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<p>[America’s</a> ‘Brain Drain’: Best And Brightest College Grads Head For Wall Street](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>America's 'Brain Drain': Best And Brightest College Grads Head For Wall Street | HuffPost Impact)</p>
<p>Thumbs up sakky</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone contests that this happens regularly. The problem is… it’s a problem. It takes real dedication to pass on that kind of money, so it’s a shame that the prestigious science and engineering jobs don’t pay more or the finance jobs pay less.</p>
<p>Are these engineers people who studied finance/econ in school as well?</p>
<p>Imagine if we could have taken the taxpayer capital used to bail out the financial system - not just the $800 billion of TARP capital injections, but also the myriad emergency liquidity facilities opened by the Feds to firms such as AIG that weren’t even technically banks - and instead redirected all of it to basic academic science & engineering research funding? Not only would that have created boatloads of science and engineering jobs, but more importantly, would have spawned multitudes of science and engineering innovations. The Internet, the Human Genome Project, GPS, supercomputing, radar - such wondrous inventions were developed or greatly enhanced by government research funding. </p>
<p>What else could we have discovered had we directed greater taxpayer funding to R&D? We’ll never know because we gave that money to the finance industry.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t call finance an industry. In my mind, the term industry implies that that sector actually produces something for the economy rather than pulling money out of a hat.</p>