How on earth can the public sector attract talent?? Part I: Money is more important than lives

Since the end of my first year of policy school, my life has been characterized by a whirlwind of conversations with bright young students/graduates that culminated in myself questioning society, my destiny and life philosophy. As an ivy league graduate, I can't help but be bombarded by news of this guy or that girl working for Goldman, X hedgefund, Y prop trading firm and making Z hundred dollars an hour. In a nutshell, Ivy league graduates are in some sense all thrive on comparing oneself to another because that's what they have done all their lives and it's in engraved in our genes to be competitive in every sense of the word.

Anyway today as I talked to a Chinese international Princeton friend about this whole phenomenon, when she casually mentioned that every single Chinese international student her year is working for Goldman, I was flabbergasted. I was suddenly struck with the disturbing thought that the future of US-China relationship hinges on knowing as many Goldman bankers as possible. My ambitious goal of networking with Chinese ambassadors/scholars and diplomats just went down the drain.

Our conversation propelled my brain to flash in a split second the idea of going back to the financial sector - yearning for the days when my adrenalin can deliver instant success/fail gratification. Traders live in microseconds. Every second you get updated with new market trend news and you act on it - sometimes like a robot and automatically follow a formula to buy CDS, stock or thoughtfully think about some innovative strategy of hedging or investing.

The idea of constantly thinking and constantly seeing action and results is something I already sorely miss volunteering in the city's poorly funded public advocate office (although I have high hopes for the supposedly fast-paced more performance driven style of the State Dept). Even when we have to deal with thousands of constituents (real human beings here) and we are in charge of 8 million people, which is hard to believe and what's even more - people's livelihoods are directly dependent on our service. We deal with people getting evicted from houses, and of course, assist the elderly, disabled with rent increase exemptions, heat and fuel bills and all sorts of necessary services for survival for some people.

yet we can't get anything done on trader's scale. When we fail in the public sector, we risk people's lives. When traders make a mistake, they lose some money. You ought to think that lives are more important and therefore deserves more attention, time and resources, but that's the irony of our society.

In other words, money is much more easier to deal with, gain, lose, transfer, destroy, create than people.

When people ask me: why are you sacrificing your life to pursue serving people in a sector that's full of dirty politics and cynical, and most importantly, incompetent people.
My answer has always been...why aren't you guys - all you smart, intelligence, innovative, ingenious people not making some minor lifestyle sacrifices and use your talent to help 99% of the world - the entire rest of the humanity who don't have the educational attainment and career opportunities of our circle of friends - the entire rest of humanity who don't have nearly enough assets to even own $1 of stock, let alone invest in your hedge fund - the entire rest of humanity who actually don't make over $30 an hour, which is the minimum wage for ivy league graduates?

What perplexes me is the fact that many of my friends are quite curious about what I do. They are extremely inquisitive especially regarding my stories of helping the poorest of the poor and want to know the hands on dirty details of my diving into different communities. I guess it's an encouraging sign at least so that one day I will be in the position of begging money from these rich retired former bankers and traders and may actually get a penny or two from them.

Thus it seems to me that it's pretty obvious that collective social solidarity and empathy is an important moral value for most people. To borrow a page from Obama....what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart.

At the moment though, the cynics and sometimes the cynical Thomas Che would say that the society is only bound together because the richest are giving away to the society just enough in taxes and aids so that the poorest don't die in front of their eyes - or in the case of NYC - the poorest (with average family income of $10,000 or less!!! imagine that this is Manhattan!!!) are in the housing projects 30 blocks up 5th avenue from the rich bankers' luxury apartments (median income >400K). The richest have just enough common sense of humanity as to give enough to ensure the poorest survive - but anything more - police protection, consistent heat and water, garbage pickup - that's all luxury service for the poorest.

For us in the public advocate's office then, the challenge is to cope with this stark contrast...

To be continued