As a result, the labour force is polarising. Many of those once employed as semi-skilled workers are now fighting for low-wage jobs. Change has been good for those at the very top. Whereas real wages have been falling or flat for most workers, they have increased for those who have advanced degrees. Owners of capital have also benefited. They have enjoyed big gains from the increased returns on investments in equipment. Technology is allowing the best performers in many fields, such as superstar entertainers, to dominate global markets, crowding out those even slightly less skilled. And technology has yet to cut costs for health care, or education. Much of the rich world’s workforce has been squeezed on two sides, by stagnant wages and rising costs.

An unorthodox solution to the problem of too many graduates unable to repay their loans.

By Akhil Reed Amar and Ian Ayres

* Real earnings for young male college grads are down 19% since their peak in 2000.
* Real earnings for young female college grads are down 16% since their peak in 2003.

These figures are for full-time workers, ages 25-34, with a bachelor’s degree only.

Why do people work in the Middle East? Some people go for the tax-free salary. Others go for the adventure. Some stay for years; a good number return repeatedly.

Day-to-day life is less hectic than in the West. You don’t have the daily aggravations: the long commute to work; the energy spent on maintaining your dwelling; the scramble to buy stuff you don’t need. You have time to develop other parts of your life, be they athletic, artistic, or spiritual. As the repeaters tell us, you have more fun in the Middle East. Finally, those of us who have lived in the Arabian Peninsula, feel that it has been a truly enlightening experience.

HOW many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is 53: eight to argue, four to object, three to research precedents, one to ask a secretary to change the bulb and 37 to bill their time at an exorbitant hourly rate. When every joke about your business mentions featherbedding, you should be worried about outsourcing. At last, lawyers are.

Thomson Reuters, a media and information-services company, bought Pangea3, a legal-process outsourcing firm with most of its lawyers in Mumbai, in November. At about the same time, Thomson Reuters said it was looking to sell BarBri, a company that prepares young American law graduates for the bar examination. Thomson Reuters says the two deals have nothing to do with each other. But Elie Mystal of Above The Law, a muckraking blog, sees a straightforward swap: more cheap Indian lawyers, fewer expensive American ones.

Legal outsourcing is still small. Of the $180 billion that Americans spend on lawyers each year, only about $1 billion goes to outsourcers. But this is growing at perhaps 20-30% a year, for the simple reason that legal costs are out of control. Between 1998 and 2009, big law firms’ hourly rates shot up by more than 65%, according to the Corporate Executive Board, a consultancy.

Nov 11th 2010 | NEW YORK | from PRINT EDITION

THIS year “The Apprentice”, a television show in which contestants compete for the privilege of working for Donald Trump, features 16 who are down on their luck, having lost previous jobs or otherwise having to start anew. No fewer than five of them are lawyers. The legal-job market in America remains dire. But the numbers applying to law school are still soaring, and students are taking out ever bigger loans as tuition fees grow faster than lawyers’ salaries. Increasingly, they are graduating into a world of overblown expectation and debt.

Between 1996 and 2008 private law schools’ median tuition fees almost doubled, to just under $34,000 a year. At public law schools fees grew even faster, albeit from a lower base: for those going to schools in their home state they almost trebled, taking the median to around $16,000. Starting salaries at the biggest firms—those with more than 500 lawyers—roughly doubled, to $160,000. But such plum jobs are hard to get, especially for graduates of the less prestigious public schools. At smaller firms starting pay has for years failed to keep up with soaring tuition fees, and of late has fallen (see chart).

Graduates’ chances in the job market have worsened since the “great purge” of 2009, when firms laid off young lawyers and withdrew job offers. The National Law Journal says that the 250 biggest firms cut their numbers of attorneys by 4% in 2009 and were projected to cut by another 1.1% in 2010, making for the worst two-year period in the 33 years of the journal’s surveys.

Those that did not lay off any lawyers have frozen hiring and squeezed more work out of their staff. So morale is dismal at many firms. But it is worse among those recent graduates stuck in temporary or part-time posts or working in non-legal jobs. The grim market has given rise to a situations-vacant website, shitlawjobs.com, whose home-page banner reads: “You’re a lawyer, the economy sucks and you need a job.” Among its latest vacancies on November 10th was one for a Spanish-speaking lawyer, on just $10 an hour.

That has caused some concern among lawyers who think the accrediting organization, the American Bar Association, is doing the profession a disservice by approving so many new schools. (Contrast that with medical schools. They come with much higher startup costs and tend not to be money-makers. Relatively few students get medical degrees every year, and demand far outstrips supply.)

Of course, most graduate programs don’t require you to cut up cadavers, or work absurdly long hospital shifts.

But now a number of recent or current law students are saying—or screaming—that they made a mistake. They went to law school, they say, and now they’re underemployed or jobless, in debt, and three years older. And statistics show that the evidence is more than anecdotal.

One Boston College Law School third-year—miraculously, still anonymous—begged for his tuition back in exchange for a promise to drop out without a degree, in an open letter to his dean published earlier this month. “This will benefit both of us,” he argues. “On the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.”