you don't make a case by using the word obviously. business professors have lucrative consulting assignments. that + 6 figure salaries+ pension benefits offers the possibility of outstripping the average professional on wall street. comparing average professors to wall street professionals is comparing apples to oranges. a more useful comparison is business professors who are in the masters and phd programs.
you are talking about the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, who seem to be so cash strapped they need to damage their reputation (if they ever had one) by representing Greece as an "economic adviser" and making themselves to a laughing stock in front of the world? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAAnV-AolTI Sure, lets narrow it down to business school professors. Only very few ar as active as Krugman. Most others max out at around 300-400k, a salary any VP or SVP at a trading desk should make. P.S.: By the way, I never said there is no possibility, Krugman for one made for himself a nice little empire of research, books, and tv appearances. Should make for at least 1-2 mil per year. But that is not the average, while 400k-600k is average salary for anyone at or above VP in a trading seat.
The quant team I used to work with were all phds. It was a requirement to be on that desk. When they were making their career decisons they saw the list as: 1. Tenured professor 2. Wall Street at 500k/year 3. Untenured professor Tenured professor was best option because you had job stability for life and you got to work on whatever you found interesting, the track to get there (untenured professor) was miserable and highly political. They opted for wall street because it was "more stable" in many ways. I know wall street traders who went the other way. They left trading desks and went to get their Phd's and are working their way to tenured professor. They are interested in doing research and teaching.
you may have a point. a friend of mine informed me that stiglitz was on a panel at a columbia university showing of the movie,wall street. of course, let's not forget professor sachs, who was the most hated man in poland. it is not clear but perhaps the shock treatment was exactly what the country needed. i suspect it was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics)
you broke morons ruined the thread. how the fuck did this turn into a debate on professors? get a job.
There are also the likes of Paul Krugman who sold his soul and decency for $ and a loud microphone. njrookie
Most of the misery comes from being forced to play politics once you reach a certain level. If your book is making a 50-100mm, there is a lot of people around the firm that want to stick their hand in your pocket. You end up working really long hours and the content of these working hours is mostly counter-productive bullshit. I only spend maybe 20% of my time doing R&D and maybe another 30% actually quoting and trading. The rest is emails and meetings. The second source of misery is the cost of living - you are forced to live in a rather small set of cities with a high concentration of people with similar income. For example, my relatively small apartment on the UES costs way more then a multi-story house with a 10-min drive to the mountains. Heck, to give you the sense of scale - when I tell the fellow New Yorkers that I have a 600ftsq roof deck, they find it luxurious. At the same time, given that I start work at 7 am and finish around 7pm, living outside the City is impractical and nearly impossible. PS. yes, I hear that Singapore is the place to be.
You are either defending yourself from vultures who or from parasites depending on your last trade. But the battle never stops.