True, but this happened recently post-2000. Because engineering is now a sweatshop due to globalization and it was not in the 90s.
That's a factor. I think other factors, probably many others, were at least as important as offshoring, which has been going on for a long time.
My favorite factor is the all-encompassing scope of stock-market consciousness in US culture toward the end of the bubble. 1929 on steroids. EVERYBODY was like John D. Rockefeller's proverbial shoeshine boy (when he gives you a stock tip, you know it's time to get out of the market). Motley Fool, instant e-trades, day-trading as a profession, CNBC, housewives investment clubs, celebrity CEO's, losers who were dozing in their offices when somebody handed them an envelope full of options that turned them into retired millionaires 3 months later, debates about naked puts in biker bars, Barbara Stresand makes $900,000 in six months on tech stocks, "Fast Company", etc. etc. etc. There were more investment geniuses than people. Some of them must have been dogs or corpses. I submit the birth and incongruous survival of SI as a trivially minor piece of evidence.
I think it changed for the long term (maybe quasi-permanently) the way Americans above the poverty class think; and the better off you are, the more likely you think that way. This certainly includes bright college students. I don't think they see life the same way any more.
Could be wrong though.
--QS |
