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Hard to say what is really going on here or if there is even a problem at all. Academic positions have always been in short supply in many fields, particularly hard science. However I do get the sense it has gotten worse in recent decades but have no hard data.

Are there actually fewer positions available?

If so, what is the cause?

There is lots of evidence that our universities have become less effective in both teaching and research - prioritizing administrative and income generating functions for example. Perhaps this results in fewer jobs available. Or perhaps professors are simply retiring older (I have heard this too).

I agree that blaming Trump seems wrong. While media reports have been hyperbolic little if anything has changed so far. The proposed new "points" system actually gives highest priority to people like that young Chinese Ph.D mentioned in the article.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/02/politics/cotton-perdue-trump-b...

This NSF report [1] has a lot of interesting data.

It seems in particular we're seeing (1) more people get PhD's (see page 3) and (2) a lower proportion of PhD's securing post-PhD employment (see page 9).

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/digest/nsf16300...

It's a combination of mainly two things.

1. More people are getting PhDs, which means if the job supply remained constant, higher percentages of people won't get a job.

2. There are fewer "real" academic jobs, because universities have evolved to focus on cost-cutting business practices, tenured faculty are expensive, and an endless stream of abused adjuncts has no down side except the quality of education provided by your university, and who cares about that anyway.

An oversupply of PhDs or our capitalist system not aligning in a way to advance us in ways that don't model a ROI in three years or less?

No just an oversupply of people that really arent smart enough to push their fields forwards, they are just highly "educated". PHDs at average schools can be done by most people willing to put in long hours, we need to stop conflating these "highly educated" people with actual ingenuity. Capitalism rightly casts them off to the side.

I maintain that the biggest inefficiency of how we practice capitalism today is that it is casting aside the ability for people to contribute to society to their full potential. And as we advance economically, it seems that inefficiency is expanding to more and more people.

Inefficiency compared to what?

Look at what capitalism has done to standards of living and life expectancy across the world over the last 100 years. In terms of the quality of human life, it is so staggering how effective capitalism has been. I think your view point of certain people being disadvantaged with regards to our current form of capitalism is short sighted. Sure, some physics phd may not be fully utilized, but that is at the cost of a system that is changing the world for the better.

What we are arguing is whether forcefully changing the inefficiencies (how do we even know they are inefficiencies? We dont. We can only speculate) you see in capitalism would help society overall. But that is like saying in the course of human evolution, we need to enforce mating rules to "change the course", sure we could do that, but how impossible is it? Would it even help? Are we even smart enough to figure that out?

Inefficiency at delivering improvements in life quality compared to even a couple of decades ago in the US.

I look at the characteristics of capitalism across two different zones of operation. One a sort of pre-industrial/pre-buildout phase and the other a post-buildout phase. The performance was great in pre-buildout where it's pretty easy to direct just about any additional economic activity to creating new value. So just about any activity that increase profits - increases general well being in the region.

But for nations in the post-buildout it's pretty sketchy, mostly more and more capital allocation going to momentum activity (three years of provable ROI...) instead of fundamental value creation. Increased profits don't necessarily spread out to general well being.

Nations like China, and many African nations, etc are in the earlier phase and it is certainly improving human quality of life in those kinds of regions - but other nations in post-buildout it's a very mixed bag where fundamental improvements are flat or even reversing. China is arguably in the middle of build out and may have another decade or two to go where current capitalistic tools work well for it. Africa is even earlier on that curve - but the US is definitely in the post phase.

I'm not even advocating any specific change - just observing that there's a big difference in the effects of economic activity in the two phases. And that the US in the second phase is really not delivering quality of life improvements to society at large in the same way as earlier. If one agrees with my observations though - it is easy to think that some sort of change is warranted.

https://www.youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-f...

And really, to be fair, America has been benefiting from brain drain from the whole rest of the world for decades and decades. Almost centuries. It probably can't last forever.

If we're being really honest with ourselves, the likelihood that he will get a faculty position is quite low. Here, he faces discrimination because colleges aren't interested in having another Asian name with the risk of being a lecturer that student's cant understand - and Asians are overrepresented anyways. He might as well take an offer from a country that is welcoming to him.

$1M is a typical US startup fund, if not a little low.

The $250k for a house is weird, but in the US we make deals like spousal hires that might seem strange in other places.

I believe it's a down payment even it's not mentioned. It's a reasonable amount of money for down payment in suburban area of major cities in China

Startup packages vary a lot depending on the tier of the university (I have seen $300K to $1M at research universities). I imagine the housing subsidy is due to the high price of real estate in Shanghai. Some US universities offer favorable loan terms to faculty in places like UCSB, so perhaps not that strange...