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Most hilarious item is where the author states that we should have a conversation about whether startups are society's best use of our brightest graduates, i.e.

• coderdude 10y ago
  Your response to that is a complaint followed by no discussion. "Somehow funny."
• jacobolus 10y ago
  A significant proportion of Harvard Business School graduates (though by no means all of them) are people who are “ambitious” in a way primarily defined around money, social status, and power, rather than curiosity or societal contribution. They’re going to inevitably be drawn to whatever field looks most promising for a lucrative and influential career. It would be nice if we could economically rearrange society to amply reward careers in research, teaching, government, public-interest law, community organizing and development, providing social services, and so on (not to mention just regular jobs in factories, agriculture, retail, food preparation, etc.), so that doing work that benefited society was more attractive vis-à-vis zero-sum financial hocus pocus, predatory legal engineering, aggressive marketing/propaganda, internet surveillance, quasi-legal fraud, etc. [My recommendation would be to dramatically increase taxes on land, inheritances, long-term capital gains, and carbon emissions, and redistribute the proceeds evenly to all citizens. And also to return anti-trust law to its roots and aggressively break apart monopolies and monopsonies, separate different types of financial activities to reduce conflicts of interest, and to dramatically increase funding for government regulatory agencies which are currently infinitely outclassed by industry.] But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, in our current society. I’m not sure what can be done to help e.g. the kind of business school grads who have already decided that personal success is more important than general social welfare.
  • hiou 10y ago
    > if we could economically rearrange society Maslow's Hammer rears its head https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
    • jacobolus 10y ago
      “Economically rearrange society” doesn’t insist on some particular means. I assume you agree with me that the current “arrangement” is fundamentally broken and unjust with horribly skewed incentives and abounding in conflicts of interest? I’m not sure what you are getting at.
  • dilemma 10y ago
    These money hungry HBS graduates perform jobs that are in themselves so boring, stressful and costly on a personal level that nobody would do them if it weren't for the large rewards they come with -- creating new technological infrastructure and organizations that supply society with the products and services it needs.
    • chrisbennet 10y ago
      Do you mean jobs in finance? I'm not so sure society really needs most of the products and services finance generates.
      • dilemma 10y ago
        Societies need financial infrastructure. Very little of it can be replaced with software, and innovations in finance is just as important to economic development as technology is.
        • wwweston 10y ago
          The necessity of financial infrastructure seems pretty easy to take at face value. The idea that "very little" of it can be replaced with software seems like it might need more support than a bare assertion.
• megablast 10y ago
  I don't understand your point? Is it the same guy who lauded graduates going to finance and then doesn't like grads going to startups? Because if it isn't the same guy, then what are you talking about?
  • gmarx 10y ago
    I'm the guy who consider finance a waste of math and physics grads. Now I'm reading this and thinking "what an idiot. He thinks its crucial to society to make best use of MBAs". Then I realize I'm making a similar judgement about math and physics. Is society objectively better off if we do more math and physics? Hard to say yes. I'm biased as he is. Even so, assuming Harvard MBAs are a valuable national resource cracks me up. I've dealt with a few