This is an important story in its own right, but there's a meta-level that's easy to miss. Why do so many smart young do-gooders, like Pete Buttigieg, decide to go to McKinsey out of college? What's the appeal? vox.com/science-and-he…
This is the appeal: McKinsey fights hard for a foothold in global public health and other governance projects, and it uses that to tell uncertain graduates that they can come to McKinsey and both save the world and learn the hard business skills college didn't teach them.
Then they get there and, as this story shows, the spots on those projects are limited and hotly fought over, they pay only 75% what other projects do, and you quickly realize that to advance, you need to be doing what McKinsey does: which isn't actually saving the world.
Way back in 2012, I did an interview with, yes, @AndrewYang about this, back when it was the problem he was trying to solve: washingtonpost.com/business/econo…
"Our best and brightest are being absorbed by what I call ‘the meta economy,’" Yang said. "They’re heading into professional services and transactions and optimizing, but not into direct value creation."
The talent McKinsey, etc, employ is the case for hiring them. But they use superior resources and access to divert that talent away from jobs in nonprofits and public sector, and then charge nonprofits and the public sector to rent it from them.
So read this story on how McKinsey got into global public health, and think about how these same facts are used by their recruiting department, how powerful they are to kids who need a job, want to do good, and need to pay down student loans. vox.com/science-and-he…
