The undiscussed metastory aside from the opinions about good or bad, is probably that neophilia, or STEM fixation, or citizen science, or whatever you want to call it, apparently does not correlate with wealth. Not an amazing cultural observation, I'm sure any starving PHD student would tend to agree, the world's full of ramen eating phd students and $25K/yr nontenured postdocs. Academia/STEM-ish workers have replaced religious orders as the cultural place for vows of poverty, with a couple rare exceptions such as applied science (especially CS). Also lots of managers, who work at STEM companies, and perhaps may have even started as STEM people long ago, get confused as currently being STEM people.
There is an interesting effect that is also not being discussed which is most of the billionaires are paper net-worth billionaires. Most of them don't have a billion cash equivalent on hand, for example if they sold 50% of their company stock, the stock price would crater enough because of sudden volume to take their net worth down quite a notch. Its quite possible to end up in a situation where you own a billion sized fraction of a multibillion dollar company, but you can only sell a couple million per year without cratering your net worth. Your net worth does not necessarily equal what you can spend today.
Maybe the STEM-fixation isn't because those "newer" academic branches are just "in" but because they get stuff done the "older" ones didn't in hundrets of years.
I don't wanna know how much brain power is burned for no good in other academic fields...
(Yes there is also burnd much of in the STEM fields, but somehow they still get stuff done)
The undiscussed metastory aside from the opinions about good or bad, is probably that neophilia, or STEM fixation, or citizen science, or whatever you want to call it, apparently does not correlate with wealth. Not an amazing cultural observation, I'm sure any starving PHD student would tend to agree, the world's full of ramen eating phd students and $25K/yr nontenured postdocs. Academia/STEM-ish workers have replaced religious orders as the cultural place for vows of poverty, with a couple rare exceptions such as applied science (especially CS). Also lots of managers, who work at STEM companies, and perhaps may have even started as STEM people long ago, get confused as currently being STEM people.
There is an interesting effect that is also not being discussed which is most of the billionaires are paper net-worth billionaires. Most of them don't have a billion cash equivalent on hand, for example if they sold 50% of their company stock, the stock price would crater enough because of sudden volume to take their net worth down quite a notch. Its quite possible to end up in a situation where you own a billion sized fraction of a multibillion dollar company, but you can only sell a couple million per year without cratering your net worth. Your net worth does not necessarily equal what you can spend today.