In a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.
And it's not just the money. For ambitious kids, it's a fear of hitting artificial limits on career progression. Working your way up in a corporation isn't a common career trajectory anymore. Instead, companies hire executives from a particular track, which starts with an Ivy-league school, involves a stint at an investment bank or consulting firm, perhaps an Ivy-league MBA, and from then forward a series of management and executive positions.
The tech industry is somewhat of an exception to this rule, but only somewhat. Elon Musk has a bachelors degree in Economics from Penn's Wharton School (in addition to his degree in Physics); Peter Thiel majored in Philosophy at Stanford, and so went to law school like the other English/Philosophy majors, and then did a stint in investment banking.
And even in entrepreneurship, you'll spend a lot of your time pitching VC's, and guess what's the easiest way to become a VC: Ivy-league, stint at an investment bank or consulting company, then an MBA. If you as an entrepreneur have that same background, that removes one level of insulation between you and the people you need to fund your company.
Considering all of these things, if you're smart enough to get into an Ivy-leaguge school, why wouldn't you major in economics?
This aspect of finance, the difficulty of getting into the field later on in one's career, is a major reason why so many Ivy-leaugers pursue it right out of school.
(Also I don't think jumping from super-elite-law to finance is particularly difficult, it seems pretty common).
So it just seems obvious that if you don't want to deal with these punishments for finding yourself with less money than 50 to 60 percent of the population, you would go into finance as it gives you the best chances of having more money than most and therefore dealing with less, if any, of the punishments US society hands out for having less money than others.
So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?
All jokes aside, indeed when you live in a country that hands our very severe punishments(just look up the murder rate in less expensive neighborhoods etc) for having less money than someone else. Real estate is directly tied to the amount of money you have compared to others so could explain how that analogy is that far off?
If someone lived in New York City, they might have to trade quite a bit of safety in neighborhood for having a less profitable degree than someone who graduated with an economics degree. So indeed US society hands out a weighted lottery about getting murdered based upon how much money you make, even at middle class levels.
I am not more likely than you to be assaulted, killed, or go hungry. Here is a more extreme example to show how misguided your statement is: a millionaire has less money than a billionaire, but that does not imply the millionaire is more likely to deal with being assaulted or killed or going hungry either.
You should really go reevaluate what you think you know about finance and how money affects life. Go read some papers about how money changes quality of life, and you'll see that above a certain (relatively small) threshold, more money doesn't make much of a difference. There is certainly no "aggressive" punishment for deciding to have a lucrative career in, say, medicine, as opposed to having a more lucrative career in finance.
http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone...
And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-20/goldman-sachs-said-...
People with kids need to pay $1000/month for day care in the NYC area. The price for an average 3 bedroom home that's commutable to NYC has to be over $500,000.
Yes, $72k/year will go a long way in Alaska.
It looks like melling is using Alaska as an example of a cheap place; somewhere your dollar goes farther. If you look at the "Real Value of $100" maps you see floating around[0] you'll see it is not a particularly cheap state. It might be cheaper than New York City, but I'm not at all sure it's cheaper than New York State. In fact, New York looks like it has a median income of 53k, so plenty of New Yorkers scrimp by on $72k. Based purely on maximizing the difference between their income and their neighbors, the hypothetical indie dev should go to Mississippi.
I think looking at the cost of living in a state is a better guide than median income. This cost of living chart[2] says that the cheapest states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana, whereas the most expensive states are Hawaii, DC, New York, Alaska (ha!), and New Jersey. Based purely on minimizing their cost of living, the hypothetical indie dev should still go to Mississippi.
I am a little surprised to see that the median income of New York is so low compared to its cost of living, so a New Yorker, on average, might be better off moving to Alaska, but not by as much as some other state, I'd wager.
My surprise got me thinking, so I did a tiny bit of excel analysis, where I normalized median wages[0] based on the value of a dollar data[1], then sorted states based on normalized median wage / cost of living[2]. Utah, Nebraska, Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming are the top 5 with that ratio, while Hawaii, New York, DC, California and Oregon (Oregon pips Alaska here, by one rank, but my point stands, Alaska is many things, but cheap isn't one of them) are the bottom 5. I think that maps roughly with my intuition that big coastal places are sort of expensive for their average salaries and that boring, but not poor places are cheap for their salaries. I'm not sure this is relevant to the indie dev who doesn't have an employer, but for those of us who work in the flesh, I guess we should go to Utah?
[0] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/ [1] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each-state [2] http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ind...
If a company is going to have remote workers, they need a culture of supporting remote workers, and they need to be writing things down a lot more, which does have it's own overhead compared to talking to someone beside you.
As peoplesoft said, when you add more programmers to a project, you increase communication overhead. Working in the same office probably has something to do with that overhead.
Also you want to make more than $72k/yr (which is about $120-150k pre-tax btw) on a savings and investment aspect. And to fund projects that matter to you.
Good software is more expensive than you seem to think.
> [megacorps] are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software
That may be true. Or not. It's a big assertion. Lots of projects are more efficient if they have a stable set of maintainers. Could you swap out Linus and his lieutenants in favor of swarms of freelancers and still produce quality Linux kernels? I doubt it.
This whole line of thought (why firms and not markets?) is a branch of economics. If you haven't, read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.
"According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm."
That seems plausible to me. If we're truly interested in deprecating megacorps, we should reduce transaction costs for laypeople, including by making rules, regulations, and laws easier to grok if they are needed at all.
Finance will continue to grow as the preferred choice of those who want to avoid being punished by US society and forced live in Alaska or not have enough to eat or a safe place to live.
user: burgers created: 8 days ago karma: 91
Have fun. I'm outta here...
Because one of them involves the choice between the gulag and death and the other involves the choice between being a poverty-stricken artist and anything else you might decide to do once you get over your art and quit.
14,000+ people were murdered in the US. Many of those people died simply because they had a low enough ratio of money to others to force them to live in a dangerous place. Not because of any other reason than having less money that others.