[LeCompteSftware]

That shouldn't be viewed in isolation. A major root cause is essentially overproduction of academics downstream from the Cold War, and obviously the private sector is not to blame for that.

But you can't ignore how much modern Big Tech has sucked away from academia compared to the tech companies of the Cold War era. Microsoft Research and Google Research have some impressive folks, but even combined they are a scientific pittance compared to the might of Bell Labs, and there is far more interference from the business side. This despite the fact that the executives of those companies are vastly wealthier than anyone from Bell Labs in the 20th century, even adjusting for inflation.

And of course it's not just the executives: every 7-figure Google software engineer should get a >$100k pay cut, and that money goes to a STEM PhD to pursue nonprofit research at Google Labs. Believe it or not, $100k is still pretty competitive for a young PhD mathematician (similar to assistant professor at a selective state school). Even if it's chump change for a guy who fine tunes AdSense.

[danaris]

Describing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"?

It's not like the current demand for scientists is somehow a completely natural value, arrived at objectively and with no human biases involved.

And the private sector is heavily to blame for that. In ways that you even describe, as well as others (as another commenter noted, regulatory capture is one).

[amirhirsch]

Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions