Is the skilled sector getting hollowed out?

"Here's a sobering sign that companies are robbing the future to pay for 
short-term profits: Over the past year, U.S. employment of scientists and 
engineers-the people who create the next generation of products and make the 
U.S. more competitive over the long term-has fallen by 6.3%, according to a 
BusinessWeek tabulation of unpublished data. Yet overall employment has 
fallen only 4.1%...

...companies, especially those in the pharmaceutical industry, are 
offshoring more research to China, India, and elsewhere."

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_45/b4154034724383_page_2.htm

"Craigslist's free classifieds have been blamed for taking at least $30 
billion out of America's newspaper companies' stock market valuation. 
Meanwhile Craigslist itself generates just enough profit to pay the server 
costs and the salaries of a few dozen staff. In 2006, the site earned an 
estimated $40 million." - Free, Chris Anderson.

"Law firm partners are paying themselves too much and their businesses will 
struggle to attract external investment because they are not worth as much 
as the partners believe, a leading commentator has warned."

http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/law-firm-partners-overpay-themselves-says-mason

"disruptive technologies which routinize or automate certain legal tasks 
will erode the need for traditional legal services or displace them 
entirely."

http://www.myshingle.com/2009/03/articles/solo-practice-trends/richard-susskind-the-end-of-lawyers-what-it-means-for-solos/

Then there's crowdsourcing...

Build somebody else's car at http://www.local-motors.com/rules.php.

"Vote for the designs you want. If you are a designer, you can upload your 
own. Either way, you help choose which designs are developed and built by 
the Local Motors community. Vote for competition designs, Checkup critiques, 
or portfolio designs.

Open Development, sort of like open source. Once there is enough support for 
any single design, Local Motors will develop it openly. That means that you 
not only choose which designs you want to drive, you get to help develop 
them - every step of the way."

Crowdspring offers a network of 40,000 designers and creatives. If you want 
some web design or a logo, you just post your requirements. They promise 
"Money back guarantee - 25 entries or a full refund, including our fee. The 
average project gets a whopping 80 entries."
http://www.crowdspring.com

That means 79 people spending time on work that's never used.

Or in advertising: "Hello and welcome to Victors & Spoils. Just who in the 
hell are we? We're the world's first creative (ad) agency built on 
crowdsourcing principles. And our goal is to provide businesses with a 
better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems 
by engaging world's most talented creatives."

http://victorsandspoils.com

Or at the BBC, though I don't expect to hear much sympathy round here at the 
news that hundreds of BBC executives have had a pay freeze and dozens can 
expect redundancy...

Even so, some fundamentals really seem to be changing here.

One has to ask whether the "knowledge economy" mentioned in the Business 
Week article is a valid future?