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I'm from the US. I've signed up for kollegiums and I'm waiting on the list. It's taking a while as all the first year students have priority first, but that's wearing off soon. Hopefully that'll come through soon, but it's going to pose another challenge as I'll be going on exchange in half a year.
I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.
Okay... But I'm pretty sure a conservationists goal is not to make species go extinct.
There is a long run goal which is the survival of as many species and habitats as possible. Being nice animals is not diametrically opposed with being a conversationist, nor would a conversationist actually argue for killing all whales unless it had greater benefits for ocean ecosystems as a whole. You're ignoring the long-term consequences and only focusing on the actions themselves in calculating moral utility.
Same housing problems in Copenhagen. I'm a student who just lives back in my home country and flies over to Copenhagen for exams because I couldn't find housing. If I want to get something, I have to be there so I can hunt down people in person. There's really no sort of easy way to just get an apartment room, and I've found that willing to pay more doesn't really help (though maybe if you're willing to rent out something for 3-4k USD a month + drop 12,000 on a deposit you might have better luck).
I like how there are commenters who feel entitled to a PC version.
5) Where can you derive meaning and satisfaction from a job in quantitative finance? How do you reconcile the opportunity cost to society from not working on directly socially beneficial applications in fields like medicine and artificial intelligence?
If this is a strong concern of yours you should probably go with one of the other two options. There's opportunities to make money in many industries. You might not end up with as high as a net worth as you would've if you went into quantitative finance, but that's not an absolute rule and you'll more likely burn out if you don't find satisfaction in your job. This isn't a dig towards anyone that is in the finance industry and enjoys their job, but it's common for people to end up quitting from dissatisfaction/work conditions.
Besides that, a robotics startup sounds pretty exciting.
The idea of a consumption bundle is a microeconomic theory that has a lot of evidence behind it and is generally accepted in the community. It's not really my idea.
There is no certain minimum size that you need; you simply place a lot of utility of living space as opposed to other goods up to a certain point, at which diminishing returns kick in. The amount of utility you place clearly increases as you have more family members to take care of. In the case of an intern, this is generally not an issue.
There are also other purchases besides food and transportation that do not increase; the cost of travel and vacationing, for instance. Technology generally remains the same cost throughout the US. Clothing, I'd imagine, doesn't increase too much.
I was mainly replying to your assertion that it isn't 2-3X more expensive to live in the Bay Area than the Midwest. I'm sorry to tell you that it is.
It can be. It depends on the utility you place on sq ft as opposed to all other goods. However, it is not an axiom that one needs 3x the money to live in the Bay in order to remain at the same indifference curve level as they previously did in the Midwest.
Your living area is probably No.1 contributor to quality of life.
That might be true for you. Everyone has different indifference curves determined by the utility they place on different goods.
As for sq. feet minimums, at lower levels of sq ft. you will place higher utility on marginal sq. feet, sure, and diminishing returns will probably not have kicked in.
Yes, but using the same basket of goods is fundamentally flawed because people shift their consumption choices dependent on relative prices. People do not pick the same consumption bundles wherever they go. Your substitution to an inferior good (actually, just less consumption of a normal good, housing space) is compensated with a larger consumption of 'other goods', which have also rose in price but not nearly to the extent your salary went up (tripled, in his previous example). Again, income effect vs substitution effect.
Housing might very well be 2-3x (or more) expensive, but not all goods have gone up 2-3x more. This allows for an adjustment of your consumption bundle; your housing is not going to be as large, but you might have access to a greater amount of other goods. Of course, you can choose to easily make it 2-3x more expensive if you desire. Family makes this difficult because your personal indifference curve places higher utility towards space, but the parent was discussing intern salaries, who generally don't have to support families.
That's not what I was saying at all, but alright. If you're interested in the topic, look up utility curves, income effect, and substitution effect in a microeconomics textbook. It'll probably have a much better explanation than I can communicate through text (unless I start making graphs, which would be a bit time consuming).
Here's a copy paste of my explanation on reddit though (where this topic also constantly comes up):
Living in the Bay Area results in a higher wage, which increases consumption (income effect), but at the same time the price of housing is much higher as well (to a greater degree than the increase in income). You substitute sq ft with other goods. If you place relatively heavy utility on housing by sq ft in comparison to all other goods, then I guess it's a bad idea to come out here, because you're going to be on a lower indifference curve. Otherwise (and I think most people fall under 'otherwise', which is why they come out here ) its not that bad of an idea, and you'll probably end up on a higher indifference curve.
You can always adjust your consumption bundle. If I'm living in a high rent city, I'm more likely to find a friend to share an apartment with or settle for something not that great. This is a drop in utility (though I'd argue living with a friend is a positive for myself), but I also have a lot more money to use on other things, which increases my utility. Spending most of your money on rent when you're pulling something like 5,000 after tax a month is a choice, not a given, and is reflective on how much utility you perceive a better apartment to give you. In reality, we're probably terrible at accurately estimating utility of a good, but I personally have lived in a variety of places, and I was most happiest living in my tiny dorm room, so I personally don't care much about having a big place.
When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth 30k in a midwestern city.
Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact.
Look up indifference curves and consumption bundles. You're ignoring microeconomics. For anyone that doesn't assign excessively high utility towards housing size, 90k in the valley is a much better quality of life than 30k in a midwestern city.
This is where cost of living calculators fail as well. You can't compare the same basket of goods everywhere you go. People will adjust their basket of goods depending on relative prices; it doesn't mean that their utility has dropped. It's income effect vs substitution effect.
Edit: The number above has been changed to 60k~. I'd say this is probably a more reasonable argument. As for the suburban argument, I don't really know the numbers and I can't argue there. As a person in my 20s who grew up in San Jose, the suburbs are like a bad dream that continuously haunts me.
Why? Hypothetically, would I not have a better impact if I used the same time to take up extra work and instead donated that money? I would imagine the price per hour to hire labor for, say, a food drive could easily be funded multiple times through the price per hour to hire a software developer. Would I not make even more an impact if I chose to donate to an organization that operates in low-income countries? And why would locally matter? Are people in need not people in need regardless of where they're located?
What has our immense military budget exactly achieved? It hasn't defeated ISIS, brought peace to Syria, stopped Putin's aggressive expansionism, or ended North Korea's nuclear testings. Maybe Western Europe isn't interested in the bargain to begin with. From what is the US defending itself against with excessive military spending when we already have nuclear weapons that function as an effective deterrent? It doesn't seem like our military budget is preventing worldwide crises and nuclear development in rogue countries.
States in the US =/= Countries within the EU. Europe is really not a cohesive entity. Different languages, different history (stretching back a thousand+ years), completely different value systems, cultures, etc.
Trying to insinuate that the degree of differentiation between states is the same as between Europe countries is utter absurdity. Clearly, trying to track healthcare across different governments with different languages and different cultures is much harder than trying to track healthcare across different states with the same language, the same national government, and a very similar culture.
Borders between states are hardly the same as borders between countries, and Portugal is not representative of Europe. Europe is a region with multiple cultures, languages, countries, and governments.
I've always heard London to be unfriendly, but when I visited and asked multiple people for directions they were pretty damn accommodating. Maybe I just got lucky, but in the city I previously lived in (Copenhagen) you felt like you were intruding on somebody's day whenever you interrupted them in public.
I feel like many Americans (assuming you're American) have a knee jerk response when they're told that money cannot buy them happiness. They get defensive as our society constantly reinforces us with the idea that money does in fact purchase happiness. This is a great message to keep us productive and increase GDP, but is it really true? You've presented that journal article as evidence, but looking past the catchy title, it still does not show that money = happiness. It says that money, when used to purchase experiences or help other people, brings about happiness. If anything, this seems to imply that experiences and helping others brings about happiness, and money is a means in which we can help others or experience things. However, excess wealth is hardly a pre-requisite for experiences nor helping others. Certainly, there exists a baseline; if you're struggling to get food, you probably can't focus on helping others, but there's nothing stopping you from deciding to quit your job, emigrate to a foreign developing country, and start working at a non-profit (sans debt obligations, of course, which tends to be the result of a horrible education system and/or rampant consumerism). I remember meeting an Australian engineer in Montreal who worked for a year and then took two or three off to go travel around the world. He especially liked to snowboard. Yes, productivity and wealth were necessary for him, but it was a means to an end; so that he could purchase experiences that made him happy. I feel like many people in our world would look at him and say "but what about your career progression? Dear god man, don't you have any ambition? You'll never become CTO like that!" I feel like our society has gotten sucked into a rat race, where it treats productivity and the accumulation of wealth as the end itself rather than the means to happiness. Nothing better signifies this than our obsession with GDP.
I do, however, agree with you that the article is poorly organized, rambles in random directions, and fails to present any actual argument.
It seems like more common is to start obsessing about how to retain your wealth, pass it on, grow a fortune, leave a legacy, etc. You replace one obsession with another, and that's really not surprising. An obsessive person will always find something to obsess about. Money isn't going to fix a poor perspective on life.
If you head over to wallstreetoasis, you'll hear a few of them comment on how software engineers have it made. Grass is always greener on the other side and what not. There's a lot of not so nice things about being in finance, like the work conditions and hours. You have to pay your dues and work like a dog for quite a bit. Outside of high finance, you can go work for F500s, but then you take a significant pay cut. The last option is strategy consulting, which has often been described as more miserable than investment banking due to the travel and the fact that hours never really go down even as you rise up.
Also, the median total compensation is $181,500 USD for an MBA graduate of arguably the best business school in the country. They have a median of four years of work; Assuming they started at 22, and the MBA took two years, they're 28 when receiving this compensation. Unless they have corporate sponsorship, they've also paid around $185,000 for that degree, most likely in loans which will increase the cost. I wonder if a software engineer of similar caliber (smart, dedicated and possessing competent social skills to get into GSB) could pull off a similar compensation at 28 and how his life time earnings would compare. I'd be willing to wager the difference isn't that drastic; if it isn't, it's probably better to just pick the path where the work suits you better.
I think a good grasp of programming combined with being business-savvy and being able to communicate confidently with people can get you pretty far monetarily if you seize the right opportunities; its a useful skill that has the potential to create significant revenue/cut losses for businesses. It seems like some people manage to become well off by becoming consultants and doing just that, but I'm just speaking from second-hand information.
Yeah, that's what I ended up doing as well. I collected more than a few Danish friends from going to school with them, but a good portion of my friends were Norwegian, Danes that lived abroad, French, etc. The international crowd is always good fun.
Groceries wise, I'm still sort of 'there', but I live in the U.S. Just pop in for exams, I'm having difficulty finding housing. That actually might be a huge part of my dislike of the city; I'm sure if I lived near Norrebro, my experience would be a lot better. Commuting is never fun.
I guess the little things got to me though. I'm used to people generally having some degree of friendliness/politeness in public, which I found lacking in CPH. The cashiers at Netto would often not even acknowledge my presence. That was weird. Asking a random stranger for something like directions sometimes felt like you were committing a no-no. Maybe I'm just projecting, but the entire city's atmosphere felt mildly hostile/alien.
This is actually where I started, with MIT's intro OCW. I began to worry, though, that I would be better served learning something directly relevant to the job market, and so half-way in I moved onto The Odin Project. My plan as it stands is to first get a grasp of web development so I can have a solid chance of getting a job after graduation, but I intend to go through a lot of MOOCs once I'm done with TOP. I've got a year and 2/3rds until graduation, which will hopefully let me learn a fair bit.
Taking stats ATM; I've got the AI /w robots one marked down in my list of MOOCs, though I've put it at the bottom as I think I've got to cover a lot more 'fundamentals' first. Thanks for the heads up though.
Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.
Right. Because there's no consumerism in Copenhagen and no fat people either. I'm curious as to how you pulled that out of everything I said.
More accurately, there's little room for individualists in Denmark. The atmosphere of Jantelov is not very pleasant, and outsiders especially struggle to find their place within it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.
Man. I studied in Copenhagen, and I really disliked the place. It was a sentiment shared by a lot of the international students I ran into, sans the ones on exchange. The variety of stores, the opening hours, the size of grocery, the limited food selection, and especially the unwelcoming culture got to me pretty quickly. How are you integrating into the Danish culture (assuming you're not a native Dane)?
Price discrimination clearly involves profit maximization, otherwise the firm would have no incentive to carry it out in the first place. The movie theatre is not practising price discrimination because it's dedicated to some noble goal of clearing the market.
As mentioned above, your method has essentially extracted all possible consumer surplus and shifted it over to the producer. I'm not sure why this is a good thing; every consumer is purchasing at the maximum price they would be willing to pay, which means they're actually getting the minimum amount of utility out of it, while the producer is getting a huge amount of utility (all that surplus).
Furthermore, you seem to be ignoring the fact that money can be spent on more than one product. No, I am not happy as I can be if I'm charged the maximum amount for each product I purchase because that limits my overall utility as I can't purchase as large of a consumption bundle.
Finally, in your example, you say no economic value was created because those students did not get to spend the 70 pounds on the movie theatres. You're implying that the money somehow goes to waste, which is not true. More likely, they'll go purchase a substitute good (dvd rentals, student plays) and increase GDP via consumption through that.
What did you do in finance? I'm guessing trading? It seems like it's a rather hard field to break into, as you've mentioned. I remember reading that even for people coming out of Harvard Business School only a few make it into trading.
Regardless, that's a small subset of finance jobs, no? What I've read about the investment banker side is that the job is absolutely dreadful; if you get into private equity, it gets better, but you're still working like a dog generally. Also, sans trading, the jobs tend to require a very different type of person than your typical software engineer. As you move up, your sales/pitch skills become more and more important, as your ability to win clients/deals for the firm is what brings in revenue, not your ability to use excel.
I really think it's a bad idea to go into finance for the salaries. You're going to be miserable, and no, you are not guaranteed a million dollars by 25. Obviously, there are many different career paths in finance, but all of the ones that involve making a lot of money include one or all of the following: stress, long hours (80-100/week), and risk (think how many financial crashes tend to happen. guess who loses their jobs?)
Of course, if you're willing to persevere through all that, and have very good people and/or sales skills, then sure, you might be able to join the ultra elite who own their private jets and have an island in Thailand. You'll need some luck for that too, though.
I think the only people that will 'make it' in finance are those that are genuinely passionate enough to endure the horrible work conditions and lifestyle while possessing the people/sales skills to be successful. Remember, to make it to the top in finance firms, you need to bring in revenue. With the exclusion of trading, this generally involves sales skills. Same goes for management consulting and probably law as well.