Does Anyone Think That "The Best And The Brightest" Go To Work On Wall Street?
I mean, to be honest, that thought has never entered my mind. I figure that if there's anywhere "the best and the brightest" cluster, it's math and physics departments. I expect you can find smart folk just about anywhere...but Wall Street certainly wouldn't be where I'd bet there'd be notable clusters of 'em. The glitziest and greediest, perhaps, or maybe even the folk most likely to think themselves to be among the B and B...but not, ya know, the genuine article.
Here's Judith Warner being surprised by the suggestion at issue. (Hey, she's a cutie pie according to that picture, eh? Not that I'm noticing that of course...)
I mean, to be honest, that thought has never entered my mind. I figure that if there's anywhere "the best and the brightest" cluster, it's math and physics departments. I expect you can find smart folk just about anywhere...but Wall Street certainly wouldn't be where I'd bet there'd be notable clusters of 'em. The glitziest and greediest, perhaps, or maybe even the folk most likely to think themselves to be among the B and B...but not, ya know, the genuine article.
Here's Judith Warner being surprised by the suggestion at issue. (Hey, she's a cutie pie according to that picture, eh? Not that I'm noticing that of course...)
posted by Winston Smith at
2:42 PM
5 Comments:
Let me lay out the logic for you.
If Good, then Well-paid
Wall Street is Well-paid
Therefore, Wall Street is Good.
Just like with so many other things, what matters is not what's true so much as what a large enough number of influential enough people assert is true.
Math, physics, and engineering departments. Those are the folks who have to work very hard (just to stay) in college.
In college, we used to separate the idiots this way: idiots with ambition went to the business school, idiots with no ambition went to the college of education.
When I finished my PhD in Physics at MIT (1991), a fair number of my fellow PhD's were going to work in the financial world. I clearly recall one fellow PhD student telling me that financial modeling is just another application of the Navier-Stokes equations (from fluid mechanics.)
I was a researcher at MIT from '91-'98, and my impression was that the number of the Institute's graduates going into the financial world was, if anything, increasing. I started teaching (mostly undergraduates) in '98. Over the past 10 years, I have had the impression that a significant fraction of MIT graduates at all levels (Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate) have been going into the financial industry.
To the degree that one considers the MIT student population to be representative of the "best and brightest" then there is some support to the claim that the best and brightest have been going into the financial industry. (Notice that the support is subjective & anecdotal!)
High pay has been one incentive to working in finance. The prestige associated with that work has also gone up in the past couple decades (as compared to the other options available).
What I don't know is the degree to which fewer options in academia, government labs, or private labs have also steered graduates towards the financial industry. The last decade has been a difficult time to start a career as an academic/government researcher (cuts in federal & private funds for research) or in industrial research labs (buy-outs often lead to cuts in R&D budgets).
Does anyone have a definition of the “best & brightest” (and the corresponding numbers) that might address the claim at hand?
best,
Jim Bales
In the same sense that the best and brightest couldn't figure a way out of Vietnam...
Well, Jim, those sound like candidates for the mantle of "best and brightest" to me...
Since the term is extremely vague and to some extent intentionally BSy, we shouldn't expect to find anything like a precise definition.
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