<p>Last night on Leno, President Obama said "We want kids to not want to be investment bankers but to want to be engineers." Nice thought, but it seems like businesses should have been rewarding our engineers accordingly instead of paying millions to i-bankers who've messed up our economy. (Should I have posted this in the i-banking career forum instead and gotten flamed?)</p>
<p>Because this is what Barry and Michelle did, right? Oh wait, no they both became lawyers and politicians and got rich. But that’s not hypocritical! Liberals are NEVER hypocrites.</p>
<p>I assume you mean the Obamas.</p>
<p>I don’t see the point of your post. Obama was not saying you shouldn’t aim to be rich and successful. He was saying we should drive students to professions that contribute real growth to society. The growth that the financial industry experienced in recent years was not “real” growth.</p>
<p>^Ken, I agree. For too long society has misplaced its values. The President is right, engineers should have been getting the glory and big paychecks. Unfortunately, if you’ll look over postings in other forums on CC, it seems everyone wants to be an i-banker.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that values are misplaced. The values were, and still are, money, development and growth. Previously, it appeared that the finance industry was succeeding in that aspect, but now we see it was just a facade.</p>
<p>A third of MIT grads, mostly engineers, have been going to Wall street every year. If you parse the situation, much of what happened on Wall Street was a product of these people’s, the ‘quants’, work.</p>
<p>Engineers ftw!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>IMO, the problem isn’t so much who’s doing the work, but what the product is.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To be fair, Barack Obama didn’t really earn a significant amount of money until recently, and only because of his book deals. As the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, he could have had his pick of any number of extremely lucrative corporate law firm positions. Instead, he chose a relatively low paying career in academia, state politics, and community work. </p>
<p>Michelle, I can agree, is a different story, for she did pursue a rather traditional and lucrative corporate law career.</p>
<p>“Ken, I agree. For too long society has misplaced its values. The President is right, engineers should have been getting the glory and big paychecks.”</p>
<p>Barack Obama’s career and path to power went through people like Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, and now he’s going to stand up and lecture me on values? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, who would you rather have? For the last 8 years, the country was run by a guy who himself admitted that he was problem drinker and ne’er-do-well until he was about 40.</p>
<p>Okay. Do you have problems in life because most people do. And if you read about George Bush you would know that Christ helped him get over acohol problems. </p>
<p>Really the whole whenever someone insults Obama refer to Bush thing is old and annoying. Bush is not president and mentioning obama past faults does not mean that Bush should be brought up at all.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Obviously McCain.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Do they make a lot of money compared to the the average American? Of course. But that’s not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether they make more than they could have in the private legal sector, and the answer is almost certainly no. </p>
<p>Let’s look at the facts. Here are the 2006 salaries for the top 10 law professors at the University of California (all campuses) and at the University of Virginia. While obviously I would like to make those kinds of salaries, keep in mind that these are professors at the very top of legal academia. The equivalent would be the partners at the top law firms, who obviously make far more. Furthermore, keep in mind that Obama was a part-time lecturer and would have therefore earned nowhere near the salaries posted below. I think it is hardly controversial to say that he would have made far more if he had gone to the private sector. </p>
<p>[TaxProf</a> Blog: More on Law Prof Salaries](<a href=“http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2006/02/more_on_law_pro.html]TaxProf”>http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2006/02/more_on_law_pro.html)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, no he didn’t. Please check your facts more carefully. Obama worked at Sidley Austin and met Michelle while working as a summer law school intern. After graduation, Obama did not return to Sidley or any other law firm. Instead, he took a one-year fellowship that the University of Chicago offered him in order to write his memoir which eventually became the book ‘Dreams from my Father’. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>See above. Obama never ‘left’ private legal practice because he was never in it in the first place. He was offered a position at the University of Chicago, first a fellowship and then a lecturer position, upon graduation from Harvard Law. But, again, he could have clearly spurned that for highly lucrative work in the private sector if he wanted it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sure, everybody has problems in life. I respect George Bush for overcoming his personal addictions. </p>
<p>But like you said, everybody has personal problems, yet the Republicans didn’t seem to have a problem with that in 2000 and 2004. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, another man who has also admitted to having been a lazy malcontent as a young man, graduating near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy and who treated his first wife quite shabbily. </p>
<p>But, again, don’t get me wrong. I strongly preferred McCain over anybody else in 2000. And, like you said, you can dig up dirt about anybody - Obama, Bush, McCain, whoever.</p>
<p>What do I-Bankers do for the greater good? basically nothing. Our future is in the hands of our scientists and engineers, and I hate fall into the political trap here, but it is nice to have a president who actually wants to acknowledge the fact that science exists. I strongly support funding scientists, I don’t care which party does it. </p>
<p>To all the people baggin on Obama: Get over it, the Republicans lost. GL in '12. For now, instead of complaining, maybe we should try and fix the many problems we have at hand instead of turning everything into “Right vs. Left”, “Liberal or Conservative”.</p>
<p>"If you parse the situation, much of what happened on Wall Street was a product of these people’s, the ‘quants’, work "</p>
<p>If you actually parse the situation, much of what happened on Wall Street was a product of Subprime Lending, The housing bubble, Credit rating agencies, Clinton policy, etc.</p>
<p>It is extremely naive to say that I-bankers, bankers, and quants contribute nothing to the economy. For one, financial derivatives contribute to price discovery. They also provide methods and models to manage financial risk by hedging. And any kind of banking has people putting up capital and providing credit for others. This is what our economy is built upon, and what makes entrepreneurship possible. </p>
<p>In any case, it is irrelevant what you consider important for society. It only matters what society as a whole wants, this is also what it is willing to pay for. Basic supply and demand: IF I-bankers are getting paid a lot, that means that either they are in great demand, or there are not enough of them. One can say that sports stars, movie stars, singers also dont “build anything”. Yet their professions are also important.</p>
<p>And who are you to decide what exactly the greater good is? When you do not even know the work and contribution of investment bankers and quantitative analysts.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That would be true if labor markets were perfectly competitive, yet the fact is, those markets are deeply imperfect, and in particular, are riddled with information asymmetries. The basic problem is that investment bankers do not get paid directly via the market and are therefore not completely subject to market forces. Rather, investment bankers are employees of firms (the banks) and their pay is therefore intermediated by those firms. In virtually any firm, there are some people who are getting paid extremely well despite not really contributing anything to the firm, and others who contribute a great deal yet get paid relatively little. The same happened in the banks - some of the investment bankers pocketed huge pay packets despite running their firms into the ground. The basic principle-agent problem was at work - a topic that has generated hundreds if not thousands of academic papers and for which we still do not have a foolproof manner of managing. Investment bankers were paid for creating short-term, often times ‘paper’ gains, despite putting their firms at untold risk, with insufficient or nonexistent clawback mechanisms to retract bonuses based on transactions that later proved to be unprofitable. </p>
<p>I have no problem with investment bankers becoming rich, as long as the banks, and by extension, their shareholders, also profit. The problem is when the banks are crushed, the investors are crushed, but the individual bankers become rich anyway. That’s a basic breakdown of managerial controls, and those who benefit from it are just rent-seeking.</p>
<p>“But like you said, everybody has personal problems, yet the Republicans didn’t seem to have a problem with that in 2000 and 2004.”</p>
<p>Bush repented. Bush overcame his problems. Obama still finds himself comfortable with unrepentant terrorists and far left idealogs.</p>
<p>"If you parse the situation, much of what happened on Wall Street was a product of these people’s, the ‘quants’, work "</p>
<p>No, it was caused by Liberal policies that forced mortgage lenders to make stupid loans. This would not happen in a free-market.</p>
<p>You wanna get out of this recession? Get rid of Chris Dodd. Get rid of Barney Frank. Get rid of Chuck Schumer. Get rid of Nancy Pelosi. Get rid of Harry Reid. Get rid of Barack Obama. Get rid of radical socialism and restore individual liberty.</p>
<p>Nobody forced the banks to give out faulty loans. The problem was that the government did not regulate what were clearly illegal loans. In the end people need to stop blaming the other side and do something about the future. Also a fundamental part of the free-market is a strong, regulatory but not invasive government. Capitalism is a form of making money, not a way to run a country.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>please enlighten me on how exactly investment bankers are more important to the world and the future than scientists and engineers. Maybe they are to our society, and if so, there en lies a problem. Scientists/engineers are much needed to keep up with the rest of the world in the technological race. Right now we are taking short term gains over long term investments.</p>