Is Wall Street Pay Hampering U.S. Innovation?

In 2009, when the economy was still convulsing from the financial crisis, Daniel Roth (now Linkedin’s executive editor) published a piece about the future of Wall Street suggesting that the financial industry’s temporary paralysis might be a good thing. “No one likes to see an industry die, but there is an upside,” he wrote in what seemed like a prescient article in Wired magazine that June. “Often, smart cubicle refugees will seize the opportunity to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, unleashing waves of innovation upon society.” He cited the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the birth of independent film as an example of how one big industry’s collapse might prompt a flowering of creativity and new enterprise.

The only trouble is, it didn’t happen.