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Friends Don't Let Geek Friends Work In Finance
theodp writes "If Vivek Wadhwa remade Pinocchio, instead of The Coachman luring naughty boys to Pleasure Island to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into donkeys, you might find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein luring bright engineering grads to Wall Street to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into, well, asses. While the practice of poaching engineering talent slowed after the economy tanked in 2008, Wadhwa is dismayed to report that thanks to hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks have recovered and gone back to their old, greedy ways, snagging engineering grads who might otherwise solve the world's problems, making them financial offers they can't refuse, and morphing them into quants, investment bankers and management consultants. 'Not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs,' writes Wadhwa, 'they are using our best engineering graduates [25% of MIT grads in '06] to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.' He concludes: 'Let's save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.' Amen, but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?"
Since when should people not get to choose their own career path?
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd.
I agree with this idea. We should take money from people who we don't believe are deserving of it. Then we can redistribute that wealth to everyone.
Honestly, I'm just surprised I never heard of someone suggesting this before. Of course I never studied world history or political philosophy, so maybe somebody did try this before...
The real litigious bastards...
This is a completely ridiculous notion, how do you think the money gets to the "serious research" in the first place? Right, investment banks and the financial services industry! You'd have a far lower amount of research if you can't get money to do that research!
Innovation and efficiency in the financial services industry helps drive money to startups and companies seeking to expand. If the investment banks get some of the top engineering talent then they can build better systems that can be more nimble at identifying tech sectors which could use cash to find these new and exciting projects. Then those companies will be able to hire more engineers to work on the projects.
Besides which, who is to say that there isn't fun and innovative ideas to be explored in the financial services industry? Remember that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame) received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the Nash Equilibrium. The financial industry does a lot of work in developing new ways to store, access, and analyze data - work that is often highly useful to the scientific community.
By the way, I'm writing this as a chemist who changed careers and became a programmer for the finance industry. I've personally seen some great ideas that would have direct application to many fields of scientific study. Just because many "intellectuals" find the concept of money distasteful and think that the world should follow some sort of communistic ideal, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the concept is a highly useful one. We need money and finance in order to give people incentives to perform and innovate. It would also be pretty cumbersome if we had to barter our services for every single transaction.
Sapere aude!