> The upshot is that many of the country’s best and brightest are either exerting their talents trying to beat each other out in a zero-sum trading game, or exploiting legal and behavioral loopholes to part investors from their money.

A lot fo these graduates make a lot of money this way, and I don't blame people who do it--but it does feel like a waste of talent and expertise.

That said, society has decided that teaching is worthless.

No one says that out loud. But it's 100% what we have decided as a society. That decision has been in place since I was in school in the 90s. Its spanned administrations, economic conditions, booms and busts.

If we gave a shit about education, we'd fund it. But we don't. Everyone agrees its vitally important, until it's time to pay 1% more tax so a school can have a working fire alarm.

I feel like the author is blaming macdonalds employees for the fact no one is ordering salad. But on a national scale. Why not just be honest and say it: people want Ez credit and low taxes and if their kids come home with lead poisoning from the school paint, they're OK with that. We'll, not ok with it, but not willing to pay a dime to prevent it...

Its not Harvards fault or the fault of the "best and brightest" that we don't want the things we're meant to want.

Expecting the best and brightest to throw their lives away and work shitty jobs because it would be nice is pretty fucking rich and cheap

as for teacher salary, someone with a bachelor's and no other certifications would start at around $50k in my (poor, east coast) city, which is roughly the median household income. this is not much less than tech startups will offer new CS grads in the area. city public school teachers can make over $100k by the end of their careers. certainly not enough to live like a king, but that puts them at about the 80th percentile for household income here. imo, that's pretty good for a public employee.

Conversely, they could spend a lot of money on fitness gadgets and instructors but never have the genuine motivation to get healthy and therefore fail despite the spending.

Does the same not apply to the things that individuals in society are collectively willing to spend money on? From this perspective you might describe Scandinavian countries as less neurotic, in that they willingly part with larger chunks of their income to go towards state-funded education and public services, and at the same time have a genuine conviction for the most part that this is healthy for society.

It's the citizenry that we deem worthless. That's why there's no money in public education.

But then of course, you're encouraging the exact thing the author objects to: private institutions for people who actually care (and have some cash to prove it)

For an outsider looking in at the US, it looks like they do not really value teachers (compared to professors) much. Not by the economic measure at least.

I would say just a limited number of software engineers work on projects that significantly benefit society.

Seriously, a computer-controlled toilet could be measurably more beneficial to society than most phone applications.

The application of AI to self-driving cars is way more meaningful than applying it (in a negative fashion) to purchasing preferences.

I suspect many people have a broader definition of "cost to society" than just "how much money the public purse has to give to someone".

I should disclose that I think the US has very little society, the US is very much about individuals alone or in small groups, not a society as a whole. That's another side of the point I make above. In Europe these institutions are overwhelmingly publically funded and part of a wider social fabric. In the US the opposite is true...

[0] Harsh and hyperbolic for effect, but it makes a point.

* Those smart kids could go to state institutions. But then we would need to fund those institutions so they could get a comparable education to the one they would get going to an elite university. And we have been cutting those very funds for decades (and increasing the amounts spent on sport stadiums instead of educational facilities). So that won't work.

* we could move them once they graduate from finance to socially useful professions like education. But then we'd have to pay teacher like we pay bankers and no one wants that. Everyone agrees education is important, but not important enough to fund teachers. Same for researchers or medics or social workers or defence attorneys.

People going into finance are making a rational informed choice that we encourage. If we really want less bankers and more teachers, we should pay for it. There are plenty of disillusioned finance workers who would come over (I am one of them), they just don't want to be charged for making the world a better place...

The same logic applies to his "meritocracy" soap box: if America was a meritocracy then... Oh wait it's not so why would I complete a sentence based on a false premis?

And that's without getting into whether we actually need more vaccines or whether HFT is useful even if you don't know why...