“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.
ETA: Here's a money quote from near the end of the article:
The main difference between postdocs and migrant agricultural laborers, he jokes, is that the Ph.D.s don’t pick fruit.
(Ouch)
I'm not sure I see what the problem is. Capitalism works? It makes it seem like this system is unsustainable or bound to collapse, but I'm not sure I see how two and two fit together. I am particularly confused with this quote:
...Obviously, the “pyramid paradigm can’t continue forever,” says Susan Gerbi, chair of molecular biology at Brown University and one of the relatively small number of scientists who have expressed serious concern about the situation. Like any Ponzi scheme, she fears, this one will collapse when it runs out of suckers — a stage that a
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.