That’s not how the market works. It doesn’t go “oh we need chemists let’s increase their pay and they’ll flock here”. It goes “oh I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years it seems really hard to do chemistry now let’s pivot the business into a glorified real estate holding and invest in those ad companies that seem to have good ROI”.

Based on pay, you'd think childcare is in low demand and astronomers are in high demand. But that would be wrong.

To a point, they will. However, the amount they can rise is capped by other economic factors. e.g. If wage pressure goes beyond a businesses ability to pay, they can't hire. This then leads to businesses ceasing operations and hiring nobody.

> wages will go up

The issue is that tech can pay exorbitant salaries compared to physical-world companies as the product they're producing has infinite reach and is often 'evergreen'

It's the same issue as investment banking; when you can almost literally print the money you're paying salaries with you can hire everyone at any price.

The issue is, that leads to the smartest people in the country all ending up at 'virtual' industries and you discover eventually you don't have an economy, you just have a giant video game.

No, they try to rebrand as “quantitative bioscientists” or “molecular engineers” and cross their fingers and hope for postbac students who weren’t chemists because they don’t believe in their own curriculum anymore.