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Hence the long standard argument over companies not paying STEM people doing STEM jobs considerably better than financiers; which is a bit of a myth tbh other than at the highest levels.

I think that's a wider problem of paying people what they're worth, not necessarily what they think they're worth. There's also a danger of generalisation, eg a quant who devises a trading strategy that generates billions from shuffling bits around is arguably worth more than a quant that can't quantify the quanta of energy absorbed and re-radiated by a simple molecule like CO2. Or worse, costs society billions by distorting those quantities.

Or there are all the scientists doing science that may never have any practical application. Or sometimes it's just nobody has come along and realised that that research could actually have tremendous value. Or it just allows me to stumble across something I didn't know, go 'huh!', and feel pleased about having learned something new. Hard to quantify the value of that, but I like learning new things, and science is supposed to be about advancing human knowledge.

In business, that's more of a luxury, and it's usually easier to quantify the value someone brings to a company. There are standard methodologies to apply P&L to individuals, decide if they're a cost or profit centre and manage those numbers. Often that's done badly, but hey, it's IT and we know how that works. In politics, I guess it gets more complicated because politics. So figuring out where to allocate funds across all possible research areas. Which then also gets political, ie all the money still being poured into climate research despite continually being told that science has long been settled. Or some of that spending is still a good thing, because the more we understand our weather, the better it is for our economy. So public money should shift towards adaptation and mitigation. We can always benefit from cheap, reliable energy, and fission & fusion promise this.

But then it's also the other bits of STEM. Like another person pointed out. To make these fantastic gadgets, we also need engineers who can translate theory into reality, and build stuff that can be adjusted with a precision hammer. Yet we've been busily de-industrialising and not developing that skill base either. Or losing it as industrys shut down, off-shore, engineers retire or leave industry and aren't replaced. Then we may figure out how to build Mr. Fusion, but can't build it. Kind of why I still want to create a machinist's school for makers of things, but I just can't make the numbers work.