Counterfactual: if you did not enter finance, would significantly fewer people get duped, lose their homes, their access to a college education? Does your marginal contribution to those negative externalities exceed the good you can do with earning that extra money?
Yes, unless you think that, on average, the finance-minded person who you out-competed for the job will give up and go home, or will switch to something like research.
Unlike, say, posts in a state bureaucracy, where there may be a fixed number of positions available, the supply of jobs in the finance industry is elastic with respect to the number of people seeking jobs...if you can’t get a job with Goldman Sachs, you can try to convince a smaller firm that wasn’t planning on hiring to take you on anyway, or you can try to raise money with friends to start your own fund.
In any given economy, there are a fixed number of arbitrage opportunities that (a) pose minimal negative externalities, (b) are lucrative enough to pay your $100K plus salary, and (c) can be discovered and exploited by a person of average talent. In most of the Western world at the moment, there are significantly more financiers than would be required to exploit these opportunities; the remainder are necessarily exploiting opportunities that fail one or more of the criteria. We are assuming, for purposes of the argument, that you want to make a lot of money but you’re not a finance genius, so if you add another financier to the economy by switching careers, you must be increasing negative externalities.
Counterfactual: if you did not enter finance, would significantly fewer people get duped, lose their homes, their access to a college education? Does your marginal contribution to those negative externalities exceed the good you can do with earning that extra money?
EDIT: s/network externalities/negative externalities
Yes, unless you think that, on average, the finance-minded person who you out-competed for the job will give up and go home, or will switch to something like research.
Unlike, say, posts in a state bureaucracy, where there may be a fixed number of positions available, the supply of jobs in the finance industry is elastic with respect to the number of people seeking jobs...if you can’t get a job with Goldman Sachs, you can try to convince a smaller firm that wasn’t planning on hiring to take you on anyway, or you can try to raise money with friends to start your own fund.
In any given economy, there are a fixed number of arbitrage opportunities that (a) pose minimal negative externalities, (b) are lucrative enough to pay your $100K plus salary, and (c) can be discovered and exploited by a person of average talent. In most of the Western world at the moment, there are significantly more financiers than would be required to exploit these opportunities; the remainder are necessarily exploiting opportunities that fail one or more of the criteria. We are assuming, for purposes of the argument, that you want to make a lot of money but you’re not a finance genius, so if you add another financier to the economy by switching careers, you must be increasing negative externalities.