willowroot

There used to be a lot of good, relatively high-paying jobs for scientists and engineers. They went away with the end of the cold war. The growth of civilian industries has not been enough to replace all those lost defense jobs. Even if you count all the jobs gained in the .com boom and don't count the losses in the ensuing bust, it's not been enough. It didn't help that the latest boom was in finance and construction instead of industry. Some science and math types went to Wall Street as quants, and they made a huge amount of money, but that was not sustainable. My hope now is that our society will choose to innovate its way out of the global warming and fossil fuel crisis. There could be a lot of good jobs, for people at all levels of skill and education.