Paul Krugman does a nice dissection of the wake of the Madoff financial scandal, and in the middle of it is this exceptionally revelatory graf:
... how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?
There's been a little talk about this, but not nearly enough, and it worries me deeply.
In my own years in college I ran into many extremely bright people — far smarter than I could ever claim to be, really — but whose ambitions were essentially to graduate and then go to work for a big company and make a lot of money, or run the company and make even more money. Isn't it a failure of imagination to not think of much of anything else to do with one's intellect except turn it into a cash cow? (And, from what I've seen, when your mentality is at that level for openers, you run out of things to do with that money in the first place except buy overpriced versions of everything you already have.)
I'm not arguing here that poverty is somehow ennobling, or anything that stupid; I'm just frustrated that we don't do enough to make other kinds of work for such people. And at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself, it should be decently-paid work. Not golden-parachute level pay, but enough to live comfortably and provide for the future. One of my best teachers in high school had to part-time it in a women's apparel store to make ends meet. He wasn't a stupid man, or a bad teacher; he had just picked a career that was desperately underfunded, and I didn't blame him for being cynical.
I'm not against capitalism or free markets; I don't see how I could be, given that I've made a living myself because of such things. I'm just disgusted with the whole way we've unthinkingly built whole careers, businesses and economies on top of wealth that's entirely fictional — except for the men who draw $150 million paychecks to keep it running, and get $20 million lifeboats when they mistakenly burn it all to the ground. And I have trouble seeing how anyone can not be disgusted by this.
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It would be nice if we had systems in place that created proper incentives to participate in more constructive endeavors. It is sad that the more unstable positions in society tend to be the more lucrative, where the true intellectuals trying to make the world better get somewhat shafted on that front and often have to rely on small book revenues and such to help support them.
We have far too much awkward economic stratification in our society, including some of the worst stratification inside individual companies. I'd like to start a business someday with a lot of socially progressive bylaws dictating that the highest salary in the company cannot be more than a certain percentage above the lowest salary and such, but it would take a lot of research to do it right and make it work.
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