Arthur C. Clarke believed America was misallocating its human capital by creating too many bankers and lawyers.

Arthur C. Clarke apparently believed America's smartest people were wasting their time on banking, law, and insurance instead of the space program:

...I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, "No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking". He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented.  

http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-and.html

Especially in light of the post-mortems of the 2008 global financial meltdown, when it became apparent that the best and the brightest mathmaticians out of Harvard et al. were being hired by Wall Street to engineer extremely complicated algorithms for derivatives trading, it's kind of hard to argue with his point. In the early 1980s there was a strategic shift in America away from manufacturing and towards the so-called FIRE (financial, insurance, and real estate) sector. More complicated than we need to go in here, but this obviously had profound consequences (both good and bad). There is certainly a very compelling case to be made that this strategic shift needs to be corrected for the general health of the American economy, and not just because it would benefit U.S. human spaceflight. 

There was a very interesting article in Harper's Magazine a couple of years ago on this (FIRE) subject, but the gist is that we have misallocated our human capital towards relatively non-productive (but get-rich-quick) sectors like finance, in order to achieve what was putatively thought to be a more efficient allocation of resources in a global economy. In other words, this was the first stage of Globalization: we do the white collar stuff and let the Less Developed Countries manufacture stuff. If we want to change strategic direction, we should do it for other reasons and not just because we want to build cool spaceships that go to Jupiter.


Hat tip: Amazing News http://newtstuff.blogspot.com/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-believed-americas.html