A Stitch in Haste

Some malcontents are lamenting the fact that Harvard graduates are actually finding jobs:

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

"Is this what a Harvard education is for?" asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. "Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?"
...
As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, "A lot of students have been asking the question: 'We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we're leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?'"

Why is this? I can think of two interrelated reasons: (1) You grew up, and (2) in doing so, you came to learn that it is in fact investment bankers who change the world -- by making entrepreneurship, innovation, reallocation of scarce resources, and all the other real engines of change in the world possible. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day ... underwrite the IPO of his fish farm and you feed the world for years (and save the oceans in the process).

The article is accompanied by an audio slide show profiling several Harvard students, many of whom are going into the dreaded dark pit of "hedge fund or management consulting," contrasted by a student who is taking a year off before medical school to do good works in Brazil "on a fellowship with a $16,000 stipend."

I suppose the point of that bullet text is to verify the student's moral superiority by earning "only" $16,000 while doing good works -- unlike his peers who will make far more yet will "squander" their Ivy League education on the "banalities" of Wall Street and State Street.

Left undisclosed, meanwhile, is exactly where that fellowship with the $16,000 stipend came from. But we already know where: Either privately from wealthy benefactors or publicly from wealthy taxpayers. Either way, the productive pettiness of others is precisely what makes the warm-fuzzy-feeling idealism of the do-gooders possible. You need money to give money.

There is nothing "wasteful" about being productive -- which is what being materially successful means. There is nothing "lofty" about relying on the kindness of the productive to make your "higher" pursuits possible.

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A post script:

In his commencement speech last month at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voiced a similar theme when he sounded an impassioned call to public service, and warned that the pursuit of narrow self-interest -- "the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition."

"Public service" -- on the backs of those who make it possible via their "poverty of ambition." Makes you wonder why, if the rich are actually so poor, Obama is so eager to impoverish them even more via his increasingly hostile tax rhetoric.

Or perhaps you prefer John McCain's "all lives are a struggle against selfishness" flavor of anti-"pettiness":

Success, wealth, celebrity gained and kept for private interest -- these are small things.

Only to small minds.