The wail of the 1%

“People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”<p>I think this quote symbolizes what's wrong with Wall street. There's too much of a focus on making money by any means necessary rather than doing what's best for your employer and clients in the long term. No matter how your incentives work, there's simply no way to have an incentive-based compensation system that can't be gamed.

"I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money. If they keep compensation capped, I don’t know how the deals get done. They’re taking Wall Street and throwing it in the East River.”<p>Maybe that's the problem. Maybe if people weren't compensated so disproportionately, and if there wasn't so much pressure for short term profits, they'd concentrate on doing deals that were more in line with economic fundamentals rather than instinct.

The issue with Wall Street overcompensation has more to do with what has happened to nearly every other profession in the past 3 decades: utter fucking meltdown. Academia: the job market for PhDs is so terrible as to constitute a glaring and likely mortal embarrassment to the profession. Law: big-firm ("biglaw") attorneys now face a single-digit percent chance of making partnership, but are still expected to work hours that would be reasonable only if eventual partnership were guaranteed. Medicine: doctors' standards of living are being continually eroded by the scumbag bureaucrats who staff the health insurance companies. Manufacturing: in the Midwest, the recession began in 1980 and hasn't stopped yet. Infrastructure: falling apart due to low investment. At the same time, housing costs, medical bills, and tuitions have skyrocketed while commodities like food and gas have been more expensive. Enough numerical gymnastics are employed to make inflation appear low (and, thus, real GDP growth seem high) but if the numbers were accurately reflected, inflation would be closer to 5-7% and real GDP growth would be flat or slightly negative; the entire 2000s decade would appear to be a recession, which is what it has been for most Americans. What changed in 2008, for most Americans, is that the rich fell down too, and quite visibly; thus, people became less embarrassed to talk about it. It's no longer an admission of personal failure to talk about how bad things are.<p>The result is an economy that shows a lack of pluralism: finance dominates, all other professions suffer. Most Americans don't understand the complexities of the situation and liken Wall Street to a cancer responsible for the atrophy of the real economy.<p>I don't want to see finance get destroyed, but a return to a pluralistic economy where people assume roles appropriate to their abilities and behaviors. The perverse irony here is that capital markets are supposed to efficiently allocate resources, yet the era of the market-state has utterly misallocated the nation's talent, strangling academia while directing a disproportionate share of talented people to finance, one of the industries in which they're least useful.

Is this anything other than the utter tripe that the first paragraph would suggest?