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A black hole for our best and brightest | The Washington Post

Teaching within a top-ranked business school associated with nine Nobel laureates in economics, I am honored to meet some of the brightest young minds in the world. These students excel at math, as one might expect, and many also pursue second degrees or minors in additional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. At our institution, economics is paired with statistics by default, as we emphasize quantitative economics over the philosophical approaches to the field. Although I admire these students, I'm also saddened that so many chase financial industry careers over working in other STEM fields or in the public sector. These great minds set forth to turn money into more money, when they might use their skills to apply the lessons of economics and statistics to greater social good. As Washington Post reporter Jim Tankersley writes, it isn't that finance is a "good" or "bad" pursuit for an individual — but in the last two decades finan