Read the article here.
Here is the juicy first paragraph:
Country club dues, gym memberships and personal assistants. Home security systems, chauffeur service and parking. And, of course, all those private jets to ensure the comfort and safety of the boss.
ERGGGG. I need a personal assistant. And I don’t even use the gym at the school where I work, because faculty and staff must pay a hefty fee, almost equal to the cost of local gyms.
And another juicy tidbit here.
[Note: when I click on the links they don't work; so you may have to copy/paste. Help!
Edit: Links should be working now.]
There may well be a slippage in the appeal of Wall Street careers as the pay differential with other professions declines. Over the years, for example, there was a big increase in the percentage of graduates of Harvard who went into finance. Two Harvard economists, Lawrence F. Katz and Claudia Goldin, studied the career choices of undergraduates since the 1960s, finding that the share entering banking and finance rose from less than 4 percent to 23 percent or so in recent years.
Surveying graduates from the 1960s through the 1990s, they found that Harvard graduates who chose careers in finance made three times the pay of their peers, adjusting for grade-point averages and test scores.
“We see a huge shift into finance over the years, and Harvard students clearly respond to economic incentives,” Mr. Katz said. “I certainly don’t think it was a pure love of finance that drove people into the field.”
When I reported the gist of this to Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar, who was sitting in a comfy chair reading Thoreau for a course, he said, “Oh, I guess maybe people go to Harvard out of career ambition rather than out of intellectual interests.”
Do you agree with that?
And what do you think, dear readers, about all the finance in the news? Should we just tune out? Or go “Ergghhh.”
And, really, we're so lucky to be able to sit in comfy chairs and read wonderful books as part of our job.
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