[burgers]

You may want to read what I wrote one more time. I did not say that those outside of finance deal with lack of food, safety and health. I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.

So it just seems obvious that if you don't want to deal with these punishments for finding yourself with less money than 50 to 60 percent of the population, you would go into finance as it gives you the best chances of having more money than most and therefore dealing with less, if any, of the punishments US society hands out for having less money than others.

[afafsd]

>I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.

So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?

[burgers]

Well, if you read the article, you would have read about two students, 1 went to Dartmouth and the other went to Yale. The former worked at a bar, if I remember correctly and the latter worked at the airport. Neither graduated with economic degrees. ;)

All jokes aside, indeed when you live in a country that hands our very severe punishments(just look up the murder rate in less expensive neighborhoods etc) for having less money than someone else. Real estate is directly tied to the amount of money you have compared to others so could explain how that analogy is that far off?

If someone lived in New York City, they might have to trade quite a bit of safety in neighborhood for having a less profitable degree than someone who graduated with an economics degree. So indeed US society hands out a weighted lottery about getting murdered based upon how much money you make, even at middle class levels.

[j2kun]

Being a graduate student who is paid just under the living wage for the city I live in, I probably have less money than you. In fact, I probably have less money than 60 percent of the population.

I am not more likely than you to be assaulted, killed, or go hungry. Here is a more extreme example to show how misguided your statement is: a millionaire has less money than a billionaire, but that does not imply the millionaire is more likely to deal with being assaulted or killed or going hungry either.

You should really go reevaluate what you think you know about finance and how money affects life. Go read some papers about how money changes quality of life, and you'll see that above a certain (relatively small) threshold, more money doesn't make much of a difference. There is certainly no "aggressive" punishment for deciding to have a lucrative career in, say, medicine, as opposed to having a more lucrative career in finance.