If you increase any one of these factors, you get more production (i.e. more prosperity). For instance, Capital: if Chinese/Russian billionaires decide to invest all their money in American companies in America, then it would result in huge economic growth.

Similarly Natural Goods: If prices of oil fall drastically, or lots of natural goods (even land) are discovered, then again there will be increased production of goods (i.e. more prosperity).

Finally, Labor: if labor prices fall drastically, or labor force is increased, again more production will happen. Prosperity will ensue.

The first two makes sense to most people, but somehow the third point doesn't because most people are part of the labor force therefore emotions kick in. The simple logic you're demonstrating is a childish whining:

> Tech execs and investors love to complain about having to pay six figure salaries to the engineers doing all the real work, all while carting home hundreds of millions themselves in just severance pay<

The whole job of tech execs and investors is to increase production. Acquiring capital for cheap (lower interest rates) would do the job, acquiring land/natural goods for cheap (like moving office to a cheaper part of the town) would also do the job, and finally getting cheap labor would also do the same thing.

Complaining against a businessman trying to find cheaper labor is like complaining against the QA for trying to find bugs in your code.

The problem isn't a shortage of engineers, it's a shortage of quality engineers who don't subtract more value than they produce.

The ones that were really hit were new grads who had accepted jobs that went away before they got there or had only been on the job a couple of months.

Another big difference (I hope) was that 9/11 came along right after and changed things in a much more macro scale. Don't know how much we can draw from that.