I guess it is easy to trace casuality to increasingly imbalanced wealth distribution. People who don't picture themselves as the rare exception who somehow makes the jump over to the winning side (as seems to be the default on hn) will aim for the best salaries and the traditional answer to that is education. Everybody is pressing hard into the highest qualification brackets because it is everything that is left of 20th century middle class. The market does what it does when supply increases but that won't make those on the way into being part of the oversupply reconsider, as no qualification is not an option.
In all this struggle, science is the unnoticed roadkill. Inconsequential publications have always been a part of modern scientific process, they are the soil on which occasional advances of the art grow. But when the fraction of involuntary pretend-acts who will never succeed at getting beyond writing only for the sake of having published gets too big, the real deal will suffer. What could have been the soil for something to grow on turns into a landslide that buries the seedlings.
In all this struggle, science is the unnoticed roadkill. Inconsequential publications have always been a part of modern scientific process, they are the soil on which occasional advances of the art grow. But when the fraction of involuntary pretend-acts who will never succeed at getting beyond writing only for the sake of having published gets too big, the real deal will suffer. What could have been the soil for something to grow on turns into a landslide that buries the seedlings.