The finance industry has attracted a big number of highly educated people to work in a low-productivity, high-destruction field. In trying to mimic science by applying things like “quantitative forecasting models”, among other bullshit stuff, top university graduates thought that they were doing sophisticated work. I guess we all know by now what they were actually doing!
I believe that our prosperity depends on ethics, science, and productivity. Corporations and media have been lip servicing about “maximizing value for shareholders”, “knowledge based economy”, and “outsourcing.”
If ethics conflicts with profit, ethics should come first. That’s for sure wasn’t the case when “toxic debts” were packaged and sold to people.
It also seems that the term “knowledge based economy” meant that financiers, instead of engineers, are the basis of this knowledge. In that case, it should’ve been labeled “liars based economy”!
I know that business gurus preached us a lot about outsourcing, but the fact is we are losing jobs to China. We now make the designs and they manufacture the products. You don’t need to be a genius to “forecast” that they will do both things very soon.
Let’s be careful with the media.Most “experts” won’t say that we need to change our broken system and those responsible of it, because it’s risky for their career to say so. They deceived us before during the internet and real estate bubbles. And they will continue to do so.
Let’s also be careful with our mindsets. They taught us that the current system gives us freedom and the chance to be rich. But we got high unemployment rate; high insecurity among the working class; and panic among the retiring segment.
We really need to change this situation. I think that Occupy Wall Street is a good try to move people and say “enough is enough”. Let’s see how it goes …
Minds Cluster 
Picking up on your first topic, I am sad when I think about science as it’s conducted today in both universities and business and the government. There’s nothing high-minded about the system. University professors are grant administrators who need to bring in research dollars. They can only get these from business and the government. Business is solely concerned with profit, and the government almost solely with military matters. Until maybe the last 100 years, science was entirely the province of the elite. It was also rudimentary. University departments, especially in the U.S., are extremely focused on entrepreneurial matters. In other words, I doubt any young mathematicians and computer scientists going to Wall Street have illusions about what they’ll be doing.