the random oracle

One positive side-effect of this financial crisis is that fewer people will stop working in finance.  A significant fraction of my friends went into finance after college and I don’t think there has been a single one who has said to me, “I love my job, I think I’m helping people, I’m improving the world, and I feel fulfilled professionally.”  Instead what I heard was that, “Well you know the hours suck, my boss is an asshole, and I’m basically skimming money off the top of a big bubbling cauldron of mysterious financial goo, but at least my bonus last year was six figures.”

Finance has attracted so many talented, hard-working people into its fold with the lure of easy money, a fast lifestyle, and early retirement.  It offered an easy route for kids who might have come from modest family backgrounds to become multi-millionaires within years of graduating from college, easily making their parents’ lifetime incomes many times over.

And the rest of the world has suffered as these bright minds were tempted into what essentially is the task of shifting money around.  Now granted the allocation of capital is an important task; money that sits in a pile collecting dust does no one any good.  But somehow the amount of money that was made doing this investment and redistribution was always surreal, and now we’ve found out that indeed it was all a mirage.

Maybe if more of the people who went into finance had gone instead into government and figured out sensible ways of regulating the investment banks maybe this crisis would never have happened.  Maybe if more of them had gone into science and worked on renewable fuels we would be one step closer to energy independence.  Maybe if more of them had gone into the civil service we would have better diplomats and friendlier relations with the rest of the world, we would have a healthcare system that isn’t falling apart, and we would have teachers who actually know the subjects they are entrusted to teach.

And maybe after the dust settles after this crisis people will re-consider their alternatives more carefully and choose one of those jobs instead of finance.  We will always need bankers and financiers, but do we really need so many?  And does finance really deserve to employ such a large fraction of our best and brightest?  Without the lure of 6-figure bonuses (that had little correlation to actual value created), maybe we will shift back towards an economy and a society that actually produces wealth, culture, innovation, and prosperity instead of producing the illusion thereof.