I don't claim it's 100% efficient. But I do think there is a high degree of efficiency. We spend most of our lives chasing social status without even thinking about it. Be it through going to school to get a degree, going off to war to become a hero, leveling up your character in WoW, etc. It doesn't take a statistics degree to see the pattern; things that are good for "prestigiousness" are rarely good for much else.
"things that are good for "prestigiousness" are rarely good for much else"
Oh, come on. Now you're just being silly.
Even the article tells you that you're wrong. Legal and medical jobs may be boring and/or tedious, but they pay about as well as you can ever expect to be paid in this country, without being insanely lucky.
Basically, you're succumbing to survivor's bias: you see the stories of the lucky entrepreneurs, so you're relatively unaware of the (vast majority of) people who never make it big (and who end up working in corporate jobs for the rest of their lives). Meanwhile, the people who labor for decades to achieve career success as doctors or lawyers strike you as unglamorous wage slaves, next to the Paul Bucheits and Jamie Zawinskis of the world.
But as I said before, there's no free lunch; nobody is going to let you succeed without a lot of work, or a lot of luck. So you either trust your fate to randomness (high variance; a lot of luck), or you methodically start climbing your way up the greased pole (low variance; a little luck).
Overall, the expected value of career success is higher for the doctors and lawyers, and the variance is lower. That's why people pursue the degree -- not out of some blind faith in title and prestige.
