Income Growth for Biotech Workers is Slowing

US Economic Census data on income growth for biotechnologists. Left scale is in dollars, right scale is year over year growth, and the shaded regions are the three most recent recessions.

Debating the Value of the MBA. Again.

The business commentariat is abuzz of late, rehashing the old debate on the real value of the Masters of Business Administration degree. Slate‘s “Big Money” insists that the “myth of business school has been exposed,” The New York Times advocates for the “retraining” of business school students, while The Wall Street Journal opines that the MBA degree might “just be another piece of paper.”   As “Big Money” asserts, oversupply is the culprit:  “Maybe it [the MBA degree] still had merit when the schools were turning out only a few thousand graduates per year.  But it certainly stopped making sense well before the schools achieved their current level of production, a whopping 140,000 or so graduates per year.”

General Motors: When Bad Companies Go Bad

The auto industry, including General Motors, is still petitioning Congress for a $25 billion bailout package. As Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli told Congress a few months ago, the monies would not amount to a “real” bailout, but simply enable the car companies to refocus on innovation.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it best: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in, other than innovation?  If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?”