1. Actuaries: you may be right here, although my vague impression of actuarial science was that there should be a squeeze, and I would want to look carefully at the statistics to see how they might be misleading - eg. is there a Simpson's paradox going on? Are people being squeezed out later in their career? Is the data for a uselessly narrow - or uselessly broad - category of 'actuaries'? etc. 2. So you do agree some fields are in decline! When the Japanese and Korean ESLs complain that the field is getting worse for them (=becoming more competitive), you agree they are. I specifically mentioned Korea because of this potential for you to just say 'ah, but if you look somewhere else....' See comment #1 about definitions and sizes of categories. 3. The broader economic point is still true; Australia's mining rise is the defining characteristic of their economy for the past decade or more. Your regulation points are interesting, though, but point to other possibilities: maybe the complained about decline is precisely the growth or increases - how well do you understand what the existing backpackers value or are complaining about? (A personal parallel that comes to mind is the growth of anime in the late '90s and early '00s in the USA: old-time fans were more than a little bitter because the growth shattered the old fanzines and blew up convention sizes and introduced so many people that a kind of Eternal September set in.) [...] An unduly harsh appraisal. I'd phrase it more as 'vague opinion not backed by specifics or statistics are of little value for assessing large-scale trends', which is not an appraisal I'd consider unjustified in very many areas!

If I understand correctly, your argument is: (1) People in lots of fields believe employment in that field is in decline. (2) It seems improbable that these fields all just happen to be the ones with the worst prospects. (3) Therefore, many of these people are probably wrong. But I don't see how you get to #3, unless you take these people to mean that their fields are in decline relative to other fields. Surely it's perfectly possible that all fields, or at least a large fraction, are in decline in absolute terms. Economic growth has been bobbling along somewhere between "negative" and "positive but very small" for the last few years, and arguably for more if you take the pessimistic view that much of the apparent growth has been from a series of bubbles, the fall from each being cushioned by the growth of the next, which can't be sustained. Since you're trying to choose a career, then of course relative job prospects are what you mostly want to know about. Fair enough. But all those people complaining that their field is in decline might not have meant that.