[TrackerFF]

Sometimes I think - what if all the smartest people that work on purely commercial things, had rather spent their time on solving problems in medicine, etc.

Of course, some will argue that

A) These people wouldn't have been equally motivated to work on such problem, compared to the ones that make them wealthy.

B) Some of the investment folks are contributing to the actual sciences, by fronting them with money.

But, still, I can't help but to think what a brain drain the finance industry is. You take some of the smartest and most motivated people out there, and make them spend all their energy on vacuuming pennies off the market, or identifying commercially successful companies.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's been an utter cultural disaster. We've missed out on so much original science and progress because these smart idiots threw away their talents on building machines to game the casino, when they could have made game-changing contributions to fundamental original research.

Imagine if Shannon, Turing, Von Neumann, Einstein, and Dirac had done this.

Yes, they put some money back, but not nearly enough to compensate for the damage.

The real disaster has been normalising this kind of "success" as the best of all possible achievements, when in fact it's spectacularly cheap and unambitious compared to the goals of previous generations.

If anyone thinks I'm overstating the heresy here, remember - a financialised economy is optimised for short-term gain, not long-term development.

The flip side of "investment" is an economy where hundreds of millions are bankrupted by health insurance, where rents are unaffordable (never mind property), where workers are treated like spreadsheet assets and not like people, where fraud is endemic, where many people are putting off having kids because they literally can't afford them, where planes fall out of the sky, and where the entire machine regularly demands government bailouts because it's stuck in a manic depressive cycle of overconfidence and opportunism followed by collapse.

That's not even looking at the incredibly toxic political effects.

[logicchains]

>We've missed out on so much original science and progress because these smart idiots threw away their talents on building machines to game the casino, when they could have made game-changing contributions to fundamental original research.

The vast majority of people who succeed in finance are very ambitious; if finance wasn't an option they'd just have found some other way to make money, not suffer as a peon doing fundamental research for mediocre pay in a lab somewhere. Just be glad they didn't go into politics where their ambition could have done even more damage.

[gcanyon]

So, are we saying that Jane Street is evil because they specifically target smart people and pull them into finance?

[specialist]

Hate the game, not the player.

[gcanyon]

Fair :-/

[realfeel78]

I mean… look who they hired.

[tikhonj]

Eh, it's hard to call it much of a "brain drain" when getting a research job is so difficult. There's no shortage of smart people interested in working in research for less than they'd make at any professional role, much less in the highest-paid industries.

PhD programs pay basically nothing, are selective, require candidates to jump through all sorts of hoops and still have no trouble filling out. Later on, becoming a professor—or some other sort of researcher with similar scope, autonomy and funding—is basically impossible, harder than making a bunch of money in quantitative finance. And yet each opening has hundreds of realistically qualified applicants. (Realistically qualified in the sense that they'd be able to do good research, anyway.)

[specialist]

Ya, "brain drain" is probably not the right metaphor. But you get the gist: Smart people have more opportunities in finance.

As you know, funding for academics, scholastics, and basic research has been on a decades long decline. The West's investment in knowledge production peaked in response to Sputnik. As the Cold War wound down, neoliberalism and the "peace dividend" replaced that commitment.

Too bad.

Maybe climate crisis, our new existential threat, will be another Sputnik moment.