Vivek Wadhwa posted re: Kedrosky and Stangler's Financialisation paper, complaining that finance firms were paying engineers too much.

The easiest solution is for Vivek to pay his engineers more. Since he doesn't want to do that, it's a national emergency. As for the Kedrosky report, it argues that engineers can be used to build new products, financial or otherwise; they don't gauge the utility of those products, they just assume that each additional engineer in finance will be less socially useful than additional non-finance engineers.

However, Kedrosky could make the same argument with poets. Clearly, the marginal social utility of another poet is zero or negative, whereas using that creativity to design new products would definitely improve our lives. Just think of how much money we lavish on subsidized Poetry education in our schools, not to mention that all great empires have produced too much Poetry just before their collapse.