Interesting thought piece about the recession and how Wall Street’s brain drain over the past 50 years since women’s rights were improved and the lucrative financial industry encouraged people not to enter the teaching profession may now be over. As a result of the lay-offs from the financial world, and indeed the re-assessment that current economics students will have to make, we might see a “giving back” to society, a return to the teaching professions and the like:
Like them or not, the men and women who’ve gone into finance in the past 10 or 20 years have certainly been among our best and brightest. They are super-well-educated and work incredibly hard, with intense focus. In economic terms, these people represent a huge stockpile of human capital — and now, some 200,000 or so of them are losing their jobs…
…Now where are they going to go? What are they going to do?
I can think of a lot of… fields that stand to benefit from all the human capital that is currently sloshing out of finance and into other realms: technology in general, energy in particular, and alternative energy in super-particular; health care; research science; and, yes, education
Have a read of the full article on the Freakonomics blog.
One Comment
shit, and i thought my job was safe (as in secure).
hackney teacher.