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First, I'm generally skeptical that "the market" is accurately pricing the value of work produced by either postdocs or federal mail carriers. Second, a postdo

First, I'm generally skeptical that "the market" is accurately pricing the value of work produced by either postdocs or federal mail carriers. Second, a postdoc is still a training position. Medical residents are also not paid much better than mail carriers either. Third, postdocs select for two types of people: those who want R1 professorships and those who need a position to stay in the country. Both of those groups drive down wages. I.e., it's sort of meaningless to compare a group of people who are working for the money to a group of people who are working for a shot at a seat in the upper tier of a tournament-style profession. Fourth, both annual and lifetime earnings of PhD holders (at least in STEM) continue to outperform high school graduates (including mail carriers). There's an oversupply of people interested in R1 faculty positions, but that doesn't mean there's a oversupply of phds per se. The labor market seems to absorb these people quite readily and at apparently high salaries as soon as they decide to quit academia.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The market is not created by some third party. It simply represents the meeting point between what people are willing to buy for and what people are willing to sell for. That postdocs are willing to work for scraps relative to their skill level is indicative that supply has gone way beyond demand. For instance software developers also face similar issues of what you're mentioning with lower wage foreign workers willing to accept much less thus driving wages down, yet nonetheless high demand keeps wages high. This is not particularly controversial and some have even suggested that starting to increasingly restrict the number of graduate students admitted could be the right path forward, as mentioned in this article [1] from John Hopkins: These and other suggestions for career preparation make one implicit assumption: that the nation needs the current number of biomedical scientists. A radically different approach to balancing the biomedical workforce equation would be to simply reduce the “supply” — that is, admit fewer students into science graduate programs. The article ends on what was apparently supposed to be an up beat note suggesting that instead of such draconian measures, perhaps we can look to people who are doing things like aiming to go teach high school science, with a doctorate.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  And on the other hand you see things like https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professors-across-many-institutions/ https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professor... Just like there's a glut of wordpress plugin authors and a shortage of ML experts, different fields of academia have different levels of supply/demand. Also, USPS really is not a prototypical example of free labor market: those salaries/pensions/benefits will be a lot smaller if/when usps privatizes...

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

The market is not created by some third party. It simply represents the meeting point between what people are willing to buy for and what people are willing to sell for. That postdocs are willing to work for scraps relative to their skill level is indicative that supply has gone way beyond demand. For instance software developers also face similar issues of what you're mentioning with lower wage foreign workers willing to accept much less thus driving wages down, yet nonetheless high demand keeps wages high. This is not particularly controversial and some have even suggested that starting to increasingly restrict the number of graduate students admitted could be the right path forward, as mentioned in this article [1] from John Hopkins: These and other suggestions for career preparation make one implicit assumption: that the nation needs the current number of biomedical scientists. A radically different approach to balancing the biomedical workforce equation would be to simply reduce the “supply” — that is, admit fewer students into science graduate programs. The article ends on what was apparently supposed to be an up beat note suggesting that instead of such draconian measures, perhaps we can look to people who are doing things like aiming to go teach high school science, with a doctorate.

throwawayjava 8y ago
And on the other hand you see things like https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professors-across-many-institutions/ https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professor... Just like there's a glut of wordpress plugin authors and a shortage of ML experts, different fields of academia have different levels of supply/demand. Also, USPS really is not a prototypical example of free labor market: those salaries/pensions/benefits will be a lot smaller if/when usps privatizes...