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The purpose of low end schools is to pay teachers more than they would earn (for less work) in another job and to provide daycare for kids so their parents can

The purpose of low end schools is to pay teachers more than they would earn (for less work) in another job and to provide daycare for kids so their parents can work. The purpose of high end schools is to prepare kids for Ivy league colleges where they will learn to work on wall street (about half of Harvard grads) where they'll exploit regulatory failures/oversights for profit. edit: corrected the percentage of harvard grads that go to wall street.

natrius 16y ago
Finance is not the unalloyed evil you're making it out to be.
- carbocation 16y ago
  I didn't interpret "exploiting regulatory failures" to be a metonym for all of finance.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be. I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
    - Retric 16y ago
      The root cause was and is the ability for people to gamble with other people’s money and only share in the upside. It promotes ever increasing levels of risk taking. Plenty of mid level people knew they were selling or buying crap but there was zero incentive for them to stop.
      - grandalf 16y ago
        I see your point. I view that as a problem with the incentives firms gave their employees. However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.
  - natrius 16y ago
    "Work[ing] on Wall Street" is a metonym for all of finance, and the sentence in question (especially when paired with the previous sentence) implies that such exploits are the predominant endeavor in the industry.
    - grandalf 16y ago
      I do think there are many legitimate aspects of finance. However if you consider the impact that mispriced real-estate had on credit markets, and consider that bad regulation led to over-investment in real-estate, then the massive chunk of the market that went away when the bubble burst was all profiting off of regulatory mistakes. I consider things like the mortgage interest deduction a massive regulatory mistake, as well as the capital gains tax exemption, etc.
smanek 16y ago
IIRC, it's closer to 10-15% of harvard grads go into finance. If you expand that to include 'business', 'management', and 'consulting' it's something more like 30-40%. Still no where near what you claim.

natrius 16y ago

Finance is not the unalloyed evil you're making it out to be.

carbocation 16y ago
I didn't interpret "exploiting regulatory failures" to be a metonym for all of finance.
- grandalf 16y ago
  It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be. I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
  - Retric 16y ago
    The root cause was and is the ability for people to gamble with other people’s money and only share in the upside. It promotes ever increasing levels of risk taking. Plenty of mid level people knew they were selling or buying crap but there was zero incentive for them to stop.
    - grandalf 16y ago
      I see your point. I view that as a problem with the incentives firms gave their employees. However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.
- natrius 16y ago
  "Work[ing] on Wall Street" is a metonym for all of finance, and the sentence in question (especially when paired with the previous sentence) implies that such exploits are the predominant endeavor in the industry.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    I do think there are many legitimate aspects of finance. However if you consider the impact that mispriced real-estate had on credit markets, and consider that bad regulation led to over-investment in real-estate, then the massive chunk of the market that went away when the bubble burst was all profiting off of regulatory mistakes. I consider things like the mortgage interest deduction a massive regulatory mistake, as well as the capital gains tax exemption, etc.

smanek 16y ago

IIRC, it's closer to 10-15% of harvard grads go into finance. If you expand that to include 'business', 'management', and 'consulting' it's something more like 30-40%. Still no where near what you claim.