Also, my experience was this:

Grad school: 24k -> 26k over 6 years, at a highly-ranked institution. (MIT, my only other offer, offered me a measly 18k, I declined for obvious reasons).

1st postdoc: 30k for 1 year. I left, because my project was completed. This turned out to be a good choice, because my boss quit six months later (and threw the other postdoc under the bus - he was lazy).

Lab tech job: 35k. This was a job that was supposed to go to an entry level post-baccalaureate. I got it within 14 days of moving to San Diego, took it, because I knew the job market was rough. It's worth noting that I took a job that was a demotion, in terms of credentials, but got a pay raise.

2nd postdoc: An "internal promotion" from the previous, 40k.

I guess it's also worth mentioning, I'm ~30 years old and still making 40k, despite having slaved away as a PhD (talking 80 hour weeks) from a top-ranked school. My peers who went on different career trajectories are making far more than I. OTOH, I have plenty of friends (whom I know through social activities, so did not make it into tech) that are unemployed, which in most cases, is worse.

I don't quite see what's obvious about declining MIT for 6k unless there's a significant decrease in prestige of the PIs you worked with.

MIT in general is worth more than the 6k more you're getting from Scripps.

Lab techs are offered higher pay because the prospects for promotion are limited at best, they compensate for that with slightly higher pay. As a post-doc you aren't expected to keep that job forever, whereas lab techs do so for decades.

You seem really disgruntled about the current system. Academia isn't easy, considering the limited funding available, it is in national interest to only have the best doing research and your CV isn't exactly super competitive.

Edit: The vast majority of younger faculty I've worked with (i.e. Assistant Professors with < 5 years of experience at the University of Toronto only did post docs for 4-6 years in total. Not the 8-12 you seem to imply, and this is in biological and medical sciences.

I think you're wrong. As much as I despise rankings, Scripps was ranked number 1 among chemistry departments my year (my degree is in chemistry). I didn't have to do any TAing. Among my classmates and the class after me (whom I hung out with the most, classes of 20 students tend to do that and at scripps we're really close), there is: A professor at Scripps, A professor at Berkeley, A professor at Stanford, A professor at UCSD. I am in contact with them and will possibly launch a collaboration with the one in Stanford. Finally, at 24k I barely broke even on my expenses. I'm sure I could have survived on 18k, but I'd have more grey hairs.

And "The vast majority of younger faculty I've worked with". Sounds like selection bias. Talk to the postdocs and see how long they've been around.

Ouch, yeah, that's pretty bad. What exactly do you have a doctorate in? Aren't there prospects in industry, rather than academia?

I applied for a job in industry (with http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation). Cold emailed the CEO (in 1/08). Got an interview with the CEO, in 7/08, was told to "call back in a month and I'll see if I can allocate money for you" - he'd been demoted to CSO by the VC. It was a really fun trip, he was great to me, but I could tell he was an a-hole, and he said, you know, you should really consider being an executive of your own. I thought he was crazy, but now that's exactly what I'm trying to do (but of a nonprofit, which might be even crazier). Again, this was in 7/08, and I'd been watching the Chris Martenson "crash course" videos and following the Ron Paul presidential campaign and knew that the market was about to crash. By 8/08, the market had begun its topspin downward, and I never got a response. Ultimately, draths went out of business, so it was probably for the better.

More recently, I applied for a job in industry with these guys (http://www.genomatica.com/) and actually got a job offer that I had to decline because they wanted me to start immediately, and I (perhaps stupidly) felt I had an obligation to finish my project where I work now. OTOH, I seem to have enough freedom to try to do my own thing.

So, yes there are prospects in industry. One caveat is that although my publication record is not terribly impressive by the conventional "impact factor metric" (I personally like that I've made innovations in three wildly different aspects of biology - difficult protein expression, small molecule drug development, and bioorganometallic chemistry), I have an extremely good academic pedigree, that gets my foot in the door to interviews and lets me at least try to justify my existence based on the merit that I value and the skillset that I've developed. Inasmuch as I hate that the title is being devalued, I feel sorry for PhDs that have their degrees rubber-stamped, because it's gotta be really tough for them.