Michio Kaku: We’re Born Scientists But Switch to Investment Banking (and More Culture Around the Web)

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100That’s the new book by theoretical physicist, best-selling author, and unabashed popularizer of science Michio Kaku. And, here’s one prediction he makes. The U.S. won’t play as prominent a role in science during the years ahead. The reason why he explains in The Wall Street Journal.

Fifty percent of Ph.D. physicists are foreign-born, and they’re here compliments of the H1-B visa. There’s a brain drain into the United States; that’s why we’re still No. 1. But it can’t last forever.

And indeed while China and India start to lure their best talent home, the best American students are leaving the hard sciences for lucrative careers, such as investment banking. Kaku goes on to say:

I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS. [If you’re an investment banker, on the other hand] you don’t create anything new. You simply massage other people’s money and take a cut.

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