Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan is questioning whether students going into finance will make the best use of their talent.
In 2014, one in five Harvard students took a job in the financial sector and this number was bigger for economics majors--one in two students.
Mullainathan explains that "every profession produces both private return--the fruits of labor that a person enjoys--and social returns, those that society enjoys." While finance is usually an industry in which returns are private, he argues, people in the industry can use it for the solve social problems with financial roots, such as saving money for college to insure unemployment risk and going into debt from having to take out loans to support meager paychecks.
"So how should I feel about my students going into finance?