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Comment by nluken | Hacker News Reader

A PhD isn't like a MBA which is meant mostly for the credential and associated pay bump. It's a research degree that you get if you want to work in academia or in a private research lab. If you're evaluating it purely by its economic value, of course it's not going to make sense, but that assessment misses why people pursue these degrees in the first place.

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It also dismisses the effect it has on society entirely. In a sane world, we would enable anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in hopes in advancing things like medical science or our understanding of the world. The fact that people really can only care about the economic value education can bring, and the fact we all act like that's normal, is very radicalizing to me.

I disagree. More people have a desire to advance our understanding than have the ability to advance our understanding.

True, but like the VC model with companies, it's very difficult to consistently identify those people in advance. Invest in a load of qualified, promising individuals and hope more than a few "hit".

The desire to do something and understand something is the root of everything, and who are to preemptively decide who has that capability? What a pompous thing to say. On top of that you are operating on the assumption that it matters. If someone wants to learn, they should be able to learn. I guarantee you that we as a society have stifled people who would be this generations Einstein so to speak.

Insufficient patent office jobs?

The money stifles. There's not enough money for everyone who wants a Very Large Array of their own. People don't have money to sit around thinking all day. There needs to be some system of deciding priority. The profit incentive is the only reason any science dependent on HPC and GPUs is possible. If you want more science, you need more economic growth.

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