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Comment by sxg | Hacker News Reader

How is it that society is preferentially allocating resources to creating lawyers rather than engineers or researchers? It seems to me that people chose to become lawyers, engineers, or researchers of their own free will. Sure, many researchers are government funded, so you could draw more people to that field with more resources, but I'm not seeing how society is pushing people into law over engineering at least.

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“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”

> How is it that society is preferentially allocating resources to creating lawyers rather than engineers or researchers?

money.

Like another commenter suggested, money. These professions are generally rather high paying and come with quite a bit of prestige. "Lawyer" is listed up there with doctor with the stereotypical aspirational jobs.

Sure, I guess I’m conflating society with government. Yeah, doctors and lawyers make more money than other professions, but those incomes are a result of innumerable positive and negative incentives (eg, cost of education, opportunity cost of education, work/life balance, “meaningfulness”). It seems nearly impossible to intentionally modify those incentives in a specific direction without causing unintended consequences elsewhere.

Example: society wants more quality teachers, so society chooses to increase the federal education budget to increase teacher salaries. Consequently, more highly educated people choose to become teachers, however, this unintentionally exacerbates the doctor shortage and further increases corporate lawyer salaries due to decreased supply of lawyers.

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