My sense is that the number of lawyers is now considerably greater than L, and thus each incremental lawyer graduated represents a reduction in overall national productivity.

But these are the people who are basically the allocators of financial fuel to companies that make things. I-banks are great sorters, the closest thing a business can be to “the invisible hand.” They are capital markets.

Lawyers, lobbyists and their ilk are almost entirely rent-seekers, people who basically create a problem (complex legal codes) and then offer to solve it (by making sure everyone has a translator, which is all a laywer ends up being).

Entrepreneuship involves uncertainty, failures, volatility and pain. Courting disaster, at the bleeding edge of a market or technology, is best done when you have nothing to loose. When you have no choice.

Ivy league graduates have lots of choices, plus education loans; you won’t find many in a startup, the souce of GDP growth.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819
SURVEY: THE NEAR FUTURE
The new workforce
Nov 1st 2001
From The Economist print edition
Knowledge workers are the new capitalists
(…) Factory workers still account for the majority of the manual workers, but their share of the total workforce is down to around 15%—more or less back to what it had been 100 years earlier.
Of all the big developed countries, America now has the smallest proportion of factory workers in its labour force.
(…)

Peter Drucker in the same series of articles:
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SSDRGT
(…)
In 1960, manufacturing was the centre of the American economy, and of the economies of all other developed countries. By 2000, as a contributor to GDP it was easily outranked by the financial sector .
The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods (what economists call the terms of trade) has fallen by three-quarters in the past 40 years. Whereas manufacturing prices, adjusted for inflation, are down by 40%, the prices of the two main knowledge products, health care and education, have risen about three times as fast as inflation. In 2000, therefore, it took five times as many units of manufactured goods to buy the main knowledge products as it had done 40 years earlier.
(…)

Looking at these developments it`s not too hard to see, why demand and wages for some engineers are falling. Production and much of it`s engineering are going to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, India, Mexico, Brazil.

Michael, germany

You have a point, at least if that Fortune 500 company actually makes anything. My view is biassed because the only big businesses I work for are those that do nothing but shuffle money around between rich people, skimming off some of it to fill their own coffers and pay their employees and as little as possible of it to the goverment as taxes. These businesses are otherwise know as “investment banks”.

Same thing at Stanford. I just attended a talk on next generation non volatile memory technology. The only non-asian there was the speaker and one very old person in the back. Everyone else was asian or from another country.

Then I go to the law school. Few asians, all american born citizens.

We lost it. I think it’s because of the lousy management. It’s hard to get smart people to work for our current generation CEOs who really don’t succeed because of their passion for technology development AND unwavering ETHICS. Grove, Gates,Brin/Page,Yang/Filo and many others excepted.

Smart people can innovate given the right environment but smart people can also see corrupt leadership and will stay away. I would do the same thing if I were 20. Go to law school/med school and stay away from the CEOs of 90% of the internet startups who want you to program up a webpage and make the company an instant success. It doesn’t work that way; managing by the latest trend.

Look at all the search engine startups or social networking startups. Look CLOSELY at the leadership, not the resume of where they worked — but what they are like as human beings. The majority are not there to make the world a better place through sacrifice, hard work and total dedication to doing things the right way over the next 20 years.

If you look closely at their behavior they do not donate regularly or do things for others that reflect what they say. They are in for the quick buck.