[jjoonathan]

All of our arguments so far have been completely generic. Both of us would love for someone with quantitative historical perspective to shed some light on these issues, but it isn't going to be me. I don't have that kind of knowledge -- all I've got is Cunningham's law and the vague notion that other engineering disciplines pay slightly over ~1/2 as much as software engineering at comparable skill levels, presumably due to having had more time for supply/demand equilibration. A solid route for counter-argument would attack my notion of "comparable skill levels," and while I'd love to hear that I was twice as skilled (comparatively speaking) as my buddies in different engineering sectors I sincerely doubt that that's the case.

Economics is not a zero sum game, but there are a few significant zero-sum games within economics that suffice to undermine the "rising tide lifts all boats" argument: land ownership, profit ownership, power ownership. A significant chunk of the value behind a certain amount of wealth is relative to everyone else. Resenting someone else for earning twice as much would not make sense in a world where prices were fixed, but that's not the world we live in. The 2x guy is absolutely capable of bidding up prices on houses, investment instruments, and political influence, which all hurts the 1x guy. The guy with a skilled job absolutely makes it harder for other people with similar skills to find work. The guy building automated burger dispensers absolutely makes it harder for those at the bottom of the totem pole to secure gainful employment.

I do not debate that the current situation is that there are too few programmers. My claim is that once supply and demand equilibrate (and unless demand experiences exponential growth forever this will certainly happen) then we'll be in the same boat as everyone else. And it isn't a pretty boat.

I would love to be wrong about this, but I just don't think that there's a certain level of education that will creates a sustainably large middle class. It can certainly help in places where there are deficiencies, but it stops being effective at the asymptote. Look at the US, look at Japan. More and more education every decade but at the end of the day the supply of jobs for educated people didn't magically expand to meet the demand. The "magic" I'm referring to is the same magic as the "it's not a zero-sum game" argument refers to. It didn't work: we massively increased education and the middle class crumbled anyway.