| > Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts? Because we pay our politicians terribly low compared to other leadership positions. Our best leaders have gone to Facebook / Google to make better ads. It makes no sense for a 18-year-old going into college to study political theory and become a mayor by 30 or so. Our political system is broken because there's no incentives to get good leaders into our political system. There's far more leadership positions available in private industry, and they all pay maybe 500% higher. Remember: Senators are only paid like $180,000/year. Most other positions are paid much much less. In contrast, you can easily get $250k+/year as a VP for... well... pretty much anyone else. (Exxon, Facebook, Microsoft). Reach "3-letter" positions (CEO, CFO, CIO) at FANNGs and you're upwards of $1MM/year. -------- Bonus points: a typical VP at Microsoft probably doesn't have to worry about legitimate death threats / assassination attempts like our politicians do. Its a quieter, safer, easier life. You put your family through hell, the media hound you and try to dig up dirt on you constantly. Etc. etc. Does anyone here actually want to be a politician? Or would you rather continue your path in Engineering / programming / whatever you're doing right now? I'm not necessarily saying Hacker News is the "best and brightest", but... a lot of us are at least _trying_ to be the best-and-brightest in our selective fields. How many of us actually think about going into politics? |