Best Students?

I really enjoyed Stiglitz's Freefall and found it very persuasive about the causes and cures of the current economic mess and its associated political skulduggery. I do, however, want to take major issue with one minor aspect of his argument.  On page 276 (paperback) he writes that he "saw too many of our best students going into finance" and laments that [w]hen [he] was an undergraduate the best students went into science, teaching, the humanities, or medicine." Given that the majority of his text is an indictment of these "best students" ability to act in their own best interests, to say nothing of the common good, and his dissection of the greed, stupidity, cupidity, lack of foresight, insight, or any sight that led to the crises, it's difficult to figure out what he means by "best students."   The self denominated Fabulous Faz isn't really what I would call, for all of his Stanford education, an example of the best America's higher education has to offer.

This characterization of the crooks and liars who created the mess that is now being exploited by dolts like Walker to further ruin everyone else's life, actually makes fixing things harder as it tends to ratify the dangerous notion that Lloyd Blankfein's nonsense about doing God's work or the inflated sense of self worth of nearly everyone involved in causing the catastrophe. As this manifesto makes clear, after having failed miserably the miserable failures still think that are John Galt.

It is also the case that lots of people went into the non-financial sector and did really important work and none of them, so far as I know, undertook to destroy the international economy in the bizarre belief that society exists to improve their personal bottom line.  Sure some of the so-called quants may well have been able to do something else but they lacked one personal quality that, for me -- in any event, attaches necessarily to the modifier "best": an interest in creating a better society.

My claim would be that the best students continued to go into the traditional fields in the rather sane hope that they would leave the world better than they found it while earning enough to come home to a the refreshing beverage of their choice and significant other.