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My dad started on Wall Street in 1977. He always jokes that when he did, finance was seen as a dull career for old men. Senior bankers did OK, but it was no great path to riches. The CEO of the bank might make half a million dollars a year. Everyone else made much, much less. Salaries were higher at IBM, which he applied to but which didn’t give him an offer after the interview, than they were at Goldman Sachs. Star stock-pickers like Soros could make money, but there were only ever a handful of them and they were largely separated from the rest of Wall Street. My father speaks fluent Spanish and French, but went to a second-tier college so the State Department wouldn’t hire him, which was fair.
I say all this because I think we often forget that the present situation, where very smart people can easily make 10x a government salary in the private sector, is mostly a recent invention. When my father graduated college, a job in the federal civil service was an elite position with a good salary, full job security and a gold-plated pension. In 1972, the President made $200,000 a year. Almost nobody in the private sector came close. Today, he makes $400,000 a year. 25 year old software engineers and investment banking associates at good firms routinely make more.
The irony is that even the modern political grift is usually quite unprofitable, even outside the state. (And many classically successful political operators did, at various times, work for the federal bureaucracy, in the military, etc., including Nixon, whose first career choice was the FBI). Sure, Tucker made money, but he was at the top of the pyramid and still got cancelled. On the left, things aren’t much better. It’s a question not of where the skilled people are, because we know where they are (in finance and tech, by and large) but of why they don’t build careers in government, where they would grow to understand the levers of power that (later, as politicians) they could manipulate effectively. That, in turn, comes down to what @throwaway182127 was discussing below.
But I think it’s less that smart young people today don’t go into the federal bureaucracy because they think it discriminates against men, or against whites. It’s that it simply doesn’t pay very well. Smart young people will go for whatever offers the opportunity for wealth and status. In some societies, that might be the military. In others, it might be Blackstone, Bain, Sequoia, KKR and Google. The intellectual types who don’t want wealth (or who have it) will work in the arts or academia, the ones who do will work in finance, biglaw, consulting or tech. The rest are the dregs.
One of the best things a DeSantis type administration could do would be to raid the Republican statehouses for the top 5% of junior staffers by intelligence and charisma, and to insert them (as far as possible) into D.C. Of course, replacing the federal bureaucracy wholesale is less legal.
Skill is not fungible. The skills and temperment of "25 year old software engineers" making $400,000 a year (of which there are fewer than you seem to think) are not fungible with political skills; software engineers (and engineers of all types, in fact) are famous for lacking those political skills, and for good reason. Finance isn't as far from politics but still pretty far from it. These people mostly never went into politics -- they went into the same sorts of roles they do now, they just didn't get paid as well for them.
If “these people” are upper-middle class graduates of elite colleges with high verbal IQ, their career choices are absolutely fungible. This might not apply to quants or to the most autistic software engineers, but it absolutely applies to a lot of people who go into finance, tech, law, consulting and so on.
I also think it’s a myth that elite software engineers at top firms have no social skills, but I’ll defer on that point.
At Google, decent ability to code gets you to L3 (i.e. entry level). L4 (after two or three years) is mostly showing competence at getting tasks done and having a passing familiarity with Google tooling. L5 (after another two or three years) and after are all about "impact": the technical component is writing architecture design docs for others to read, and it's increasingly about knowing what the right things are to build, positioning yourself to build them, coordinating with other teams and management, and publicizing your work. Engineering management and even high level IC roles have navigating politics as the number one requirement. One of the not-especially-well-kept secrets of Google SWEs is that on average they're not rockstar coders but merely good enough and capable of navigating byzantine documentation, bureaucracy, and internal politics (which is, to be fair, an uncommon bundle of traits).
Someone like Stallman might be hired on purely for publicity purposes, but someone with his affect and hygiene coming in as a new grad would be lucky to make it to L4.
Stallman, with all his quirks, is demonstrably a better politician than any random Google L5.
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Law, certainly -- the law-to-politics pipeline is pretty well established. Consulting also certainly; consulting requires many of the same skills as politics, except for the largely interchangable people at the bottom. Into "tech", maybe, but not into software engineering specifically. Political skill and temperament are not the same as having a "high verbal IQ".
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Obama's net worth is $70 million and it seems to me that he's able to live with the life and influence of someone much wealthier.
Depends on what part of the bureaucracy. Quite a bit is ostensibly entirely at the discretion of the executive, but I suspect that this isn't true in practice. Perhaps we'd find out if DeSantis took power, but I kind of doubt it.
Obama made a ton of money from book royalties, both before and after leaving office. He hardly seems representative of the average politician.
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Obama was an immensely popular (with elites) two term president. I don’t think people dispute that there are people like him (and Pelosi, and the Clintons) who can make a little money in politics, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
The Pendleton Act makes it hard. Trump ostensibly tried to get around it (in a great show of competence, he did this a whole one month before he lost the 2020 election) by re-classifying a large number of federal civil service jobs as policy appointments ('schedule f'), but it never really went anywhere and of course Biden repealed the order on his second or third day in office. If another Republican president tried it and then attempted to fire/replace longstanding federal employees, it would face a lot of legal challenges.
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