abstract engineer blogspot

  • Subscribe to our RSS feed.
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Digg

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Greed and Growth at War With Each Other

Posted on 10:40 by hony
If this is true it is stunning:
The financial sector, which includes lending, stock brokerage, complex securities and insurance, among many other services, derives enormous profits from collateralized debt obligations. These new products require such sophisticated engineering that the industry now focuses its recruiting on new master's- and doctoral-level graduates of science, engineering, math and physics, and pays them starting wages that are five times or more what they would have earned had they remained in their own fields.

"Because these new hires are often the very individuals who otherwise would have comprised the most robust pool of prospective founders of high-growth companies, the financial services industry's steady rise has had a cannibalizing effect on entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy," said Paul Kedrosky, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and one of the paper's authors. "Excessive financialization exacerbated and distorted the flow of capital in the economy, potentially suppressing entrepreneurship by drawing away entrepreneurial talent."

The knee-jerk reaction is to say "the big bad financial sector is draining America's braintrust." Certainly that is how the Kauffman Foundation makes it seem. But think again. No one is forced to go into finance.

Yglesias adds:
Certainly my observation when I was in college is that almost everyone who had the mentality “I’d like to make a lot of money in life” was planning to instantiate that plan by working in the financial services sector.
That's exactly right. The greedy kids in the engineering (undergraduate) school already had plans to get their law degree or MBA as soon as possible after graduation. They weren't in engineering school to be engineers, really. They had made the shrewd (and often true) assessment that business acumen plus a technical background made them almost universally coveted in non-engineering fields. Engineering, to a certain point, was/is a meal ticket degree, because you could often use it as a leg up into a graduate program. And then you coupled your "technical background" with your graduate degree and sell yourself as a "six figure starting" employee with grandiose claims that engineering, almost magically, prepares you for virtually any and all future jobs.

The problem, dear readers, isn't the brain vacuum being swept across the carpet by the financial sector. No the problem is the culture of greed in this country where people say to each other "I'd like to make a lot of money in life." When did that become a serious goal? Was it always?

It seems to me (and I say this as neither a philosophy student nor a business student) that a business behaves (and is legally recognized) as an entity that is completely self-serving, and in a perfect world (relative to that business) it thrives while all its competitors fail, and fail miserably. The theoretical pinnacle of a business is complete monopoly on its sector of the economy. Multiply this by a million businesses in America and you get our oft-lauded "capitalist economy" which does seem to function pretty well.
However, to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women is not necessarily a strategy conducive to national prosperity. But in America that is basically considered sound corporate strategy. So yes, we have a brain drain in engineering and sciences. And yes, its partially caused by the financial sector having high-paying jobs available.

But its also caused by America being greedy first, and enterprising second.


_
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to Facebook
Posted in | No comments
Newer Post Older Post Home

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Popular Posts

  • In which I criticize the antiquated feelings of Ye Olde Mechanikal Engineer
    In a Lawrence Journal World blog, Dave Klamet writes about changing trends in education, especially the increasing competitiveness of non-A...
  • The End of an Era
    Last night, the beginning of the end of the laptop officially began . Sure the iPad has been around...but with nearly 30 tablets debuting at...
  • Inadvertant Great Idea
    The "@" symbol was included on the typewriter in 1885, and remained the least used key on the board until 1971, when Ray Tomlinson...
  • I promise to stop writing about STEM soon. Just not yet.
    Imagine you are a tech company that makes widgets. You've gotten a factory in China to make the parts for the widgets for a tiny amount....
  • If A, Then B
    WSJ Headline 1: Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard  WSJ Headline 2: To Follow the Money, Study Engineering  The concl...
  • Schadenfreude
    Ran into a kid that bullied me from elementary school all the way up through my junior year of high school. He's really fat now, and dri...
  • Evolutionary Politics
    If President Obama is reelected I see a clear example of specialization-elimination in effect here. Let's say each of the GOP primary ca...
  • The Influence of Andrew Sullivan
    Ross wonders if Andrew Sullivan is the most influential political writer of his generation. I humbly submit that my grandmother, who votes ...
  • The Worst Science Idea of 2010 - Genspace Now Open For Disaster
    Here's the idea : Let's build a lab where anyone, literally anyone, can come and tinker with microorganisms. Better yet, let's m...
  • 5 Years
    Five years ago tomorrow I started this blog. I was working at a job I didn't particularly like nor found mentally fulfilling, and the bl...

Blog Archive

  • ►  2013 (41)
    • ►  July (4)
    • ►  June (7)
    • ►  May (4)
    • ►  April (6)
    • ►  March (8)
    • ►  February (8)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ►  2012 (91)
    • ►  December (8)
    • ►  November (5)
    • ►  October (11)
    • ►  September (8)
    • ►  August (8)
    • ►  July (3)
    • ►  June (10)
    • ►  May (12)
    • ►  April (3)
    • ►  March (9)
    • ►  February (10)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ▼  2011 (205)
    • ►  December (11)
    • ►  November (14)
    • ►  October (10)
    • ►  September (18)
    • ►  August (18)
    • ►  July (10)
    • ►  June (15)
    • ►  May (11)
    • ►  April (32)
    • ▼  March (24)
      • More on Obama's Energy Speech
      • Quote for the Day - Revisionist History Edition
      • List of Bad Ideas, Day 2,158
      • Infinite Free Energy Reported...But Not Found
      • Greed and Growth at War With Each Other, Ctd
      • Greed and Growth at War With Each Other
      • The Abstracted Gymnast
      • An Ingenius, Flawed Plan
      • Kindle and the end of the "book era"
      • What We Can Do
      • Successful Drones vs. Failed Savants
      • Military Bashing
      • The Problem With Using "Decile" Divisions
      • Live Like Me Syndrome
      • From the Annals of Hypocrisy
      • How You Are Helping the Terrorists With Each and E...
      • Hey Jonah, Why the Apparent Contradiction?
      • Nuclear Fission Fusion
      • Battle: Los Angeles is a Battle to believe in
      • Kindle 3G
      • In which I argue by analogy that we MUST raise taxes
      • NASA evisceration of the day
      • Bleeding Heart Libertarians
      • The Oracle of Omaha is a fitting name.
    • ►  February (16)
    • ►  January (26)
  • ►  2010 (163)
    • ►  December (20)
    • ►  November (20)
    • ►  October (23)
    • ►  September (28)
    • ►  August (28)
    • ►  July (29)
    • ►  June (15)
Powered by Blogger.

About Me

hony
View my complete profile