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Academia, Teaching, Charities & Not for profit organisations all improve society and you wouldn't do any of those if you wanted to be rich.

• nirvana 14y ago
  People have gotten rich doing all of those. For instance, the head of the Red Cross makes a lot of money. So do the leaders at United Way. Further, many of these organizations arguably don't improve society. For instance, the Red Cross monopoly on blood supply significantly drives up health care costs, primarily to the personal profit of the Red Cross bureaucracy. But this is all sidestepping my point. The idea that making money is to the detriment of society is the claim I wish to dispel. My point is not that you can't help society without getting rich-- its easy to prove you can. My point is, most ways of getting rich do significantly benefit society.
• Estragon 14y ago
  Coming from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large government research grants. And the people who do this do very well financially. There are many individual academics for whom it's not about the money, but this institutional culture corrodes altruistic motives, and selects against them.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    I do think this is a big problem (bigger than it was a few decades ago), but I think on average it's still not mostly about the money for most scientists. People don't go into physics because they want to get rich, but mainly because they want to research physics. At least, they shouldn't, because if your main goal is making money, the physics-professor route is far from the optimal one. I agree that incentives are increasingly selecting for empire-builders, though, which is money-related. There are some people who really want to manage a big, important physics lab, and are more ambivalent about the physics itself, and those people are nowadays being selected for.
  • larsberg 14y ago
    There's a difference between money for the university and money for yourself. I think the poster was trying to point out that taking an academic job is not the path to riches. For example, I made more at around five years in to working at Microsoft than I will as a professor unless I manage to make full professor at a top university _and_ run my own lab. Undergraduate starting salaries in this field, from top-tier institutions, are still far above assistant faculty salaries, despite ~8 years less education (a post-doctoral stint is basically mandatory to even get a faculty position interview at this point). So, even if I made the very top tier of my field and stayed there until senility sets in, it's questionable whether I could ever make up for the lost wages during my re-education. And that's assuming I had never gotten another raise beyond inflation, ever. At least in CS, you don't go into academia for the money.
    • Estragon 14y ago
      I think it's terrific that you're making choices based on what really interests you, rather than optimizing your income. You're obviously the kind of person pclark was talking about, and that's admirable. I do think, though, that if the institution's executive goals are more along the lines of "make money" while an individual's are more "do cool stuff to change the world," he or she is setting himself up for an enduring conflict which can be hard to negotiate, or even to keep track of at times, because the institution will have so much influence over their life.
• Shivetya 14y ago
  There is a lot of money to made in non profit and charitable organizations. At least for those at the top. Go look up how much your higher ups make in groups like United Way and you will begin to wonder how many people could be helped if so many people didn't make near a half million a year at a charity.