[knowtheory]

The answer to this is pretty clear.

You can make billions of dollars in the business (particularly in finance), screw people over with little or no consequence, and you can't do that as easily as an engineer.

But i disagree that our best and brightest aren't trying. There are still engineers, and there are still people going out and becoming doctors, regardless of the difficulties in their fields.

The problem is that to do interesting and innovative things in tech, you have to go up against the regulatory and entrenched business interests in the US. The Obama Administration is having to contend with this, and Google has tried and failed to contend with this (look at the Nexus One experiment, and their whitespace wireless efforts).

It sucks to try and disrupt in the US.

[cal5k]

That's silly. The vast majority of technological innovations still come out of the US. So whatever it is you're doing poorly, the rest of the world is clearly doing that much worse.