What shortage of engineers?

I'm always hearing about how the U.S. suffers from such a scarcity of competitive engineers. Well, I think Bryan Caplan has discovered why:

But I think I can put the case for the econ major more succinctly. Here goes: Econ is the highest-paid of all the easy majors.

My students often howl in protest when I say this, but come on: Econ does not put the crimp on your social life that CS or Engineering do. It's not even close.

My GPA in liberal arts classes and Johnson Business School was about 0.5 higher than my GPA in my engineering school. My hardest challenges always came from my engineering core or concentration classes. Top college scholars would start Intro to Computer Science and drop it by the second program assignment.

As long as engineers are being paid half of what economics majors or federal workers in this country, well, we are going to have more of the latter.