Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013, and reports news from late October 2013, weeks after Shiller’s Nobel. Vivek Wadhwa’s title and the Google projects mentioned, self-driving cars and floating wireless networks, are as of 2013.
Robert Shiller, the Nobel laureate, had earlier offered some good advice to young people and entrepreneurs, but his latest words at The Economist’s Buttonwood 2013 conference may well have stirred up controversy.
There are two factories of millionaires and powerful people in the world, currently Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Robert Shiller told graduates that if you have a moral purpose, you should work for Goldman Sachs rather than for Google.
Of course, to keep young people from twisting the message, the Nobel laureate briefly explained what he meant.
When you study finance and work in the financial sector, he said, what you are really doing is making things happen, on a large scale and in a lasting way. That, in his view, matters more than working at Google or a similar company and coding a few tricks.
Shiller also argued that every important human activity has to be financed. You can’t do good things for the world by yourself, he explained.
Clearly, Shiller is talking about the financial world “as it should be”, and probably not as it has behaved. Shiller is right when he says that great advances wouldn’t be possible without financial people behind them.
None of the breakthroughs at Google, Apple, Microsoft… are down to just a couple of geniuses alone. They also owe a lot to the people who put up private capital, to the financial markets and to the financial institutions that fund that work.
(Read: Entrepreneurs: chasing a dream)
On the other side of the microphone was Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University, who was clearly annoyed by Shiller’s words. He pointed to the good creations and projects Google is working on to improve the world (self-driving cars and floating wireless networks) and, likewise, to the trouble the financial system has got us into as it moves from bubble to bubble.
At one point, Wadhwa went as far as to say that he couldn’t believe he was having this debate with a Nobel Prize winner.
The debate wasn’t just heated live on stage: it kept people talking afterwards on social media, where many users were, to say the least, very annoyed by Shiller’s words. Even so, the Nobel laureate isn’t entirely wrong in what I imagine he really meant to say.
Further reading
- 10 leaders give advice to university students and entrepreneurs
- The best advice 9 successful business people ever received
Featured image: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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