In any case, unless you've personally served time as a doctor or a lawyer, you might want to tone down the rhetoric a notch. Because whatever the intangible benefits of devoting your young life to a startup, I can guarantee that ten years from now, there are going to be a lot of cynical 30-somethings who feel screwed that they didn't get rich from web 2.0.

It seems that every generation has to discover the law of "no free lunch" for themselves.

I'm a cyncial 30 something that screwed myself by not getting rich in web 1.0.

More than one friend is a veteran of the first boom, with little to show for it.

(Obviously an efficient job market is a big assumption, but that's a different question.)

Oh, come on. Now you're just being silly.

Even the article tells you that you're wrong. Legal and medical jobs may be boring and/or tedious, but they pay about as well as you can ever expect to be paid in this country, without being insanely lucky.

Basically, you're succumbing to survivor's bias: you see the stories of the lucky entrepreneurs, so you're relatively unaware of the (vast majority of) people who never make it big (and who end up working in corporate jobs for the rest of their lives). Meanwhile, the people who labor for decades to achieve career success as doctors or lawyers strike you as unglamorous wage slaves, next to the Paul Bucheits and Jamie Zawinskis of the world.

But as I said before, there's no free lunch; nobody is going to let you succeed without a lot of work, or a lot of luck. So you either trust your fate to randomness (high variance; a lot of luck), or you methodically start climbing your way up the greased pole (low variance; a little luck).

Overall, the expected value of career success is higher for the doctors and lawyers, and the variance is lower. That's why people pursue the degree -- not out of some blind faith in title and prestige.