The usual criticism is that MBAs believe the degree endows them with far more strategic intelligence than they really have.<p>It&#x27;s like officer school. The worst graduates come out absolutely convinced they can run an entire army, when in fact they&#x27;re still almost completely clueless.<p>Aside from the networking - which is not trivial - the benefits of an MBA for talented individuals seem to be exposure to the idea that strategy, cost&#x2F;benefit analysis, accounting, marketing, and the rest all exist, and are more relevant to a business than the code base.<p>This can be a surprise to straight CS people, many of whom only care about code.<p>But by analogy, many MBAs only seem to care about money.<p>There&#x27;s more to running a successful business than the bottom line - or at least there should be - and more subtle management principles that build businesses by <i>making customers and employees happy</i> as well as making shareholders rich don&#x27;t seem to figure at all in MBA schools.<p>The MBA point of view seems to be that happiness doesn&#x27;t matter when there&#x27;s profit to be made.<p>Ironically, there&#x27;s a lot of poverty in that view - not just morally, but politically <i>and economically.</i> In the longer term it leads to the kind of economic picture we have today, where there&#x27;s a lot of profit being made, but at the cost of rapidly shrinking broad prosperity and economic freedom for most of the population.