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Our best and brightest can make more money with FANG or banking induary than contributing to science. My wife with a PhD in Chemistry from a prestigious univers

• alephnerd 3y ago
  It's the same thing elsewhere as well. As I noted below, the Nature Index has a number of flaws in how it measures affiliation.
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  Also, we can shift away from a culture and polity that worships Mammon. Generally speaking, people simply go with the grain of the culture, regardless of whether that grain is crooked or straight. If the culture reduces life to economics and makes consumerism its religion, then yeah, you'll see lots of people who would have chosen less lucrative paths choose work that pays more. What's worrying about finance and FANG pulling in a good chunk of the STEM majors is that finance is not a productive sector, and arguably, FANG isn't really all that productive either, certainly not relative to the economic bias. You need sectors like finance, of course, because they are the way capital is allocated toward productive labor, but the only way unproductive or marginally productive sectors can make this much money without funding and investing in productive industry is through usury. Usury is the ruin of empires.
  • pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Agree about usury and all (I think mortgages should probably be illegal), but is consumerism really a big driver of high earners continuing to focus on high earning as opposed to more altruistic research? I feel like keeping up with the Jones’ maxes out at a level that, while much higher than the median income, is not that high among the incomes of geniuses wasting their potential at tech companies. The treadmill feels much much much more about status and future freedom than about consumption itself (granted some consumption is status signaling in nature).
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  If these are mutually exclusive Id rather the US focus in competitive industry than competitive publishing. That’s a perverse game at this point.
• coliveira 3y ago
  Yes, when I did my PhD it was quite difficult to live with a post-doc income. I imagine what it must be nowadays. Most people in science are now being driven to other fields just to have a decent life.
• jltsiren 3y ago
  And capitalism revolves around comparative advantage. Because American professionals expect higher salaries than their peers in most other countries, they can only be competitive with sufficient institutional or educational advantages. If American universities and research institutes no longer have those advantages, they start losing their competitiveness. Either their productivity suffers, because they have to pay more for the same research output, or they can't attract domestic talent, because the opportunity cost of going to the academia is higher in the US than elsewhere. Relying permanently on foreign talent may work, if the rest of the society accepts it. Research is an activity dominated by labor costs. Capitalism favors doing such activities in the cheapest places where they can be done well enough.
• deleted 3y ago
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