The vampire squid is not looking to gift you with the means to do good in the world, it is out to devour minds and turn them into more tentacles with which to suck the lifeblood out of the world.
I know people who have worked and are working on Wall St. Your overactive imagination is better suited to writing gothic horror than to speaking about reality.
If there’s something inaccurate about Izeinwinter’s characterization (and I bet there is), just tell us what it is. Since you are a person on the internet, the fact that you are personally acquainted with someone gives us virtually no relevant additional information about them.
If there’s something inaccurate about Izeinwinter’s characterization
Yes, it bears no relationship to reality.
“institutionally set up to impose immense sunk costs on new entrants”—that’s not true at all. The high burnout rate shows that there is not much in the way of sunk costs in the industry. The sunk costs are in education—typically investment banks take their pick from the graduates of top-10 MBA programs which are not cheap in either time, money, or effort. Take a look at medical interns for comparison.
“become willing to undertake actions that they would in the normal course of their lives have balked at for reasons of morals, decency or basic sanity.”—evidence, please. This is just scaremongering.
“The vampire squid...”—just an attempt at emotional manipulation.
I would have called it motivated cognition except that there is not even much cognition here, just agitprop.
Eh.. There are oceans of phone recordings and emails that got seized via court order detailing rampantly criminal behavior having gotten utterly normalized.
HCBC being effectively an arm of the drug cartels, the interbank rate setting scandal, the entire CDO debacle and the way business was conducted during the runup to the crisis, the hilarious interoffice memos of goldman sacks. There is no end to it, and the settlements levied against these criminal enterprises are mostly a bad joke—as they are almost invariably smaller than the proceeds of the crime. Finance is operating in a fun-house reality where you can steal 100 million, pay a 40 million fine and walk away laughing, and as a result very large parts of the finance industry has predictably decayed to the point of being a criminal enterprise. If pointing this out is agitprop.. We kind of need more agitprop. ¨
The high burnout rates are actually very encouraging - it strengthens my faith in the better nature of people.
It seems like it might be worth distinguishing between “this is an industry with a lot of scandalously bad behaviour” and “everything about this industry is bad”. It’s clear that the first of these is true of finance, and I bet it always was and always will be. The second is what you seem to be claiming. It doesn’t follow from the first.
The level of bad behavior is not an invariable constant over time and location, but follows from local values - the social norms that mean that some things are just not done, and secondly, the effectiveness of law enforcement against violations of formal rules. Both of those are at a depressing nadir at the present time. (in the english speaking finance world)
I know people who have worked and are working on Wall St. Your overactive imagination is better suited to writing gothic horror than to speaking about reality.
.. I do write gothic horror. How’d you guess? :)
There was a waft of certain… stylistic aroma :-D
If there’s something inaccurate about Izeinwinter’s characterization (and I bet there is), just tell us what it is. Since you are a person on the internet, the fact that you are personally acquainted with someone gives us virtually no relevant additional information about them.
Yes, it bears no relationship to reality.
“institutionally set up to impose immense sunk costs on new entrants”—that’s not true at all. The high burnout rate shows that there is not much in the way of sunk costs in the industry. The sunk costs are in education—typically investment banks take their pick from the graduates of top-10 MBA programs which are not cheap in either time, money, or effort. Take a look at medical interns for comparison.
“become willing to undertake actions that they would in the normal course of their lives have balked at for reasons of morals, decency or basic sanity.”—evidence, please. This is just scaremongering.
“The vampire squid...”—just an attempt at emotional manipulation.
I would have called it motivated cognition except that there is not even much cognition here, just agitprop.
Eh.. There are oceans of phone recordings and emails that got seized via court order detailing rampantly criminal behavior having gotten utterly normalized.
HCBC being effectively an arm of the drug cartels, the interbank rate setting scandal, the entire CDO debacle and the way business was conducted during the runup to the crisis, the hilarious interoffice memos of goldman sacks. There is no end to it, and the settlements levied against these criminal enterprises are mostly a bad joke—as they are almost invariably smaller than the proceeds of the crime. Finance is operating in a fun-house reality where you can steal 100 million, pay a 40 million fine and walk away laughing, and as a result very large parts of the finance industry has predictably decayed to the point of being a criminal enterprise. If pointing this out is agitprop.. We kind of need more agitprop. ¨
The high burnout rates are actually very encouraging - it strengthens my faith in the better nature of people.
It seems like it might be worth distinguishing between “this is an industry with a lot of scandalously bad behaviour” and “everything about this industry is bad”. It’s clear that the first of these is true of finance, and I bet it always was and always will be. The second is what you seem to be claiming. It doesn’t follow from the first.
The level of bad behavior is not an invariable constant over time and location, but follows from local values - the social norms that mean that some things are just not done, and secondly, the effectiveness of law enforcement against violations of formal rules. Both of those are at a depressing nadir at the present time. (in the english speaking finance world)
Don’t forget incentives.