Nowadays, it seems that the money worship influences engineers thinking and behavior. It is not a positive sense of worth, especially when engineers’ job can be regarded as “driving the advance of civilization”. However, everyone must confess that the economic aspect has become more and more significant in the engineering. According to Longman Advanced American Dictionary, scientists are people who exam, test, and prove facts. Compared with scientists, our engineers have to design and process scientists’ research achievement, and make it into reality. Therefore, the cost of solving the grand challenges in the future will be an inevitable factor that engineers should take into consideration. For example, we all know that the energy is consumed greatly when transferred from power plants to users because of the resistance of wires. Instead, scientists found that the superconductor can approach zero resistance when it is frozen enough. However, no engineers of any country today use the superconductor to make wires just because the cost of cooling the material overwhelms the benefits it will bring. Someone may say that it is only a pure economic problem, so it is easy to judge. Let us see another example. One of the methods of solving today’s global air pollution problem is to replace the fossil fuel by biofuel, such as ethanol. However, the cost of refining ethanol from corn is 29% higher than the cost of getting petrol. Only American engineers are trying to use the biofuel to replace the fossil fuel because their government can bear the extra cost.
In a conclusion, no engineer will ignore the economic aspect when they design and propose the engineering solutions.
