A lot of smart people are working minimum wage jobs and dying on the streets
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
— Stephen Jay Gould
Thank you, it was this quote that i was thinking of when writing the title.
I forgot what it was and who wrote it.
Makes me wonder though: is inherent talent what makes a human valuable?
Finance and the Misallocation of Scientific, Engineering and Mathematical Talent
The US financial sector has become a magnet for the brightest graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematical fields (STEM). We provide quantitative bases for this well-known fact and illustrate its consequences for the productivity growth in other sectors over the period 1980-2014. First, we find that the share of STEM talents grew significantly faster in finance than in other key STEM sectors such as high-tech, and this divergent pattern has been more evident for STEM than for general skills and more pronounced for investment banking. Second, this trend did not reverse after the Great Recession, and a persistent wage premium is found for STEM graduates working in finance and especially in typical financial jobs at the top of the wage distribution. Third, the brain drain of STEM talents into finance has been associated with a cumulative loss of labor productivity growth of 6.6% in the manufacturing sectors. Our results suggest that increasing the number of STEM graduates may not be enough to reignite sluggish economic growth without making their employment in finance more costly.
If we collectively pay for open source software development it will have a massive impact on productivity. It's just good economics but doesn't help any group specifically.
They obviously weren't smart enough to be born in a rich family. Failed when they choose a bad spawn point.
Somewhere out there right now, is a kid with the potential to cure cancer. But that potential will never be realised because he cant afford the education and worse, doesnt have the contacts to get into the right research group to make that discovery.
America is one of the dumbest nations on Earth. Its got all this money, all these brilliant institutions of education. And yet doent consider that investing in its youths development, is the best way to take the nation into the future and beyond, because it would rather make a quick buck off the few that can afford it.
Demographics dictate policy in a democracy.
If elderly folk outnumber the young, government policy and elected officials will focus on their needs preferentially.
It's a fundamental issue that has yet to be meaningfully addressed.
I had about three novels ready to start editing and working on in my younger years, sweeping epics, and I had ideas about time and space and started taking college courses towards a physics degree.
All of that went on hold for so long that when the last big financial crash happened after the housing bubble popped, I've been treading water ever since, and sinking a few times, until I am now ragged, worn out and every day is just a mental exercise of if I am making enough money at a job that should be paying salary to afford to pay off debts so I can prepare to charge inevitable major medical expenses to my credit cards if I have to.
Writing? Learning and contributing to the world? Fuck no. I will be LUCKY at this point if I have a job when I hit 68 or whatever the retirement age is now, that doesn't require manual labor. I don't have any inspiration or drive to write fiction, I have lost most of my passion for actually learning physics and just catch the latest discoveries on youtube as I literally fall asleep.
The constant pressures of staying above water have turned me from an active participant in the world, to someone who will likely disappear without more than another couple people in the whole world knowing what was going on in my mind.
If it helps at all, you are not alone in this. I'm probably a bit older since I'm already at the retirement planning stage, but I feel the same about the lost opportunities thanks to circumstances (some my own making, but most just because of life). I'm just hoping that I can retire early and recapture a percentage of what I used to have in enjoyment, learning, and creativity while I have some of my brain left. Right now I have rare fleeting sparks, but usually I'm just too tired.
And that last line... realistically almost all people that have lived have experienced lives rich with experiences, good and bad, all lost to time, but it's still tough to understand that from your own pov. Cue Pink Floyd's "Time". Try to enjoy what you can of the now.
the extra fucked part is once you learn how the financial markets actually work underneath...the boom and bust cycles are 100% deliberate, simply because the US's business-captured federal government refuses to properly regulate anything
Feel this one in my soul
Literally me, in a first world nation struggling to keep afloat.
This applies to every single economic strategy and if anything capitalism is less faulty in this regard. My grandma used to pack scalding hot candy in wrappers 12 hours a day in soviet union and had nothing to her name, I'm sure she'd take tweaking mattress ad algorithms over that any time of the day.
The existence of failed communist states does not absolve capitalism of its faults.
It does not but it proves that this issue is not unique to capitalism or even caused by capitalism as OP implies
Ok Ayn Rand
How does that have anything to do with Ayn Rand? You are completely clueless my dude
I'm going to say that scientific advancement in the past few hundred years has been a generally bad thing. It has made many peoples' lives better but it has caused a human population explosion and is rapidly destroying the environment. I guess future generations will see how this all pans out but I wonder if 1950-2100 will have been the golden era of human civilization.