Despite the
lip service paid to the importance of basic science to US competitiveness, you can see that not only are natural scientists underpaid here, but their rate of income growth has lagged that of other professions in the last decade. A careful study would show that US scientists, as a class of workers, are the first victims (in an economic sense) of globalization and its consequent reduction of returns to labor. Science was the first field of human endeavor to become globalized, with a truly international market for talent. US cold war policies were meant to produce as many scientists as possible, providing generous graduate fellowships for talented foreigners (like my father). After the cold war, the lion's share of the most talented Soviet scientists ended up here, along with the cream of the university crop from countries like China, India, Korea, Taiwan, etc. Beneficiary: the US economy in general, losers: US-born scientists.
If you love science, by all means go for it, but please be advised that it is hardly an optimal choice from an economic standpoint! See
here and
here for previous discussion.
Data below from
WSJ. Note that among professionals, scientists had the worst wage-growth performance (essentially zero when inflation adjusted) in the period under study. Does that sound strange in our era of nanotech, biotech and infotech? You might argue that, according to this data, natural scientists are better paid than programmers (a group that is
starting to feel the effects of globalization), but the vast majority of scientists have PhDs and should be compared with workers in categories like lawyers, physicians or "teachers of economics" (econ profs).
