[jefftk]

We saw this with programmers and the dot-com bubble. There was briefly really high demand and high pay, and then when funding suddenly disappeared there were massive shutdowns and layoffs. Many devs couldn't find work for years, and the market wage was much lower because there were so many extra devs. (College CS enrollment also plummeted then, which is one hypothesis for why CS training has been slow to scale up to current demand.)

Automotive factory work is another example, I think. Something like: there were high wages (with unions) in Detroit factories, and then competition first from overseas and from other US states led to a collapse in pay (along with a general collapse in Detroit).

I haven't looked into it, but I suspect that there was a time when some railroad workers were very well paid, which then went bust when one of the railroad bubbles popped.

[_bxg1]

I do feel that the dot com bubble was different. In that case, the whole industry was brought into doubt. "Maybe this whole internet thing isn't all it's cracked up to be." That notion is clearly ridiculous in 2019.

The much scarier "bubble" today is "actually most of this stuff isn't all that hard". There are probably also smaller bubbles to be had in AI, blockchain, venture capital, etc., but I don't think those will be nearly as broad-reaching as dot com.

[ghaff]

The thing with dot-bomb was that there were cascading effects. All those startups were buying gear from the "Four Horsemen of the Internet" so their collapse brought down a bunch of the large firms as well. (And it was all mixed in with 9/11, etc.)

Today, even if there were a big ad-tech collapse, a bunch of highly paid Bay Area engineers might end up having to move back to Ohio but I'm not sure you have the same overall economic effects. (And, if it's mostly just a drying up of VC capital, the effects are even less.)