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I don't think if I could live with myself if I worked at an investment bank. Most of what they do provides no benefit to humanity, in fact on the whole they're
by mattmaroon 16y ago
I don't think if I could live with myself if I worked at an investment bank. Most of what they do provides no benefit to humanity, in fact on the whole they're probably parasitic. Shuffling money around senselessly while taking a cut might be extremely profitable if you do enough of it, but it's just a drain on modern capitalism.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoTell that to Southwest Airways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Hedging_fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Hedging_fuel Shuffling money around is also useful for making public what would otherwise be private information. Greece can profess to the world how solvent they are, but the swap market tells a different story.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI said "most of what they do" rather than "all of what they do" because some of it coincidentally helps others. The ratio of parasitic behavior to useful is unfortunately growing, and hasn't stopped just because it caused an economic meltdown.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoWhat specific behavior do you believe is parasitic?
- dtby 16y agoI wonder how you square this with your past, as I understand, as an online poker pro? As a former professional poker player myself, it never would occur to me to denigrate the work of financiers or suggest that what they were doing was immoral. I was able to morally justify my occupation to myself.. and, as such, it is orders of magnitude easier to justify theirs.
- richcollins 16y agoOnline poker is a consentual exchange. Inflating the money supply and taking taxpayer bailouts is akin to coercive theft.
- rmk 16y agoSo are taxes for building bridges to nowhere etc. A penny in tax is one penny that cannot be allocated for something else (which is far more likely to be productive). The money supply was inflated because of the easy money policies of Greenspan and co. Attributing that solely to bankers oversimplifies things. And let's remember that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two of the groups that originally lobbied for 'increasing homeownership' and thus accelerated the real-estate bubble, are still roaming around scot-free.
- richcollins 16y agoI agree completely.
- mattmaroon 16y agoThat's pretty much it. Any penny I won at gambling did nothing to harm the broader economy. It might harm some other guy who gambled it, but he knew what he was buying into. My problem with Goldman and their peers isn't that they won money gambling from other people. It's that in so doing they knowingly destabilized the global economy. The actions of investment bankers have harmed every American, most of whom couldn't even spell CDO let alone know why the existence of so many of them led to Joe Average getting laid off. I'm not some sort of moral crusader by any means. I really did mean I had less against crack dealers (in fact I think drugs should be legalized, but that's another topic entirely) because the person buying crack knows what they're getting. I don't think everyone can or should be saving lives, they just shouldn't be harming people who aren't knowing and willing parties to the transaction. If my playing poker could have caused economic collapse (in fact the opposite happened, poker became a huge industry that provided lots of well-paying jobs) there would have been an issue.
- 16y ago
- kleiba 16y agoFor a long time, I used to think along those lines, too. But then I seriously asked myself in what way I'm actually contributing to humanity - and I find it's not so much. And I'm working in research. But in the end, what I do is so marginal that it only really differs from what investment bankers contribute if you look at it through a strong microscope.
- ewjordan 16y agoMany of the people I know that work in the vast world of "other people's money" feel exactly the same way, FWIW - on many occasions I've had discussions with them about the fact that all the only value they ever create is to shave the odd basis point off a spread here or there, and they have no illusions that it matters one bit. But it's an assload of easy money, and once you're in, it's trivially easy to stay in (it's like gambling for a living, where you get a cut of whatever you win, except that you don't actually have to win consistently to continue to buy in because there's always another fool willing to trust you with his money), so it's very easy to end up deciding that there's not enough rational incentive for you to do anything else. More than anything, I weep for the brain drain that Wall Street inflicts on the rest of the world. Far too many of the smartest people I've ever known were sucked in, people who could otherwise be creating real value doing jobs without which, the financial industry couldn't even exist. IMO, this is the great danger of having a society where the money shufflers are outpaid by 10:1 compared to people of similar ability in other jobs, that too much of our real talent will be wasted on an industry that is practically by definition (as a zero-sum plus fees industry) incapable of creating much more value than it currently supplies.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoHow smart are they really if they were sucked in? The smartest people I know care much more about tickling their brains than about earning insane amounts of money. They are happy with their middling six figure salaries doing quantum computing research and the like.
- starkfist 16y ago"Mafia Boss" provides benefit to humanity?
- mattmaroon 16y agoMy company employs 14 people and counting. It's created most of those jobs in a recession. It buys goods and services that total up to a lot of money which then employ other people. The games provide enjoyment to thousands of customers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not curing cancer, but yes it does benefit humanity.