I spent last weekend at a wedding where the bride and groom were both members of the Harvard Class of 2001. Harvard builds a strong class spirit and ensures that most of a graduate’s friends will be from the same class by maintaining freshman-only dorms in the Yard (the impact on academics is negative because there are no upperclassmen from whom to learn study habits or get help with homework, but this isn’t a big deal at a school where “A stands for average”).
Five years after graduation, what are these bright young expensively educated people up to? Although the bride and groom were in medicine and business, a plurality of their classmates had gone to law school and/or were working in Washington, D.C. as lobbyists or legislative assistants. With so many of America’s best and brightest making the personal choice to go into fields that, at best, transfer money from one pocket to another, I thought “Thank God we have immigrants, since if we had to rely on these folks for economic growth, we’d be toast.”
[Camera nerds: If you’re curious to see how an EOS 5D performs in the low available light of a church or restaurant, check out my slide show from the wedding: medium-sized or huge.]
Oh well, how many MIT CS nerds end up working for Fortune 500s to help very rich people make more money more efficiently? Not that much of a difference…
The wedding photos look good, but how dark was this church? What ISO, f-stop, shutter speeds are we talking about? Was any flash used?
It is difficult to define and measure productivity. Every job in an advanced society fits the “transfer money from one pocket to another” description. In our market economy the true measure of a job’s economic importance is pay. How else can the “economic growth value” of different jobs be measured? If those well-educated people are making a good living it must be because someone is considering them productive. I however, like your comment on immigrants (no contradiction here, I just happen to be one myself).
Bas: Your idea that there “isn’t much of a difference” between someone working for the government, consuming tax dollars, and someone working for a Fortune 500, paying tax dollars, is interesting. Maybe it is a good thing that so many of those Harvard 2001 grads are off studying Political Science. They can try to figure out how to run the “Scheffers economy” where everyone works for the government, lobbies the government, or litigates in a government-operated courtroom.
The wedding photos? It was dark in there. ISO 800, f/2.8 and around 1/100th of a second. I try not to use on-camera flash as a primary light source and had not strobed the venue (big studio strobe slaved to an on-camera trigger of some sort), so I didn’t use flash.
“In our market economy the true measure of a job’s economic importance is pay.”
Nah. The tue measure of a job’s economic value to the person cutting the check is pay. The true economic value of a job’s importance in a macro sense may not be reflected in the paycheck.
Two employees, an engineer and a lawyer, work for big technology corportation. Young lawyer studies the tax code hard, and discovers that if expensive equipment is purchased by a shell corporation and leased back to big technology corporation, the company can save 10 million in taxes. Young engineer studies manufacturing simulation hard, and discovers that an optimal process can save $5 mil in new equipment and another $5 mil in energy costs.
Both worth $10 million to the company cutting the check. But in case 1, money has only been shifted around. In case 2, new wealth has been created. And I’m not even getting into the benefits of genuinely new products (ie., instead of a new process for building cars, an engineer creates a hybrid engine).
But hey, if the law jobs pay more and can be had with a sociology degree and three years postgrad, that’s what the younguns are going to chase, and you can’t blame them for it. I agree with Phil – the US now depends on immigrants to create wealth, so our lawyers can divvy it up.
I agree with Philg but Bas makes a good point: after all, isn’t an enormous amount of software (tax software, dBs, payment systems etc.) really just aimed at dividing up money and wealth more efficiently? A lawyer works on enforcement of laws that stop or discourage identify theft, is that any less important than software that is designed to stop identity theft?
A quick comment and question on the slide show. Image quality is mostly superb, but it looks to me as if the Eos 5D has a clear tendency to overexpose images. Any comments on the cause of this? Does it perhaps have something to do with the post-processing?
I agree with you Phil.
Same thing at Stanford. I just attended a talk on next generation non volatile memory technology. The only non-asian there was the speaker and one very old person in the back. Everyone else was asian or from another country.
Then I go to the law school. Few asians, all american born citizens.
We lost it. I think it’s because of the lousy management. It’s hard to get smart people to work for our current generation CEOs who really don’t succeed because of their passion for technology development AND unwavering ETHICS. Grove, Gates,Brin/Page,Yang/Filo and many others excepted.
Smart people can innovate given the right environment but smart people can also see corrupt leadership and will stay away. I would do the same thing if I were 20. Go to law school/med school and stay away from the CEOs of 90% of the internet startups who want you to program up a webpage and make the company an instant success. It doesn’t work that way; managing by the latest trend.
Look at all the search engine startups or social networking startups. Look CLOSELY at the leadership, not the resume of where they worked — but what they are like as human beings. The majority are not there to make the world a better place through sacrifice, hard work and total dedication to doing things the right way over the next 20 years.
If you look closely at their behavior they do not donate regularly or do things for others that reflect what they say. They are in for the quick buck.
Hi Phil,
I like your last sentence “Thank God we have immigrants, since if we had to rely on these folks for economic growth, we’d be toast.”
The problem is that States are not attracting young smart immigrants anymore. They’ve started preferring European or Asian countries where they have much more freedom and don’t have to fight with stupid bureaucracy.
I wasn’t looking at it from an economic point of view, rather from personal achievement/fulfillment. (which I thought most of your rant was about)
You have a point, at least if that Fortune 500 company actually makes anything. My view is biassed because the only big businesses I work for are those that do nothing but shuffle money around between rich people, skimming off some of it to fill their own coffers and pay their employees and as little as possible of it to the goverment as taxes. These businesses are otherwise know as “investment banks”.
I think, some of you are missing the changes in the US society as described by Peter Drucker in the Economist a few years back:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819
SURVEY: THE NEAR FUTURE
The new workforce
Nov 1st 2001
From The Economist print edition
Knowledge workers are the new capitalists
(…) Factory workers still account for the majority of the manual workers, but their share of the total workforce is down to around 15%—more or less back to what it had been 100 years earlier.
Of all the big developed countries, America now has the smallest proportion of factory workers in its labour force.
(…)
Peter Drucker in the same series of articles:
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SSDRGT
(…)
In 1960, manufacturing was the centre of the American economy, and of the economies of all other developed countries. By 2000, as a contributor to GDP it was easily outranked by the financial sector .
The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods (what economists call the terms of trade) has fallen by three-quarters in the past 40 years. Whereas manufacturing prices, adjusted for inflation, are down by 40%, the prices of the two main knowledge products, health care and education, have risen about three times as fast as inflation. In 2000, therefore, it took five times as many units of manufactured goods to buy the main knowledge products as it had done 40 years earlier.
(…)
Looking at these developments it`s not too hard to see, why demand and wages for some engineers are falling. Production and much of it`s engineering are going to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, India, Mexico, Brazil.
Michael, germany
Interesting post on the transfer of money. One observation in business, when a company is about to go under, and needs an acquisition partner or new funding, it seems that in the end the accountants, bankers, and lawyers are those paid first before the creditors, employees, and investors.
It is a fact of life that Ivy league gratuates, specially MBAs, need to generate return on their education investment. After an expensive and successful education, graduates need to start on their career path and continued success.
Entrepreneuship involves uncertainty, failures, volatility and pain. Courting disaster, at the bleeding edge of a market or technology, is best done when you have nothing to loose. When you have no choice.
Ivy league graduates have lots of choices, plus education loans; you won’t find many in a startup, the souce of GDP growth.
“My view is biassed because the only big businesses I work for are those that do nothing but shuffle money around between rich people, skimming off some of it to fill their own coffers and pay their employees and as little as possible of it to the goverment as taxes. These businesses are otherwise know as “investment banks”. ”
But these are the people who are basically the allocators of financial fuel to companies that make things. I-banks are great sorters, the closest thing a business can be to “the invisible hand.” They are capital markets.
Lawyers, lobbyists and their ilk are almost entirely rent-seekers, people who basically create a problem (complex legal codes) and then offer to solve it (by making sure everyone has a translator, which is all a laywer ends up being).
Clearly, there is some number of lawyers, L, which represents an optimum from the standpoint of the overall economy. It isn’t zero, because then there would be no one to draft and adjudicate contracts, conduct criminal proceedings, etc, but it isn’t 10 million, either.
My sense is that the number of lawyers is now considerably greater than L, and thus each incremental lawyer graduated represents a reduction in overall national productivity.
Interesting blog… There are many valid points so far, and a few that “just don’t get it”. I was self employed for more than 20 years (“knowledge worker”), and now work for a fortune 500. I’m miserable, but it pays the bills (for now). The lady I date worked for a 500, but is now self employed (downsized)… She manufactures a product in China that her and her partner (also downsized) invented., has had lots of bogus “cease and desist” letters over trivial things, like a slogoan… One letter from a law firm claimed that they “owned all uses of the word groovy, followed by any noun”… ridiculous, but you have to spend money to fight it. Which for a 2 person start up, learning the ropes of business, was impossible for her and her partner. She chose to drop the slogan rather than go to litigation… which is very, very common. She has a stack of letters from lawyers all over the US similar to that. Try to start a company that actually does something & it’s an uphill battle…. They’re succeeding, they have more customers reselling their product every day, but it’s been a valuable learning experience for the two of them.