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<p>so it’s not that finance as a category doesn’t count as economic productivity – it’s that too many financiers equals economic inefficiency. well duh! too many physicists and biologists equals economic inefficiency too; there is nothing unique to finance here. wow, that clarifies so much. </p>
<p>basically you know that there are too many financiers, but the market is not paying attention to your wisdom. sucks for the market, huh?</p>
<p>Well, as a kid who is a senior in high school now and will be majoring in finance, i think i’ll chime in. Sorry if i missed anything cause I haven’t read past the first page.</p>
<p>Anyways, I have no interest what-so-ever in engineering or “the sciences”. None. I do have interest in stocks and bonds and all that crap. I watch CNBC almost everyday. I read the business section everyday. I’ve read more books about Wall Street and bankers than you ever will. Plus, my parents make about 55K and I’m going to a school that will cost around 20K a year. I’m not taking out 10K a year in loans to go “do research” or “produce something” or “develop myself socially”. Will I do those things, probably, but that’s not the primary reason for me going to college. I’m going to be able to improve myself financially in the future and finance seems to be the best way to do so.</p>
<p>Sure I’m probably not going to end up as an iBanker, but I don’t really want to. What I will be able to do is score a nice corporate finance or consulting job that will be a good starting point to a solid career.</p>
<p>It’s the stupid, spoiled brat liberals that have had everything handed to them and have the luxery of spending two or three years unemployed after college because they majored in some liberal-arts degree (excl. econ) that make up all this BS about finance majors being unproductive, greedy go-getters. No, it’s you that are the ones that have too much time on your hands worrying about how “productive” others are and how much they are “contributing to society”. That’s all a bunch of crap. Who cares how others are spending their time, make life better for yourself and the world will be a better place.</p>
<p>not really. </p>
<p>some people just have the idea that we must progress as a society</p>
<p>some people go to work with the idea that they’re making some sort of difference for someone else</p>
<p>some people have the type of personality that requires them to have a cause or a meaning in order to be productive in the workplace </p>
<p>what you have described, MNTwins, is your average story of a bitter lower-middle class kid who wants to jump right through his glass ceiling and get a place under the sun</p>
<p>nothin’ wrong with that, but there’s nothin’ wrong with people who have different motivations</p>
<p>which is where i think it’s time to announce that the thread has run its course</p>
<p>Has the invisible hand been brought up yet? Everyone is paid according to their productivity to society. If a science teacher has a starting salary of 40,000 and an accountant has a starying salary of $60,000, society places more value on the accountant than teacher. Likewise, if a chemist is paid $100,000 and a financial analyst has a salary of $55,000, then society values the chemist more. Ideally, everyone is paid according to their worth.</p>
<p>^ Has the recent failure of the Chicago School been brought up yet? Umm yeah, for like the first couple of pages! The market isn’t efficient. We don’t have perfect info available.</p>
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<p>No curiosity in how the world works? </p>
<p>Then you sir, are worthless. </p>
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oooh! What a big shot!</p>
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<p>Firstly – what’s your current job? Are you employed? What firms you worked for so far? Do you do research?</p>
<p>Secondly, it’s the “finance-only” majors who are to be targeted. It’s like those kids who major in Education without a real specialisation. It’s easier to train a physicist to be a teacher, than it is to train an education major to be a physicist. </p>
<p>How can you be a truly informed consultant if you don’t have a specialisation – a case study?</p>
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<p>Hey I like the Chicago School. They do pretty good economics. Their math is responsible for the explosion of evolutionary biology after Maynard Smith and Price’s landmark paper in 1973. How has the Chicago school “failed”? Of anyone, the Chicago school realises the imperfections of the market. Their philosophy in how to deal with them is different from the saltwater schools though. The Chicago school treats the imperfections as an annoyances – things to be worked around with.</p>
<p>I’m honestly not sure if you’re ■■■■■■■■ or not, but I’ll throw in my two cents.</p>
<p>In general, I sense a lot of bitterness.</p>
<p>I am extremely well-versed in science/math/technology, and yet I chose finance as my field of study in college. Many other finance majors that I know of are also very good at science and math. We’re not rich, either. Finance is genuinely interesting and isn’t always just a pursuit of a large paycheck. There’s a ton of math, calculus, modeling, problemsolving, and quick decision making skills required. I’ve also found that I can apply my knowledge of technology and programming to help make a lot of things easier for me. Finance is also practical, versatile, and very useful – I can take those skills anywhere I go. </p>
<p>I think a field of study is what you make of it. You can either choose a major blindly and mindlessly for the money, or you can view it as an opportunity to actually expand on passions. It’s helped me gain a better understanding of how people/economies/the world works, and I find that it’s a sort of gained understanding that many of my non-finance friends don’t necessarily have. </p>
<p>You may be able to point out “passionless” finance majors, but I can just as easily point out countless CS majors who aren’t really into coding but do it because they like computers, or people who choose Bio simply because they hate the math of physics or dislike chemistry.</p>
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<p>Clearly, the heroin dealer, who is paid a lot, is doing something socially constructive, as well as the weapons companies who sell arms to rebels who use children soldiers. </p>
<p>Clearly, the construction company who builds houses for $500,000 – and quite inefficiently, wasting lots of material in the process – did a very economically-productive thing, even if the price of the house they built crashes a year later to $190,000.</p>
<p>And of course, the chemical company is doing something very productive for society when it concludes it’s cheaper to avoid emissions filters or to avoid upgrading an entire industrial process for a cleaner, greener alternative. </p>
<p>Consider the Monsanto process for the production of acetic acid and acid anhydrides; an engineer built upon this and created an improved Cativa process, which in the long-run was more economical, greener, more efficient, cleaner, and had higher yields. For a long while Monsanto kept trying to pay science firms to prove that the Monsanto process was still superior. Eventually Monsanto withdrew their claims. There are many social cues and social processes involved in the “real world” which distort price information. The Chicago school deals with this too.</p>
<p>Oh this all overlooks the fact that the career paths of other people influence me, since they influence the working culture and the cultural attitudes of society. Aka there are strong externalities involved.</p>
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<p>This thread is not about you. From impression, your demographic is a small minority.</p>
<p>You’re conflating value and social worth – people are paid based on the added value of their services. Those services may or may not fall in line with what you deem socially valuable. If you think people should major in things that are socially valuable (e.g. a science to help produce something to make the lives of others easier/efficient/safer/etc), that’s one thing. But consider that finance actually IS socially valuable, even if not in a super-direct way like a “green” technology would be “direct.” Money is the lifesource of many, and being able to harness and control the underlying structure to it all is a great way to add value, control costs, make decisions, and help make things better for everyone connected (money is power, and power is effectively change and progression when directed correctly). Of course, as we can see, it’s also possible to completely destroy value if you’re not careful.</p>
<p>Ideally, if market forces and the invisible hand are to work perfectly, social value and economic value should have a 1 to 1 bidirectionality. They do not. How then to resolve the disconnect? Well there are various interesting solutions. The Chicago school has proposed a few (theoretically).</p>
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<p>When linked to a scientific field of expertise!</p>
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<p>The basic idea behind the Chicago School is still good, I think, but for a school of thought that supported deregulation and didn’t see the crisis coming, its preeminence has definitely been challenged.</p>
<p>lol @ the tags</p>
<p>this is why I stopped calling myself a libertarian</p>
<p>Are there too many finance majors? Yes. I agree with the OP. In economic terms, the supply of finance majors has simply exceeded demand. Many of my friends who majored in Finance do not have jobs, and this is from a top 10 business school. They had high GPA’s, great internships, and a genuine love for Finance, yet they are still jobless. I cannot imagine how it would be at lesser universities. </p>
<p>There are many kids who see Finance in terms of “get rich fast”, but for the most part, they won’t make it. It is the people who have passion that will shine and breakthrough. </p>
<p>At my B-school, a funny thing is happening. A lot of kids who came into school with their hearts set on investment banking have now switched to accounting. They witnessed the collapse of I-banking industry and observed the tremendous difficulty recent graduates were having finding jobs and changed their minds. </p>
<p>If I could do one thing, it would be to limit the enrollment of students in Finance programs, especially at lower tier schools. They should set stringent entrance requirements to ensure that the students majoring in Finance are competent. </p>
<p>Additionally, business schools should stop providing misleading information about their Finance programs. Many prospective Finance students (especially at lower tier schools), even after taking introductory economics courses, can’t interpret the signals of the job market, and instead foolishly believe the misleading statistics and anecdotal success stories shoveled onto them by their school. Some seriously believe graduating with a 3.0 GPA from a second rate business school is going to be the high road to a cushy job. </p>
<p>At the moment, there are too many finance majors. Will there be a demand for them in the future? Possibly, but don’t count it.</p>
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<p>That’s the main fallacy in your desire to support the Chicago school–the economy ISN’T ideal, but you can’t just ignore the differences between a model and it’s real world application. In my physics class the other day, we were discussing models, and our professor said that many times the model may get an answer, but the model oversimplifies the original problem, such as if you declared a cow to be a perfect sphere. Just because you state it is something doesn’t mean that’s what it actually is.</p>
<p>navyarf… I feel that that is just the general trend with ALL college majors. What major or field then do you feel is the safest in this economy?</p>
<p>Maybe accounting, if you don’t mind having to explain to some corrupt, dimwitted CEO that he can’t deduct his transvestite prostitutes as “overhead” on his tax returns each and every April.</p>
<p>If you cannot teach money to flow into the best projects (balancing the risks, value added, etc.) by itself, then shut up and stop complaining about the people do work necessary for ideas to develop into valuable products and services.</p>
<p>sorry if I missed something because I don’t care to read six pages of stupid debate, but theoretically a person’s contribution to society is measured by their income. And certainty someone can argue that investment banking is critical to the economy.</p>
<p>if a person wants to do what they want, let them.</p>
<p>It ain’t my concern.</p>