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Tenure is just one of many forms of dependable income that is harder to get now that it was a few decades ago. I suppose it's because there is more competition:

Tenure is just one of many forms of dependable income that is harder to get now that it was a few decades ago. I suppose it's because there is more competition: more people at university in the first place, more students per professor, and people who are profs started as students. Universities have also figured out that they've got you by the balls once you decide you want to try the tenure track, so you end up doing a lot of postdoc before you get that prize. I sound like Karl Marx himself when I say it, but it's the capitalists extracting as much work as possible from the helpless workers. (I don't think I'm normally even on the left, but here we are.)

zo1 4y ago
I'm as far from a marxist as you can get. But we right now have this unholy union of capitalism and weird cultural norms, together enforced by the state. Example: instead of people having generational households and wealth, we're forced to ship kids out at 18 and force them to start from 0$. It's the cultural norm for people to save just enough for retirement so that there is nothing left for kids. People buy a house that's huge, instead of a smaller one and then buy one for the kids when they leave house. And other countless such examples. Cumulatively it means that "something" was extracted away from humans and transformed into fungible monetary things that the "evil" capitalists can insert themselves into.