what would you have done?

Physics bloggers are quite taken with the recent financial market turmoil.

Hsu considers propagator effects and asymmetries of time averaged risk, while the Incoherent Ponderer seizes upon my comment about the root cause between the Superconducting SuperCollider cancellation and current financial shenanigans

What brought the original comment I made to mind, is that I recognized a name or two in a list of major players in the east coast financial and mortgage markets... er, Hey Guys!

It was very clear when I was graduating that the academic job market in the physical sciences was in a bad squeeze - a lot of very, very good people either got pushed out of academia, or saw the writing on the wall and jumped.
I remember people turning down postdocs at the IAS to move to Wall Street, and many more consciously putting down a hard date and jumping if they had no prospects for a permanent position by that time.
Many of those who survived to the tenure track were either just lucky in their timing of hitting the market, or found position that could be extended over the worst times.

First time I went to the NCSA, just as Mosaic was about the be sprung upon the community, the first seminar on the first day I was there was a presentation from a major US financial company trying to solicit people with CM-5 experience to come work for them (they sponsored the workshop to get that slot).
It was tempting - through my postdoc days I had a permanent verbal job offer with a california company at several times my salary, should I choose to leave - I am pretty sure that my colleague who made that offer has already retired. There were also dot.com possibilities and for a short time my postdoc colleagues scrambled to get on the interview list at Arthur Andersen. Right up to my taking a tenure track job there were offers to come talk to classmates of mine that had authority to recruit quants.

When the WTC was hit on 9/11, I knew at least three former colleagues who worked for companies on the top floors, none were in those offices as it turned out, nor were the several who went there for meetings on a regular basis (although one apparently had stopped for a late coffee across the street, he was supposed to be up on one of the high floor offices but needed a grande before going into the meeting after a long flight).

So... and here is the essential concern as to whether my ex-colleague "quants" have an actual responsibility for the turmoil:

if we were to invent a time machine, and go talk to our younger 25 year old self, and propose the following:
quit science, now. Your future can be an intense, intellectually challenging rollercoaster.
You will work with a collection of people as bright and intense and interesting as any university faculty, you will tackle new and important problems, with resources no object - you can buy equipment, hire people, just get it done.
You will receive immense riches, enough to retire wealthy beyond your dream in your thirties, if you so choose. You and your family will never want.
But, your actions will cause ruin to millions, and possibly plunge the nation, if not the world into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
You will be rich, millions will be poor.
Or, you can putter along on minimal salary, fight long odds to get mediocre pay on the tenure track, get to teach and do paperwork while scrambling for your own funding, just to work on obscure problems of your own choosing that few care about.

What does your younger self do?

PostScriptum: a change in social norms so that it becomes socially acceptable to walk away from a mortgage where the debt exceeds the current total value is precisely the sort of non-perturbative risk that a large fraction of ex-1980s physics grad students might fail to model until the data is there to prove them wrong. "Who couldanone".

It is also interesting to contemplate whence the hedgies go now: do they cut back on those expensive and occasionally wrong quants, and go hire some nice classicists; or, do we get a race to the bottom, with pursuit of über-quants, and bidding wars for performers - ie can they step back far enough to understand that Poisson noise fluctuation in performance occurs for traders as much as for basketball players or army generals?
The Mirrlees instability has a great psychological attraction for people who are in a position to work it.