This article, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance”, appear in my STEM-centric twitter stream. It talks about the damage that the finance industry is doing to America by its recruitment of STEM talent from graduate programs. Citing the authors of a report from the Kauffman Foundation, the author says</p>

Paul Kedrosky says that the virus that infects scientists and engineers and causes them to go to Wall Street rather than create something of societal value is “economic Ebola”. He wants to be an “economic virus hunter”. Let’s all help him. Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources,and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.

Read the article. Express your opinion on this to someone, like a Senator, or Congressperson, or me.

Update: Beware the TechCrunchism in Vivek Wadhwa article. Neither of the authors (Pedrosky or Stangler) mention “economic Ebola” or being “economic virus hunters.” The analogy to illness is Wadhwa’s alone. The Kauffman Foundation article is very fair, even, and thought provoking. See my follow-up post on the report itself.