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It's really more of a symptom of the problem than the source of the problem.

Real economic growth is heading toward zero.

Think of the period of time between 1800 and 2000 of being a kind of "technology bubble".

Dude has it right that in IT the BIG money is in consulting. Hourly rates are sky high for specialized consultants. My DH has a fulltime for which he is highly compensated with a nice benefits package yet his bill rate for independent work is often 5x what his salary rate calcs to. He has been able to more than double his salary with a few hours of independent contracts on the side and still keep all the perks of the fulltime job.

He started working independently while still in college with consulting work he sourced and telecommuted to. And his payrate at that time (with no degree or formal training) was only $20/hr less than his fulltime now.

Maybe these grads do actually plan lucrative careers as "consultants" based on their education. I mean if my DH could do it while still IN college with a double-major, surely they might have similar aspirations.

In the US, with the forces that are currently aligned against it, I'd say you're mostly right. There are a handful of companies that still do research (Google), but to do STEM on a large scale, you need massive amounts of investment without any immediate prospect of a payoff, because you never really know what the outcome of research will be. And that massive amount of investment can't happen without at least one of two things:

1) Corporate commitment to bearing the expense: The current corporate culture rewards short-term gains, and cutting/eliminating research is low-hanging fruit.

2) Public commitment to bearing the expense: The current political machine is incapable of accomplishing anything, much less paying for it.

That's not to say that one of those things may not change in the future, so I won't say it's not coming back. The Golden Age is alive in China, among others, and given significant changes in the geopolitical situation for the US (read: danger), it could come back again pretty quickly.

IMO, this is something of a fantasy. The kind of person who knowingly signs up to work 80+ hours per week is doing it for the rush and the money. In most cases, he isn't suddenly going to transform into a dude of leisure.

Plus, there are other very real factors. People get used to or stuck in a certain income level (read: children, mortgage payment, and/or divorce). They look around themselves and see everyone else working umpteen hours and know that they have to keep the pace or risk losing their jobs. We all know how quickly people can become obsolete and unhirable. Not to mention how pointless a lot of that kind of financial consulting work is, anyway. Full of sound and fury....

It's the same way in academia. People work themselves to the bone for tenure and say that things will be different afterward. But things stay the same. That newly minted Associate Prof. still has to publish in order to get the next grant. If she doesn't, the university may not fire her, but it also won't give her money for research. So she gets to teach or work in the clinic if she's an MD. People who want to do research rarely want to do that. If they did, they would have signed up to work a community college or a local hospital way back when. So they suck it up and keep cranking out papers (many of which are mediocre at best).

Plus, many of these people also enjoy heart disease, high levels of stress, divorce, and the constant knowledge that they may outsourced.

And meanwhile, we're cutting our national investments in R&D. So our bad situation is now getting to be like a bad air day in Beijing: Crazy Bad.

So put me in the camp that says, "Yep, this is insane."

The h1b is horrifically abused and is the main reason that IT is not the decently paid niche that it used to be. There now are a ton of cheap gormless morons working in the place of what was a much smaller FTE work force of highly skilled, hard-working and motivated people. The key word here is cheap and by God does buying cheap cost dear in lost quality.

I have seen formerly great IT titans on Wall Street like Morgan Stanley then (90s) and now (2 years ago) the difference made me feel like Charlton Heston in the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes.

Love that.

Has anyone seen Thomas Friedman's facile analysis about employment in today's Times? It's risible. But the comments are bodacious.

In all honesty, now that I have personal access to the Tom Friedman Op Ed Generator, I have been able to satisfy my nearly insatiable longing for his glorious prose in the privacy of my own home.

I just created my own article, which you can feel free to read and enjoy: "Macedonia and its Own Arab Awakening".

http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/Macedonia+and+its+Own+Arab+Awakening+c57aa8

It combines a firm grasp of the true nature of current global realpolitik trends with a warm rational optimism that a better world is truly possible.

If you have any interest in feeling what it must be like to *be* Mr. Friedman, you may create your own at the above link.

Yeah, but do you know *why* he felt that way?

Because "The Planet of the Apes" was really a future Earth!

He didn't discover a new planet after all, he returned to Earth after it had been basically destroyed by people.

The thingy sticking out of the sand was the Statue of Liberty.

It's very confusing if you don't understand that the entire story actually takes place on Earth and not "The Planet of the Apes."

I think they should have renamed the movie "Future Earth".

That would have made it much less confusing to the average moviegoer.

It's also a much more honest title.

I don't know if it's gone, but it has changed. We just filled a junior engineering position in my company. What I saw was tremendous wage compression. The best grads out of college were touching six figures, and many highly qualified candidates with 10 years of experience were making about the same amount.

Now the figures for the experienced grads might be skewed downwards somewhat because of our position's salary cap, but there were many talented people to choose from.

Which is entirely why I wrote what I wrote