Society’s Smartest People are in the Wrong Jobs

Our best and brightest should be in professions taking humanity to the next level

Credit: www_slon_pics via Pixabay

In any normally distributed population — you have some people who are smarter than the rest.

In our society, we also have a number of large problems (such as cancer, climate change, population growth, urban planning, etc), and scientific frontiers (like space travel, age reversal, and so on). Tackling these will take humanity to the next level.

The problem is — not all of our smartest people are working on tackling these challenges. This is due to the misallocation and underutilisation of these brilliant minds.

• Misallocation: A great many of our quickest minds and hardest workers are in professions like Investment Banking. These are professions that do not materially improve our quality of life or impact society. What our world would look like if these people instead worked for NASA or on harnessing the power of fusion, or making synthetic meats, or politics?
• Underutilisation: In many countries, becoming a Doctor is a highly competitive process. In Australia (NSW) for example — only ~0.3% of those completing high school are accepted straight into med-school. That’s 3 out of every 1,000 people. Surely such brilliant minds can be…