK with the consequences of their actions and don’t have any illusions about what they do.</p>
<p>As another example, think of a large-scale Silicon Valley: lots of useless products and lots of delusional engineers fooling themselves into thinking they are changing the world. Lots of bubbles, and plenty of make-believe value formed in a giant cloud of BS. Thankfully, all this stuff is relegated to just a few cities on the edge of the country.</p>
<p>Things are better the way they are.</p>
<p>Worldwide population growth would fall to record low levels.</p>
<p>Herbert Hoover was a stereotypical engineer- smart and logical person but a very poor communicator with very little charisma- overall, a very unpopular president.</p>
<p>It is the same thing I have talked about before- people who are smart but not well rounded hardly ever are going to be successful leaders.</p>
<p>I would not want to live in a world run by engineers :)</p>
<p>Engineers have highly specialized knowledge. I don’t see how engineers running the world would end up any better or worse than pastry chefs running the world; that said, I’d probably err on the side of pastry chefs.</p>
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Uncharismatic yet he “somehow” managed to run a campaign successful enough to put him into office. Did he win on party-lining? Perhaps, but that would mean he successfully outperformed every other Republican.</p>
<p>Regardless, his unpopularity wasn’t a product of his personality, as you seem to think it is. There was one and only one issue that really mattered during his term as president: the Great Depression. And he was really not the right person to deal with the worst economic collapse in the history of the United States. Charisma had nothing to do with it - plenty of people listened to what he had to say and tried to do what he said, including the businesses he told to stop deflation from happening. That just didn’t solve the problem.</p>
<p>While it does hurt to overspecialize, Hoover is not a good example of that.</p>
<p>Oh hell no!</p>
<p>There are some things in life…even decisions that need to be made without some 100-step process. </p>
<p>Engineers would be trying to “CONOP” everything, hahahaha.</p>
<p>^^GLOBALTRAVELLER, as the wife, SIL, aunt and mother to current and future engineers in all fields, I couldn’t agree more!</p>
<p>China largely has been run by engineers, though this may be changing.
<a href=“http://china-us.uoregon.edu/pdf/071110_F_Engineers.pdf[/url]”>http://china-us.uoregon.edu/pdf/071110_F_Engineers.pdf</a></p>
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<p>I believe he was also the last president to not use a press secretary, but instead do all of it himself (at least up until everything went south).</p>
<p>Politicians and lawyers don’t suffer from hubris? Say again?</p>
<p>Xi Jinping, the President of China, is a chemical engineer. He replaced Hu Jintao who was a hydraulic engineer.</p>
<p>If the world was run by engineers, it would be like China:
[Why</a> do Chinese political leaders have engineering degrees whereas their American counterparts have law degrees? - Quora](<a href=“http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-political-leaders-have-engineering-degrees-whereas-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees]Why”>http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-political-leaders-have-engineering-degrees-whereas-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees)</p>
<p>I think I’ll stick with the lawyer-run dysfunction we have…</p>
<p>Please remember that there are far more significant contributors than education to the performance of the various national leaders. China may be led by engineers, but the big differences between the US and China are due primarily to other factors.</p>
<p>Going back to the OP, if the US was run by engineers I think some things would get better (like science and education funding), some things worse (like foreign relations), and everything would get slower - hard to believe, I know, but it would.</p>
<p>Engineers can be totally clueless when dealing with the soft, squishy, philosophical issues that so often arise in real life, like morals and human relations.</p>
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Engineers are much, much worse.</p>
<p>I have read that to be a politician in France one needs to have attended the X (Ecole Polytechnique).</p>
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<p>Because someone has an Engineering degree does not mean they are smart, logical or a bad communicator. If he had little charisma, how did he become president? </p>
<p>Note that liberal art classes will not make you a good communicator. Honestly, I think engineering classes will help you gain more social skills because you will have to work with others on projects. The reason it is more common for an engineer to have bad social skills is because a much higher percentage of engineers had bad communication skills before college</p>