Obama gave a long speech on economy in Georgetown university. Here is an interesting excerpt:
And, by the way, one of the changes that I would like to see and I’m going to be talking about in weeks to come is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things. Engineers, scientists, innovators.
For so long, we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations. And that’s good. We need some of that. But you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things that we can export to other countries.
It reminds me an anecdote that happened a year, more or less, before finishing my Ph.D., I was approached by a hedge fund from Philadelphia with a tempting offer – to earn about three times the money I will ever make. They were not interested in any training in economics. Actually, they did not accept people with trading or business management training. They were only interested in “pure” mathematical training in order to design models for derivatives and god knows what. It struck me as a bad omen. If hedge funds are making money with no fundamental knowledge in finance and economy, things will not go well in the long run. I hope that at least one good thing that may come out of this crisis, is that companies such as this hedge fund will not have the money to draw the brightest people from science to luftgesheft (a Yiddish word, roughly translated as “business from air”).
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