This is not true. There are many different types of information encoded in a market clearing price (supply of inputs, the supply of inputs to their inputs, util

This is not true. There are many different types of information encoded in a market clearing price (supply of inputs, the supply of inputs to their inputs, utility of the output, economies of scale, etc). You can't say that e.g. a rise in the price of pencils means it's "easy to tell" there's a shortage of pencils. It could mean that: 1) more people are getting better utility from pencils. 2) pencils are getting harder to produce at the current scale. 3) an input supply to pencil construction is rising in price Applying these lessons back to the market for developers, it's pretty easy to see parallels to ALL three of the above scenarios. Which explains the rising price. Unless you're using the word "shortage" to mean "you can't get what you want at the price you want", in which case the statement is almost tautologically true.