That’s not how the market works. It doesn’t go “oh we need chemists let’s increase their pay and they’ll flock here”. It goes “oh I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years it seems really hard to do chemistry now let’s pivot the business into a glorified real estate holding and invest in those ad companies that seem to have good ROI”.

Ex-chemist, can confirm.

>I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years.

Americans are world leaders among chemists, so I don't think you're correct in this case [1].

It looks much more like saturation, with only 7200 openings per year [2]. And over 13000 annual graduates [3].

We have an excess of chemists in the US, as best I can tell, and we should expect pay to reflect that.

[1] https://research.com/news-events/world-ranking-of-top-chemis...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/che...

[3] https://cen.acs.org/education/graduate-education/numbers-s-c...

Based on pay, you'd think childcare is in low demand and astronomers are in high demand. But that would be wrong.

Based on pay I wouldn't think that astronomers are in high demand, and neither does the Bureau of Labor [1].

Child care labor is in fact in low demand [2].

I think child care is expensive because insurance is expensive.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Life-Physical-and-Social-Science/Phy...

[2]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-...

The data at those links indicate the demand for child care workers is more than 40x the demand for physicists and astronomers combined. Yet, childcare workers make only slightly more than 1/5th the wage.

This is because skilled labor is not fungible and different jobs are on different demand curves.

Maybe I misunderstand your argument. I thought your main point was that pay may be high despite demand being low, and vice versa. I'm sure there are exceptional cases where this is true, but the examples you provided illustrate something very much counter to your point.

In your examples, pay and demand are low for all three professions, chemists, child care workers, and astronomers, according to the BoL.

My point is that each profession has its own independent supply and demand equilibrium, and not every market even operates at equilibrium. The relative wages of two entirely independent markets for labor don't indicate relative demand.

Okay. I didn't make that comparison. I see why you might though. For clarity, my point isn't that they make less than any comparable. It's that taking into consideration the cost of acquiring the degree, it's unusual that the pay would be about median in keeping with uneducated laborers. An explanation like unusually low demand (or market saturation) is likely to be the cause of that pay deficit. In this case, it appears to be in fact.