A few expert commentators have been in a huff lately about the choices being made by the best and brightest young Americans, and the uses to which their skills are being put. They’re worried about a problem that’s sometimes called “internal brain drain,” where the best minds are unavailable to do the most important work even when they stay close to home.

They have a point, but I think they need to look at the bigger picture.

First, late last month, there was the TechCrunch essay by Vivek Wadhwa, the entrepreneur-turned-academic-thought-leader. In Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance, Wadhwa expressed dismay that so many of his best engineering students (at Duke, where he has a visiting appointment) were entering finance and management consulting instead of pursuing careers as engineers. It’s an easy choice, he admits, when Goldman Sachs is offering twice as much as the engineering companies.



Wadhwa

argues in his essay that the smart young scientists and engineers who

enter finance and related fields are being badly misused. Wadhwa thinks

they’re needed to start up new technology companies.

The loss of

this talent into finance is, Wadhwa argues, a huge drain of critical

human resources, which he lays claim to on behalf of the nation that has

invested in them:

“…not only are the investment banks

siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with

financial gimmicks like [collateralized debt obligations]; they are

using our best engineering graduates to help them do it. This is the

talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.”

Paul Kedrosky, author of a report

cited by Wadhwa, coins the phrase

“economic ebola” to describe “the virus that infects scientists and

engineers

and causes them to go to Wall Street rather than create something of

societal value.” Kedrosky “wants to become an ‘economic virus hunter.”

That ambition earns him Wadhwa’s full support:

“Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of

medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways [of] sustaining the

environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.”

Then, last week, technology writer Ashlee Vance bemoaned the great young talent being swallowed up by Facebook and other social-networking companies. Vance argues that when the social-networking tech

bubble bursts — which he believes it will, soon enough — those newly

bereft social-networking experts — Wadhwa’s engineering graduates and

their equivalent, a few years on — won’t have the expertise needed to

do the more important work that needs doing.

Vance tells the

story of Jeff Hammerbacher, a young math whiz from Harvard who was among

those lured to Wall Street, joining Bear Stearns soon after graduating.

But he didn’t stay on Wall Street long; before his first year was out,

he contacted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, a Harvard acquaintance,

and took a job at Facebook. After a couple of years there, he got

restless again, Vance reports:

“Hammerbacher looked

around Silicon Valley at companies like his own,

Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. ‘The best

minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,’

he says. ‘That sucks.”

He should have said that “some”

or “many” of the best minds, since science still gets a share of those

best minds — but his essential point is still correct. “If instead of

pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads,”

Hammerbacher says, “they pointed it at great unsolved problems in

science, how would the world be different today?”

After leaving Facebook, Hammerbacher started up a company — Cloudera

— to address one of those big problems: managing and analyzing huge

quantities of data in genomics and other fields. “It won’t be old school

biologists that drive the next leaps in pharma,” says Eric Schadt, the

chief science officer at Pacific Biosciences, quoted in Vance’s article.

“‘It will be guys like Jeff who understand what to do with big data.”

Let

us agree that, as Wadhwa and Vance both argue, we need to find a way of

getting more of these people to do what Hammerbacher is doing, embark

on careers doing foundational work in science, engineering, technology,

and translation instead of — um, instead of what? Instead of accepting a

good job when one is offered?

As Wadhwa and Vance apparently

see it, the problem is that these other sectors — finance and social

networking — offer opportunity disproportionate to their social value.

They pay too much for doing non-essential work. They suck the talent

away from where it naturally belongs and is most needed. I can see why a

CEO — or a former CEO like Wadhwa — would see things this way. His

goal is to staff a company without burning through his startup funds too

fast. My goal, as one who cares deeply about science and science

careers, is a bit different.

I don’t think that hoping for

bubbles to burst and opportunity to dry up is a sound approach to this

very serious problem, for reasons both fundamental and practical. The

most important is this: It won’t work. The very best people will always

be in demand somewhere. If jobs at Facebook vanish, these excellent

people will find other promising opportunities. In making their career

choices, they will act as Hammerbacher did: they’ll consider the

interests of society in making these choices, but they’ll also consider

their own — and their families’ — personal interests, as we all would.

The more we ask them to sacrifice to do foundational work, the fewer of

them will make that choice.

Yes, it is true, as Wadhwa seems to

assume, that brilliant folks with limited career opportunities will

sometime start companies. But usually (no, not always) it takes time to

acquire the skill and knowledge to do that well; meanwhile, many are

drifting off to join the latest flavor-of-the-month career track.

The

only way to keep them from drifting is to make them comfortable at home.

Making those other careers less attractive won’t work. We have to make

these careers — careers in foundational science and technology — more attractive. It isn’t just the money; indeed, I don’t think it’s mainly

the money. What matters most is the sacrifice of professional and

personal security. People shouldn’t have to pay such a high price for

the opportunity to serve society.

Jim Austin tweets as @SciCareerEditor