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Reminds me of a story. One of my local universities (top 3 in the country) had a chemistry lab competition and invited high schools from local cities to partic

Reminds me of a story. One of my local universities (top 3 in the country) had a chemistry lab competition and invited high schools from local cities to participate. My younger sister was selected to be part of her school's team. So she went and won the competition. The deen of science was so impressed by her performance that after the reward ceremony he invited her to enrol in the science program. She replied no and that she was already accepted into the university's school of business (like most of her overachieving classmates). According to my sister, the deen was both taken aback and looked sad at the same time. So here's an anecdote to you.

magic_beans 12y ago
Business is much more lucrative than science. Not surprising.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  It is kind of surprising actually. Scientists create more wealth than managers. If they aren't better compensated it indicates an economic inefficiency that someone could profit by eliminating. There are obviously structural reasons why this hasn't happened or it would have already, but given the amount of money on the table, someone who figured out how to do it would stand to profit immensely.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    That's a great thought. I am assuming that the structural issue is that science in order to create the wealth must "open source" it's knowledge and this be unable to capture private profit, whereas corporations can maintain proprietary control and create less wealth but more profit. If we do solve it however, perhaps through some patent system, we will incur another problem - Albert Einstein for instance (photons, relativity and atomic structure) would be owed about 20% of the entire world GDP ... But yeah, I like the idea.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      The patent system is actually highly problematic because it a) provides no reward for research leading to negative results (which is extremely important to scientific progress) and b) provides the money after the fact rather than while the research is being conducted, requiring scientists to solicit investors up front (and possibly not be able to find any) and then gives the fruits to investors who may or may not reinvest it into future R&D. Then on top of that the patent monopoly makes the new invention more expensive and discourages third parties from making improvements they can't deploy without permission, which reduces the overall value of the invention. We might actually do better to just throw the patent system away and replace it with massive direct public funding of scientific research. The interesting question then is how to decide what to fund and in what amounts, which seems to be the heart of the problem. And there is also another point, which is that maybe scientists aren't particularly underpaid, maybe it's that managers are overpaid, e.g. because investors in public companies are so diffuse and distant from the companies they're invested in that they can't prevent executives from paying themselves more than they deserve. If you solve that then fewer people will want to go to business school instead of becoming scientists and companies will have the money they're no longer paying managers to potentially invest in R&D.
      - throwawaykf05 12y ago
        >The patent system is actually highly problematic because it a) provides no reward for research leading to negative results (which is extremely important to scientific progress)... And how is that different from absolutely any known system for managing science? You don't get publications for failed results either. FWIW I dedicated a whole quarter of my Master's thesis to a failed approach, just because I also thought it was important for progress, even though it provided little value from a thesis defense perspective >and b) provides the money after the fact rather than while the research is being conducted, requiring scientists to solicit investors up front (and possibly not be able to find any) Again, sounds like how the current proposal-for-grant system we have now. > and then gives the fruits to investors who may or may not reinvest it into future R&D. There really is no way to differentiate this from the alternatives. The government decides to invest based on a budget that is subject to way more conflicting forces than a profit-driven private entity. > Then on top of that the patent monopoly makes the new invention more expensive ... That is a commonly postulated hypothesis, but if one looks at empirical evidence, one finds a great deal of positive impetus to innovation provided by patents... in some industries. As always, the data is messy, the situations are complex, and the hypotheses are simplistic, but a large number of studies show that the patent system has significant benefits as well as costs. However it is impossible to tell from the data which one outweighs the other, mainly because it is like comparing apples and oranges. In general, though, risky, capital intensive fields are benefited more than harmed by patents. >* massive direct public funding of scientific research.* I don't know what you mean by "public", but to me it sounds like "government", in which case, see point above regarding budgets.
  - refurb 12y ago
    It is kind of surprising actually. Scientists create more wealth than managers. Creation of wealth only plays a role in salaries in the sense that you can't pay someone more than the value created overall. Supply and demand is really what drives salary.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      Supply and demand sets the price of everything. You're just restating the fact that scientists don't make a lot of money. The interesting question is why there isn't more demand for scientific research when the returns are so high. Clearly it isn't that the market and society have no desire for additional scientific progress.
      - sokoloff 12y ago
        The returns for genuine basic scientific breakthrough can be very high. They also are very rare, and tend to create financial payoff only after a decade or more.
      - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
        Hyperbolic discounting makes decades-scale scientific projects "unwise" from a private firm's point of view: many private firms don't exist in the same form across 40-year time-spans.
  - Tycho 12y ago
    Somebody already has. They're called Renaissance Technologies.
  - throwawaykf05 12y ago
    >Scientists create more wealth than managers [Citation needed.] While I completely agree that progress in science creates much more value than efficient management, a very small fraction of research efforts actually yields any useful results (as you mention downthread). Abstract value is different from wealth. Even assuming that value translates proportionally into wealth (a huge assumption, considering that commercialization itself of scientific advances is risky and often far into the future), how can you even try to consistently determine the wealth an average scientist creates? This is why science is like the startup game that VCs play. Invest a pittance into people who see promising and hope one of them turns out to be the next Google. Of course, despite the immense wealth a Google creates, all the non-Googles get nothing.
ForHackernews 12y ago
That's an interesting story. It's too bad your sister had to make a decision like that while still in high school. FWIW, the English term for a head of an academic department is spelled "dean", which is pronounced the same as "Deen", common as a person's name.
kqr2 12y ago
In a somewhat related issue, many of these financial firms will recruit top science & engineering talent at competitive universities. In some sense, it would have been better if these people had just studied finance to begin with since that would have opened a spot for someone who really wanted to practice science and engineering as a profession.
- tanderson92 12y ago
  While what you say is true, I would draw a different conclusion. It seems more likely that the students would prefer working in a field closer to what they studied, but the lack of positions means they had to look elsewhere. Finance knows they can find people with highly transferable skills in sci/engineering at competitive schools, so the brain drain is really the fault of the job market in the sciences and engineering. Of course you can still look at it as finance not investing in long-term R&D such as in science and engineering directly causing this brain-exodus (as opposed to brain drain), so it's still finance's fault!
  - dagw 12y ago
    That's like a friend of mine with a math degree. He didn't want to work in finance, but despite his best efforts he could not find anyone offering him a job where he would get to use his degree. So he ended up in finance after all and gets paid lots of money and works on interesting math problems.
- akgerber 12y ago
  I have generally seen people finishing PhD.s lately reluctantly start looking for jobs in alternate industries only because there is an extremely slim chance of getting a reasonably well-paid, secure job doing the type of scientific research they trained for. If they don't explore alternate options, they can easily be trapped in postdoc purgatory for a very long time.

magic_beans 12y ago

Business is much more lucrative than science. Not surprising.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
It is kind of surprising actually. Scientists create more wealth than managers. If they aren't better compensated it indicates an economic inefficiency that someone could profit by eliminating. There are obviously structural reasons why this hasn't happened or it would have already, but given the amount of money on the table, someone who figured out how to do it would stand to profit immensely.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  That's a great thought. I am assuming that the structural issue is that science in order to create the wealth must "open source" it's knowledge and this be unable to capture private profit, whereas corporations can maintain proprietary control and create less wealth but more profit. If we do solve it however, perhaps through some patent system, we will incur another problem - Albert Einstein for instance (photons, relativity and atomic structure) would be owed about 20% of the entire world GDP ... But yeah, I like the idea.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    The patent system is actually highly problematic because it a) provides no reward for research leading to negative results (which is extremely important to scientific progress) and b) provides the money after the fact rather than while the research is being conducted, requiring scientists to solicit investors up front (and possibly not be able to find any) and then gives the fruits to investors who may or may not reinvest it into future R&D. Then on top of that the patent monopoly makes the new invention more expensive and discourages third parties from making improvements they can't deploy without permission, which reduces the overall value of the invention. We might actually do better to just throw the patent system away and replace it with massive direct public funding of scientific research. The interesting question then is how to decide what to fund and in what amounts, which seems to be the heart of the problem. And there is also another point, which is that maybe scientists aren't particularly underpaid, maybe it's that managers are overpaid, e.g. because investors in public companies are so diffuse and distant from the companies they're invested in that they can't prevent executives from paying themselves more than they deserve. If you solve that then fewer people will want to go to business school instead of becoming scientists and companies will have the money they're no longer paying managers to potentially invest in R&D.
    - throwawaykf05 12y ago
      >The patent system is actually highly problematic because it a) provides no reward for research leading to negative results (which is extremely important to scientific progress)... And how is that different from absolutely any known system for managing science? You don't get publications for failed results either. FWIW I dedicated a whole quarter of my Master's thesis to a failed approach, just because I also thought it was important for progress, even though it provided little value from a thesis defense perspective >and b) provides the money after the fact rather than while the research is being conducted, requiring scientists to solicit investors up front (and possibly not be able to find any) Again, sounds like how the current proposal-for-grant system we have now. > and then gives the fruits to investors who may or may not reinvest it into future R&D. There really is no way to differentiate this from the alternatives. The government decides to invest based on a budget that is subject to way more conflicting forces than a profit-driven private entity. > Then on top of that the patent monopoly makes the new invention more expensive ... That is a commonly postulated hypothesis, but if one looks at empirical evidence, one finds a great deal of positive impetus to innovation provided by patents... in some industries. As always, the data is messy, the situations are complex, and the hypotheses are simplistic, but a large number of studies show that the patent system has significant benefits as well as costs. However it is impossible to tell from the data which one outweighs the other, mainly because it is like comparing apples and oranges. In general, though, risky, capital intensive fields are benefited more than harmed by patents. >* massive direct public funding of scientific research.* I don't know what you mean by "public", but to me it sounds like "government", in which case, see point above regarding budgets.
- refurb 12y ago
  It is kind of surprising actually. Scientists create more wealth than managers. Creation of wealth only plays a role in salaries in the sense that you can't pay someone more than the value created overall. Supply and demand is really what drives salary.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    Supply and demand sets the price of everything. You're just restating the fact that scientists don't make a lot of money. The interesting question is why there isn't more demand for scientific research when the returns are so high. Clearly it isn't that the market and society have no desire for additional scientific progress.
    - sokoloff 12y ago
      The returns for genuine basic scientific breakthrough can be very high. They also are very rare, and tend to create financial payoff only after a decade or more.
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
      Hyperbolic discounting makes decades-scale scientific projects "unwise" from a private firm's point of view: many private firms don't exist in the same form across 40-year time-spans.
- Tycho 12y ago
  Somebody already has. They're called Renaissance Technologies.
- throwawaykf05 12y ago
  >Scientists create more wealth than managers [Citation needed.] While I completely agree that progress in science creates much more value than efficient management, a very small fraction of research efforts actually yields any useful results (as you mention downthread). Abstract value is different from wealth. Even assuming that value translates proportionally into wealth (a huge assumption, considering that commercialization itself of scientific advances is risky and often far into the future), how can you even try to consistently determine the wealth an average scientist creates? This is why science is like the startup game that VCs play. Invest a pittance into people who see promising and hope one of them turns out to be the next Google. Of course, despite the immense wealth a Google creates, all the non-Googles get nothing.

ForHackernews 12y ago

That's an interesting story. It's too bad your sister had to make a decision like that while still in high school. FWIW, the English term for a head of an academic department is spelled "dean", which is pronounced the same as "Deen", common as a person's name.

kqr2 12y ago

In a somewhat related issue, many of these financial firms will recruit top science & engineering talent at competitive universities. In some sense, it would have been better if these people had just studied finance to begin with since that would have opened a spot for someone who really wanted to practice science and engineering as a profession.

tanderson92 12y ago
While what you say is true, I would draw a different conclusion. It seems more likely that the students would prefer working in a field closer to what they studied, but the lack of positions means they had to look elsewhere. Finance knows they can find people with highly transferable skills in sci/engineering at competitive schools, so the brain drain is really the fault of the job market in the sciences and engineering. Of course you can still look at it as finance not investing in long-term R&D such as in science and engineering directly causing this brain-exodus (as opposed to brain drain), so it's still finance's fault!
- dagw 12y ago
  That's like a friend of mine with a math degree. He didn't want to work in finance, but despite his best efforts he could not find anyone offering him a job where he would get to use his degree. So he ended up in finance after all and gets paid lots of money and works on interesting math problems.
akgerber 12y ago
I have generally seen people finishing PhD.s lately reluctantly start looking for jobs in alternate industries only because there is an extremely slim chance of getting a reasonably well-paid, secure job doing the type of scientific research they trained for. If they don't explore alternate options, they can easily be trapped in postdoc purgatory for a very long time.