Wall Street Smarts and the shift of desired work
One of my favourite rants is that of the generational shift of “what I want to be when I grow up”. When I was at school it was still, just about, desirable to become a professional; something that your parents & teachers thought acceptable and a profession where you can be of real use to society (and your standing in society) : An educator, a lawyer, a doctor/physio etc. What changed was something in the mind set of people (including some in my generation) to say “I want to make money”. It’s a sad state of affairs and it appears that I’m not the only one who feels this has massive implications from things other than pure moral standing.
The following is a short snippet that seems to be doing the rounds on the net right now titled Wall Street Smarts from the NYTimes.
“So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”
..
“When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”
Some are also suggesting that this is the problem with the tech industry in places like Microsoft. I’m not sure about that but it is interesting to see how this mindset with making money doesn’t neccesarily make the world turn around - it perhaps corrupts it.
(Cynical subtext: I’m just bitter that I don’t make lots of money)
