director for extramural research’.
No market-based enterprise is totally immune from the
law of supply and demand. When supply of something
exceeds the demand, the value of that good (or service, or
type of worker) goes down. Put another way, if you
produce a great deal of just about anything, the demand
for it will probably not keep up with the supply; to bring
them into balance you have to produce less, unless you
find a way to inflate the demand by, typically, lowering
the price. However, not everything operates as a pure
market-based enterprise. Science doesn’t - in particular,
the science labor market. Postdoctoral scientists and
graduate trainees are in theory free to sell their services to
the highest bidder, and if there were a glut of such
employees you would ordinarily expect their wages to fall,
but in fact the salaries of scientific trainees are confined
within close limits, and those limits are set by the policies
of the NIH, chiefly, and not by marketplace demand.
Such wage control means that the only constraint on
demand is the number of fellowships and grants that NIH
awards, and when the NIH budget increases, as it usually
does, the supply of scientific labor at the entry level is
free to rise with it. Coupled with that is ever-growing
pressure on heads of laboratories to produce more papers