I'm getting tired of populist vilification of finance. We went through a bubble and too many resources were devoted to finance lately, just as too many resources were devoted to technology in the bubble of the late 90s. However, finance is not a "talent graveyard". It is "useless" only as your circulatory system is "useless" to the "real work" of your body's organs. Allocating resources to all available investments in society is valuable, which is what finance does. It creates value even if that value is less visible than the product of the coal mines that your grandpa used to work in.

I tend to look at it as an economic lubricant. It makes things run smoother, and as complexity increases things would break down if it wasn't there, but at the end of the day it is there to enable the parts of society that produce valuable things and ideas.

I agree that it is useful and its existence is desirable, but the problem is that it is often overshadowing the parts of society that it is supposed to be supporting. Because of this, it is drawing a disproportionate number of smart people who might otherwise be having a greater impact elsewhere.

I agree, but with a caveat:

The problem of "talent" migrating to lucrative fields is universal, but is not really a problem at all. I'm going to be graduating from college soon, and I've seen many of my peers look at Wall Street, law, and even medicine (I'm an engineer).

The people who do so, invariably, are hardly people I would consider top-talent. The people who take up code jobs at banks in the hope of one day becoming traders invariably can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. The people who are only after the money tend to also be the most incompetent. We're not losing that much when they all flock to the flavor-of-the-decade industry.

The hackers who really care about their work continue to work in their respective interests, rain or shine, and they're the ones who are advancing their fields in leaps and bounds. As long as we do not dis-incentivize these people (e.g. pay them a non-living wage) we're doing pretty ok.

I had a job offer from one of the major British banks for code, and I asked them how much real programming I could look forward to. My contact was honest and told me most of it would be front-end C# hackery, and I turned them down. I don't care if you pay me $200K a year, I'm going to hate my life if I hack C# GUI day in and day out.

Some might dispute the idea that finance is dead.

Although lawyers, with their TPS reports and infinite memos, drive me absolutely nuts; they are necessary. While they don't create wealth, they allow others to do so.

I agree major reforms are needed, but they certainly provide some value.

You need enough medical people to take care of people who are sick, enough lawyers to keep the legal system running efficiently, and enough financial people to make good decisions about the allocation of capital. You also need a few managers, to mention the most prominent elite profession. Most of these professions, however, are overloaded and have people in them who don't belong.

Having one profession attain the status of an elite caste leads to a lot of problems, including a sharp reduction of quality within that profession. People go into that profession with the wrong motivations, and a lot of the people who enter this elite profession don't have the necessary talent, but get put there as political favors (e.g. top-tier managers). Much of why managers have such a negative reputation is that most people in management really have no talent for it, but ended up there because executive positions pay well while expecting very little at minimum, and they were able to get these jobs.

Much of why finance and law suck up so much talent, though, has to do with risk-aversion. A person only has one life, and an assured upper-middle-class lifestyle is more appealing than a 1/5 chance of becoming very wealthy and a 4/5 of faceplanting and having to enter a traditional track at 30. There's more expectancy in starting a company than in going to law school, but expectancy is meaningless, given human mortality.

If I had the ultimate power, here's the program I would found in order to take at least the long-term risk out of startups and encourage bright young people to form companies: career mentoring, 3-5 hours per week, from a VC. The "trainee"/protege works for, and eventually may found, startups. He operates "on the market"-- the program wouldn't guarantee any funding or line up particular jobs, though it might provide assistance and advice-- and is therefore fully responsible for his own job search and funding. After 12-14 years working in startups (some successful, some failed) he gets a job in VC, if he wants it (he might be doing something more interesting).

This removes the long-term career risk from founding startups and makes "serial entrepreneur" a viable career rather than a pipe dream. While one might argue that the guaranteed exit would lead to people being less hungry, most young hackers would much rather found successful companies than end up in business in any context, even as VCs.