They simply face the same limiting factor that every field faces, the relative lack of exceptionally original people, period. And in that sense, it is a zero sum game. If the EOP's are directed to finance, there will be less of them for chemistry or physics. If they're directed towards physics, there will be less of them for finance, English or medicine.
Sure, but maybe we're conceiving of that set differently, or I made it sound too rarefied.
I think you're giving humanity too much credit here in your belief that these fields can trade off zero-sum, particularly across such disparate domains. It seems more likely that these interests are additive, not mutually exclusive.
Conceptually spitballing here: what's the critical mass of any one field, in terms of new idea generation, realistically? That's distributed tightly at the top, maybe top 3%, where you're less likely to see inter-disciplinary shifts. Other than a few Da Vincis, I'd bet that astrophysicists are in the field because they love astrophysics, chemists love chemistry, etc. It's not like a behaviouralist nudge will have them catch religion on enterprise risk management or run off with a backpack of Proust. At any rate, far better to grow the population who has access to these professions than to worry about distributional effects between them.
(Agreed 100% on trades, but I think it's probably not what the OP was thinking, either.)
And, like you, I prefer an invisible hand approach, where possible. But because these professions have such outsized impacts on networks and access to capital, IMO it's important that these fields be prioritized for minorities / low SES students precisely because of the spill-over effects they'd carry in other professions. Maybe after a couple of generational cycles, once the field is more level, the consultants and financiers can go the way of the lawyers. :p
Nice chatting! Rest well.
