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The New York Times discovers afresh what should have been understood as an axiom of economics. The headline of a front-pager today:

Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices

As reader Aron Spencer puts it in a single syllable, "Doh!" The story is about people with training in traditional fields such as medicine and law, who are using that training for less traditional careers in Wall Street and management, and earning far higher incomes. You'd think it would be good news that people are finding paths to personal wealth. Yet the Times manages to make it sound like something bad. One doctor who went to Wall Street reflects for the Times on doctors who stayed in medicine:

"They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they...saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money."

So going to Wall Street involves being untrue to one's ethics? Having impure goals? And here's a quote from a couple of "experts" -- the same left-leaning academic economists who can always be counted on to show up in Times stories like this:

"The bigger the prize, the greater the effort that people are making to get it," said Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth. "That effort is draining people away from more useful work."

The reporter has a twinge of conscience, apparently, and acknowledged the value-loaded last sentence -- but then uses the acknowledgment itself as a non sequitur jumping off point to "prove" a proposition that the quote didn't even address:

What kind of work is most useful is a matter of opinion, of course, but there is no doubt that a new group of the very rich have risen today far above their merely affluent colleagues.

There's even an "expert" quote designed to piss on the philanthropy of the newly rich:

As some have grown enormously rich, they are turning to philanthropy in a competition that is well beyond the means of their less wealthy peers. "The ones with $100 million are setting the standard for their own circles, but no longer for me," said Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist who described the early stages of the phenomenon in a 1995 book, "The Winner-Take-All Society," which he co-authored.

Try to imagine this same story written for Forbes. All the same facts. But instead of this fault-finding envious nostalgia for a bygone era in which reporters weren't quite so relatively underpaid, there would be a celebration of the potential for upward mobility.

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