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This article frames the questions as "Why are young people entering safe fields?". But the fields they mentioned are not just low risk, they are also high payin

This article frames the questions as "Why are young people entering safe fields?". But the fields they mentioned are not just low risk, they are also high paying. But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious. If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it.

xwdv 7y ago
You hit the nail on the head. If I could quietly do research the rest of my life I would probably do that, but only if I’m paid what I earn now year after year, I’m not going to be satisfied with some pitiful grad student level stipend. The alternative is what I do now, building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money. I’m ok with that because I am insulated from most of the effects of my work.
- boofgod 7y ago
  Are you happy about that
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - xwdv 7y ago
    I’m happy enough, and that’s good enough for me.
- molteanu 7y ago
  Only today I've reopened my Euclid's Elements [1] and longed for the PhD days when I would read it all day long dreaming I would do maths and physics for the rest of my existence. > building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money Same. https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195 https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted I honestly agree with your assessment. I left research because raising a family would've been impossible with the amount I would have been paid and how often I'd have to change jobs/travel.
jschwartzi 7y ago
This is basically analogous to "We chronically devalue and underpay our public school teachers. We require them to perform to lowest-common-denominator testing, constant interventions, rigorous, standards-based teaching, work samples, documentation, and other requirements. Why is nobody interested in getting into teaching?"
- Thriptic 7y ago
  Agreed, these sorts of pieces really irritate me because they almost seem to be blaming young people for following basic incentives. Want people to go into an abandoned field? Great, pay them more than jobs they are equally well suited for, give them autonomy, grant them social status, or give them a great lifestyle. No one with other prospects is going to come to a profession if they are paid like shit，treated with no more deference than a fast food worker, saddled with a million regulations from the government, given no autonomy, and / or granted no job security without commensurate upside potential. This is not hard to understand. The government / employers simply don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
  - bob33212 7y ago
    Similar to "unfilled jobs" and "not enough engineers". The market price is just higher than what they would like to pay for those employees.
  - molteanu 7y ago
    > saddled with a million regulations from the government How acute is this, in general? I'm not from the US and I have no clue about it. From the outside it seems that everything is going well, creativity is abundant and freedom is running wild in the streets. Your comment kinda negates that and I'm a little surprised by it.
    - danaris 7y ago
      By and large, it's propaganda. There is reasonable concern about some kinds of bureaucratic requirements and government-mandated busywork in certain fields, but for the most part, what holds individuals back in our country is the gross inequality in the system, manifesting in a variety of forms. One of those forms, of course, is regulatory capture, allowing certain industries to maintain high barriers to entry because the people running the governmental agencies tasked with ensuring those industries are being run safely and for the public benefit are mostly former and/or soon-to-be industry executives and lobbyists. This makes it much easier for the anti-government "look how horrible things are with regulation" rhetoric, when the actual cause is still overwhelming corporate power.
Hoasi 7y ago
> But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious. Indeed, but it also highlights something that may be less obvious, and that is the proper allocation of reward. The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society? Careers in education, healthcare, research, and less stable creative ventures should not need subsidies if we acknowledged their inerrant long term value.
- qsymmachus 7y ago
  David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  I don't think it's unfair to consider the historical demography of those (service) jobs, in addition to considering the network effects on perceived value in work that is often done in the background.
- watwut 7y ago
  Job that are suposed to be done "out of passion" of "for a cause" are always underpaid and offer terrible conditions. See also game programming.
- jerf 7y ago
  "The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society?" The answer for most of them is simple: oversupply. Being a teacher is generally something a lot of people want to be, and especially for K-12, almost by definition, the intellectual bar is "finished K-12 reasonably well". (If you read curricula for teaching schools, you'll find that while teachers are generally educated maybe a year or two's worth past the high school level in their chosen teaching subjects, that's generally it for the requirements.) Accomplishing the "bullet point" objectives of being a teacher is not a difficult enough bar to filter out enough people. (I phrase it that way to forstall hiking the goalpost to the sort of astonishing, life changing teacher whose slightest jiggling of their eyebrows inspire students to new heights of knowledge and curiousity. Those may not be all that common, but that's not the bar in question. Most teachers are pretty close to average.) When you imagine yourself in the role of teacher (the inspiring kind, I'm sure) or researcher (who is, of course, hot on the trail of the cure of cancer, not researching some workaday research question), it's easy to imagine how you should be paid more. But if you put yourself in the position of paying for these things with your money, and you offer $100,000/yr to be an elementary school teacher in some medium-sized town in the country because wouldn't that just be awesome, and you get your first 10,000 applications today with another 10,000 coming tomorrow, it's not long before you start thinking "Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to part with quite $100,000/yr to fill this position.... maybe $90,000 isn't such a bad idea, and I can use that $10,000 to do some other $WORTHY_THING..." (Or... maybe I could use this money to hire two teachers....) It's easy to imagine how someone else should pay teachers three or four times more... it would be a lot more challenging if you were the one doing it.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
> "If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it." He is. Tyler Cowen lead the creation of Emergent Ventures. (https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures) From the opening of their application which he shared on his blog: > "We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox. > Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!) > Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project. > We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world." Incredibly, they're taking no stake in successful ventures. They're just subsidizing high-reward ideas to encourage them. If you read The Complacent Class and Stubborn Attachments—both highly recommended, you'll get a better idea of where Tyler is coming from and why this issue of decreasing dynamism is an issue he's so concerned about.

xwdv 7y ago

You hit the nail on the head. If I could quietly do research the rest of my life I would probably do that, but only if I’m paid what I earn now year after year, I’m not going to be satisfied with some pitiful grad student level stipend. The alternative is what I do now, building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money. I’m ok with that because I am insulated from most of the effects of my work.

boofgod 7y ago
Are you happy about that
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xwdv 7y ago
  I’m happy enough, and that’s good enough for me.
molteanu 7y ago
Only today I've reopened my Euclid's Elements [1] and longed for the PhD days when I would read it all day long dreaming I would do maths and physics for the rest of my existence. > building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money Same. https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195 https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195
Ancalagon 7y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted I honestly agree with your assessment. I left research because raising a family would've been impossible with the amount I would have been paid and how often I'd have to change jobs/travel.

jschwartzi 7y ago

This is basically analogous to "We chronically devalue and underpay our public school teachers. We require them to perform to lowest-common-denominator testing, constant interventions, rigorous, standards-based teaching, work samples, documentation, and other requirements. Why is nobody interested in getting into teaching?"

Thriptic 7y ago
Agreed, these sorts of pieces really irritate me because they almost seem to be blaming young people for following basic incentives. Want people to go into an abandoned field? Great, pay them more than jobs they are equally well suited for, give them autonomy, grant them social status, or give them a great lifestyle. No one with other prospects is going to come to a profession if they are paid like shit，treated with no more deference than a fast food worker, saddled with a million regulations from the government, given no autonomy, and / or granted no job security without commensurate upside potential. This is not hard to understand. The government / employers simply don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
- bob33212 7y ago
  Similar to "unfilled jobs" and "not enough engineers". The market price is just higher than what they would like to pay for those employees.
- molteanu 7y ago
  > saddled with a million regulations from the government How acute is this, in general? I'm not from the US and I have no clue about it. From the outside it seems that everything is going well, creativity is abundant and freedom is running wild in the streets. Your comment kinda negates that and I'm a little surprised by it.
  - danaris 7y ago
    By and large, it's propaganda. There is reasonable concern about some kinds of bureaucratic requirements and government-mandated busywork in certain fields, but for the most part, what holds individuals back in our country is the gross inequality in the system, manifesting in a variety of forms. One of those forms, of course, is regulatory capture, allowing certain industries to maintain high barriers to entry because the people running the governmental agencies tasked with ensuring those industries are being run safely and for the public benefit are mostly former and/or soon-to-be industry executives and lobbyists. This makes it much easier for the anti-government "look how horrible things are with regulation" rhetoric, when the actual cause is still overwhelming corporate power.

Hoasi 7y ago

> But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious. Indeed, but it also highlights something that may be less obvious, and that is the proper allocation of reward. The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society? Careers in education, healthcare, research, and less stable creative ventures should not need subsidies if we acknowledged their inerrant long term value.

qsymmachus 7y ago
David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.
bsanr2 7y ago
I don't think it's unfair to consider the historical demography of those (service) jobs, in addition to considering the network effects on perceived value in work that is often done in the background.
watwut 7y ago
Job that are suposed to be done "out of passion" of "for a cause" are always underpaid and offer terrible conditions. See also game programming.
jerf 7y ago
"The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society?" The answer for most of them is simple: oversupply. Being a teacher is generally something a lot of people want to be, and especially for K-12, almost by definition, the intellectual bar is "finished K-12 reasonably well". (If you read curricula for teaching schools, you'll find that while teachers are generally educated maybe a year or two's worth past the high school level in their chosen teaching subjects, that's generally it for the requirements.) Accomplishing the "bullet point" objectives of being a teacher is not a difficult enough bar to filter out enough people. (I phrase it that way to forstall hiking the goalpost to the sort of astonishing, life changing teacher whose slightest jiggling of their eyebrows inspire students to new heights of knowledge and curiousity. Those may not be all that common, but that's not the bar in question. Most teachers are pretty close to average.) When you imagine yourself in the role of teacher (the inspiring kind, I'm sure) or researcher (who is, of course, hot on the trail of the cure of cancer, not researching some workaday research question), it's easy to imagine how you should be paid more. But if you put yourself in the position of paying for these things with your money, and you offer $100,000/yr to be an elementary school teacher in some medium-sized town in the country because wouldn't that just be awesome, and you get your first 10,000 applications today with another 10,000 coming tomorrow, it's not long before you start thinking "Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to part with quite $100,000/yr to fill this position.... maybe $90,000 isn't such a bad idea, and I can use that $10,000 to do some other $WORTHY_THING..." (Or... maybe I could use this money to hire two teachers....) It's easy to imagine how someone else should pay teachers three or four times more... it would be a lot more challenging if you were the one doing it.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

> "If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it." He is. Tyler Cowen lead the creation of Emergent Ventures. (https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures) From the opening of their application which he shared on his blog: > "We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox. > Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!) > Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project. > We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world." Incredibly, they're taking no stake in successful ventures. They're just subsidizing high-reward ideas to encourage them. If you read The Complacent Class and Stubborn Attachments—both highly recommended, you'll get a better idea of where Tyler is coming from and why this issue of decreasing dynamism is an issue he's so concerned about.