Commentary: The meltdown in high-tech and science jobs has happened before, and is sure to happen again

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Set us as preferred On a visit to MIT, the science journalist Spencer Klaw found its students and faculty in “a chastened and uncertain mood.” Government science funding and hiring had dried up, and the prospects for graduates had dimmed.Among those he encountered on campus, Klaw detected not merely depression, but anger: These were people who had started their education convinced that their skills were among the most highly valued in government and industry, only to come out of school unappreciated, even disdained.That may sound like a ripped-from-the-headlines experience, but it dates from 1972.

An entire generation that had entered what we now know as STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — amid a national drive to regain America’s technological primacy after the shock of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 felt cheated and misled.Unemployment among workers in occupations most exposed to AI-driven disruption is rising, but not faster than among those least exposed.— Stanford Institute for Economic Policy ResearchMany had gone into those fields because they could be sure of a good job, Klaw wrote for Harper’s.

“As kids in school they were told this was a great national emergency, that we needed scientists,” Klaw heard from Victor Weisskopf, the chair of MIT’s physics department.“So they worked hard, and now they have maybe a wife and a child, and they are out on the street.”The lesson there is that career paths can change dramatically, even within the time span of one’s education.

Nowhere is that more evident than in high tech.As my colleague Queenie Wong has reported, a newly minted corps of tech jobless “are rethinking their lives.

Some are taking pay cuts, others are leaving tech.Some are going back to study or launch startups.

Some have retired.”Commentary on economics...