No Times de hoje #16

O New York Times traz hoje um artigo sobre as fortunas que se fazem a trabalhar em Wall street, que dá que pensar.

Não se trata apenas de gente que sempre se dedicou ao estudo dos mercados financeiros, como os gestores... o artigo fala especificamente de um médico que durante 10 anos se dedicou à profissão e à investigação e que há 10 anos começou a trabalhar como consultor de investimentos na área da medicina. De um salário anual que rondava os $150,000 em 1996 passou para uma verba que deverá ultrapassar os $20 milhões em 2006. Não admira que haja tanta gente a saltar da academia para a consultoria.
___________

"A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded physician-scientist,” Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.

And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.

(...)

Just how far he had come from a doctor’s traditional upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would become a managing director of health care investment banking.

'There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people,' Dr. Glassman recalled in a recent interview. 'They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money.'

(...)

Something similar is happening in academia, where newly minted Ph.D.’s migrate from teaching or research to more lucrative fields. Similarly, many business school graduates shun careers as experts in, say, manufacturing or consumer products for much higher pay on Wall Street.

(...)

Indeed, doctors have become so interested in the business side of medicine that more than 40 medical schools have added, over the last 20 years, an optional fifth year of schooling for those who want to earn an M.B.A. degree as well as an M.D. Some go directly to Wall Street or into health care management without ever practicing medicine."