Cowen: "Start with the Ivy Leaguers. I have no rancor against lawyers, financiers or management consultants, but the pursuit of these careers seems like a misal

Cowen: "Start with the Ivy Leaguers. I have no rancor against lawyers, financiers or management consultants, but the pursuit of these careers seems like a misallocation of human creativity. Those jobs do not comprise most of the value of the U.S. economy, so why are they such a magnet?" Pretty simple: the US is all about rent seeking these days. It's in the sciences as well; most people gravitate to fashionable woo which isn't particularly reproducible, and may fall entirely outside of the class of falsifiable science. Look at all the noodle theorists, cosmologists and other such wankers in physics departments. Look at the travesty that is the F35, or the laughable efforts of the center of the tech world taking billions of dollars to build a mile of freaking subway. Just getting into some Ivy League hole like Harvard; there's a huge industry of ding dongs who will set up non-profits, fake admission essays, and either tutor or fake test results; allowing sons and daughters of the ambitious to appear competent and useful citizens rather than parasites. This sort of travesty doesn't select for "creative," it just breeds an "elite" of rent-seeking sociopathic scammers. The last 20 years of Silicon Valley/Bay Area development are effectively rent seeking. Google and company blew up newspaper advertising while cannibalizing newspaper content. Uber, AirBnB, etc, all the same. Really the big winners in the Bay Area were the goddamned landlords; turning Boomer retirement dollars invested in "new technologies" into huge returns on real estate. There are entire books of historical philosophy and economics on this sort of thing: Brooks Adams recognized rent seeking as deadly to civilizations. Georgists were a similar intellectual current. I don't see it as even being recognized as a problem. Cowen at least notes that progress has slowed; an idea which meets with screeches of terrified denial from the "muh ipotato" crowd. At its core, though, is a problem with rent seeking.