> I couldn't accept the job and look myself in the mirror while knowing that not only do my direct reports struggle to get by and can't save tax-deferred for retirement, but that I'm one of the only employers in the country who doesn't even pay FICA taxes.
With finance or ad-tech like you are recommending the whole output of the job is often zero or negative sum. That can happen in academia as well but it seems less likely.
Finance isn't zero sum, trades can be mutually beneficial and efficiently allocating capital is an important problem (that the NIH utterly fails at incidentally). There are a ton of shady finance people because that's where the money is, sure. But it is not inherently zero sum!
If you moved money from a sinkhole garbage establishment project to some other promising scientific endeavors, that would almost certainly be a net positive for the world even if the total spend is the same and you "just pushed money around". A similar principle applies when considering many industry investment decisions.
Regardless, "finance" is broad as hell and there are a huge number of potentially well-paying careers that are not finance nor ad-tech. Not to mention that a FIRE research scientist who is less beholden to the current system might very well contribute more scientific progress over their lifetime than the latest career academic.
Consider latency arbitrage. Let's say the lowest latency between NY and Chicago is 22.6ms and a trading firm gets it down to 22.5ms with a huge investment: big benefit to society right?
The reward for that investment is the same as the reward for the next guy who gets it down to 22.45ms, despite the first guy saving 0.1ms on the state of the art and the second guy only saving 0.05ms. Surely 0.05ms is worth a lot less than 0.1ms to society, and it shows this whole thing is almost totally detached from any value to society.
It's just lowest number wins and the industry will consume any number of resources (running CPUs in spinlock loops instead of more efficient ones, having human labor climb microwave towers at some risk of life) up to the reward amount to claim it, regardless of any marginal value to society of the improvement.
With finance or ad-tech like you are recommending the whole output of the job is often zero or negative sum. That can happen in academia as well but it seems less likely.