I recently spoke to a group of college and graduate students about Meltdown (my recent New York Times bestseller on the financial crisis), the publishing world, my experiences with the book, etc. The talk elicited quite a few laughs. You can listen to it here (left-click to stream; right-click to download).
Among many other things, I also did this brief (print) interview.
jgo Says:
September 2nd, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I just finished reading _MeltDown_ and it’s a great little book. I’ve tried to explain this view of the economic cycle to others repeatedly since the late 1960s, but this book will be a handy tool.
But, there are a couple paragraphs which assert that there were shortages of STEM workers during the dot-com boom. I don’t see any signs of that in the data. In the last half of he 1990s, we had a large pool of idle or under-employed STEM talent, and a wide-open pipe-line for producing more capable of web-weaving and such (and it has only grown larger).
Studies by researchers from Columbia U, Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke U, Georgetown U, Harvard U, National Research Council of the NAS, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers U, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford U, SUNY Buffalo, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, Urban Institute, and US Dept. of Education Office of Education Research & Improvement have reported that the USA has continually been producing more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we’ve been employing in these fields. If you’ve got data to the contrary I’d like to see it.
In 2000, Cisco received 20K applications per month but hired only 5% of the applicants. Inktomi hired only 1%, MSFT 2%, Qualcomm 5%, Red Hat Linux 1%. Qualcomm reported in 2001 May that they were receiving over 1K per day, and in 2003 February they were receiving 200 job applications every day. And there was a jump in STEM lay-offs in 1998. Through this same period, MSFT had shaved pay and benefits by declaring many employees to be contractors (see “perma-temp”). With MSFT (and Oracle and Sun…), there’s also the issue of professional ethics and low-quality products which many self-respecting software and hardware engineers might reasonably wish to avoid; i.e. MSFT execs made their own bed but didn’t want to sleep in it.
BLS figures on pay by industry show a slight increase in pay in software publishing, but also a big increase in hours worked (and there was an even bigger increase in off-the-books work by salaried STEM workers from 1985 to present).
http://www.kermitrose.com/images/EarningsPerHour.jpg
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoOccupation.html
Why would immigation lawyers be giving seminars on how to place job ads so as to avoid getting many able and willing US citizen STEM worker applicants, and then how to create pretexts to reject all who have applied? And yet, from 2000 forward, that’s what we see.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econSummaryAnalysis.html
P.S. I was glad to see friend Randall Holcombe’s book mention in the citations.
P.P.S. Javascript is evil.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books. A senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his master's, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Read more »
