Incorrect, programmers can be bought from India for /10th the price and or course they'll pay Americsn programmers their $70K, that's not big money. An MBA grad starts at $250K, plus bonuses, this is a fact.
Experienced programmers make a lot more than $70K. There are very few software developers with PhD. That is just your nonsense that Phd = better. I have worked for a lot of senior project developers and none had PhDs. One might have had a masters but honestly nobody cared. What matters is experience solving real world problems none of which is learned in college.
And no, it's not the programmers that make the big money as far as coding - it's the PhD physicists and mathematicians who then fell the programmers what models and programs to build and these are called black boxes which do high frequency trading which do in fact are responsive for a huge % of the trading activity and they make lots if money, but the bulk of the money, the big money is still made by traders, economists, heads if hedge finds, etc because a black box can't predict the future I'd see a good buy it simply trades in milliseconds based on a preprogrammed trend or news and it simply beats the human reaction time.
Once again I actually worked on statistical models for risk analysis and nobody on our team had a PhD. None. Models that were used in the pricing of tens of billions of dollars in distress assets. A half dozen computer science professionals (db engineers, developers, project managers) and a few statisticans no PhD.
Then again this is like a chef explaining to a guy who ate a hamburger once how culinary arts works. As for every MBA making $250K starting well that is just silly. Then again how much are you making on unemployment? My guess is less than $250K.