<p>karabee is right, we’re not in the sort of society that needs an endless supply of teachers, scientists and engineers </p>
<p>i personally know a couple of people with fancy science degrees whose skills are not apparently in demand</p>
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<p>Yeah, it’s unfortunate, but the financial services industry can be quite elitist in this regard.</p>
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<p>yeah but science is a useful case study of the math. It’s really hard to appreciate the math you see until you can ground it somewhere. (Which is why I support integrating economics, the sciences and math in high school as a coordinated curriculum, i.e. the teachers co-collaborate.) </p>
<p>If not science, entrepreneurial activity – production. I bet fast food shift managers earning 10-12 dollars an hour have more insight into productive economic activity than those finance interns in some cushy office position, far away and removed from it all.</p>
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<p>Well yes. Economic activity.</p>
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<p>I don’t see fellow scientists as competition. I see them as collaborators – people who can strengthen my research. It’s true, it is possible for there to be too many people in science. Then maybe we would have to start allocating more to finance, manufacturing, and so on (or maybe robot operators in the factories). I don’t think we’re there yet. Right now I see way too many people flocking to finance because apparently it’s the trendy thing to do for those born into privilege.</p>
<p>Finance (as in the academic subject) is a valuable tool. But see these kids – they don’t seem to have an idea of the real power of what they’re studying, besides the fact that finance is prestigious, pretty influential and earns big bucks.</p>
<p>sO leave it to those who are born into privilege. you’re not going to bring down class walls</p>
<p>Are you a proponent of socialism by any chance? Not applied, but the pure form. You seem to enjoy telling other people what they should and shouldn’t want/get to do. Just because you think science is the most important job doesn’t mean that it is. Careers have checks and balances–there’s no reason for researching applications of polymers if there’s no manufacturers to benefit, there’s no reason for manufacturers to produce anything without customers, and so on.</p>
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<p>Maybe. I just feel like rattling the culture a little bit.</p>
<p>unfortunately it can’t be more than empty talk</p>
<p>you can play the system, cheat the system, but we’re too far into the system to be a real stick in its wheel</p>
<p>karabee: wth? I’m no proponent of planned economics. I’m not an econ major but I’m not you know, alien to the invisible hand concept. I also happen to use economic tools in science, e.g. Nash equilibria in evolutionary game theory. But we also know that the market doesn’t have perfect information and that job training and education take a long time, setting up some prime opportunities for misallocation, especially since there are very vague social cues involved. Just like you know, “evolution” isn’t this omnipotent force that makes species adapt to their optimum. There are many kinetic effects that prevent species from making adaptations that “should” otherwise happen (take for example, the stalled macroevolution of the arthropods despite their apparently diverse successes.) </p>
<p>more importantly, price is not the only way to (dynamically) signal economic information, while there are several important problems in using price alone in calculating social utility. For example, consumers are not as organised as firms. Labour organisation is another issue (big hegemonic trade unions are too rigid and undynamic, not to mention all the protectionism they enjoy). To name a few distortions.</p>
<p>btw, I’m anarchist communist in spirit, but anarcho-capitalist in practice. For the uninformed I usually just say that I’m a “progressive libertarian”.</p>
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<p>Of course. That is why everyone receives a liberal arts education in high school. That is why most universities have core curricula grounded in the liberal arts, encompassing both the arts and the sciences. Eventually, one will learn how to apply what they have learned in math elsewhere.</p>
<p>I completely understand what you are trying to get at, but how will an education in the sciences make a better finance major? Hmm? Finance is inherently abstract by itself.</p>
<p>Something tells me that even if most Wall Streeters were biology, chemistry, or even biomedical engineering majors to begin with, this economic crisis would have happened nonetheless. </p>
<p>The problem with Wall Street is that in its pursuit of quick profits, it has ignored the virtues of long term analysis and decision making. That is where its problem lies: most finance majors (and people who end up working in the finance industry) were never taught to learn how to make decisions that have long term impacts.</p>
<p>Personally, we don’t need finance majors taking more science. We need more finance majors taking courses in philosophy, especially in the field of ethics and decision making.</p>
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<p>we are the system, don’t you realise?</p>
<p>You’re going to have people in almost every major who are dim-witted. The allure of big paychecks causes many to major in Finance or other business-related majors. We do need more scientists, engineers, teachers, and nurses, but those jobs don’t appeal to everybody. As for uninformed finance majors causing the current financial crisis, there is an argument out there that it was people who were too knowledgeable about finance that created all these complicated loans and financial markets that caused the economy to tumble.</p>
<p>WuTang, the the business world is a huge and amazing place. Some of us do have a legitimate interest in the hard sciences, but are more interested in business. A great deal of money can be made using science; a business major wants to maximize the profits of science in order for the science to be economically and financially viable.</p>
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<p>speak for yourself, please</p>
<p>you can choose your level of participation</p>
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<p>yeah, financial engineers, or whatever you call them, created all the fancy derivatives, but it were the average financiers who spread them around. they focused on immediate and short-term profit, without a care for what flaw might lie within that system since it wasn’t their job to worry about that per se</p>
<p>I think a large part of the economic downturn wasn’t Wall Street’s inability to analyze and choose the best long-term decision, but rather their choice not to. Short-term benefits outweighed long-term economic growth for those people, and that has nothing to do with their background in education, but rather their intrinsic values.</p>
<p>Also, it seems that you’re painting financiers as morally wrong for wanting money, and scientists as perpetually in the right for research: You do realize that a large majority of pre-meds/med students are in it for the money, don’t you? Some people become doctors because they want to help, but I would say that they’re in the minority to people who just want to improve themselves financially.</p>
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<p>Exactly. Especially when it comes time when researchers have to fight for funds.</p>
<p>this wutang guy needs to stop bashing finance people, especially since it’s obvious he knows nothing about the finance field or the recession in general. first, banks love science majors and engineers/science majors have a huge leg up in finance recruiting because of their hard-core quant skills. as long as they took one or two finance classes and know the basic concepts they will be easily recruited. also, part of the reason this whole mess started was because these financial instruments were too complicated and nobody understood what they were investing in. why were they too complicated? because they were designed by people who have phd’s in physics and the like. if you go to any trading desk you will see plenty of people from science backgrounds, kids who were applied math majors, etc. </p>
<p>second, stop bashing wall street bankers for ruining the economy. yes they made mistakes, but so did several others. how about you blame the greed of the american pple buying houses they cant afford? how about you blame the clinton administration for passing regulation forcing banks to give mortgages to low-income pple so everyone can have the american dream of being a home-owner? how about you blame the fed for keeping the interest rate too low for so long? serisouly, there are so many factors at play here. try reading a newspaper once in a while.</p>
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<p>Quite a shallow one! </p>
<p>Finance people should be tied to at least one advanced lab project, you know, at least one productive activity that oversees production of some sort. </p>
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<p>Maybe they should be born in the ghetto. Maybe then they’ll really appreciate the concept of capital.</p>
<p>I have a feeling the kind of grad students who work 7 years on their graduate degree and finally publish that major finding or discovery are the kind who’d have that long-term vision.</p>
<p>And did I mention entrepreneurs? We need more of them.</p>
<p>I’m talking about social encouragement here. Prestige cues are used in conjunction with price information. (Both can deceive.)</p>
<p>entrepreneurs? OH YEAH we need more of those</p>
<p>you know how some of the most successful entrepreneurs built their empires? they exploited all the right loopholes without considering what people would think of them. take Ingvar Kamprad, for example, the guy who founded IKEA. he moved production to communist Poland where the price of labor was half of what it would’ve been in Sweden. great move, but it wasn’t exactly what i’d consider an ethical way of doing business</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem like you’re encouraging anyone at all, though. You’re cutting down those whom you disagree with and putting your idols on a pedestal. Encouraging people to major in sciences, or at least have a background in them, is a completely different approach than tearing those down who cannot or will not (for whatever reason).</p>