Smart Guys on Wall Street

Nicholas Kristof asks the profound question today in his column: Is banking bad? He gives the equally enlightening answer: no. Only if you read down to the end of the column filled with such nuggets do you find the one truly revealing fact:

In 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, 47 percent of Harvard's graduating class  headed for consulting firms and the financial sector — a huge misallocation of human capital.

In a NY Times op-ed essay in the midst of the financial crisis, Calvin Trillin presented the thesis that the origin of the financial crisis is that smart guys began working on Wall Street. There is no doubt truth to this and it goes hand in hand with the extraordinary rise of the entire financial and banking industries in the world. What needs to be seen, however, is that the reason smart guys have come to Wall Street is not simply because they wanted or needed that second ocean-faring yacht. Rather, it is that in an era of unbridled capitalism, self-worth and purpose are determined above all by one’s standing in the game of workplace success.

When all higher culture and spiritual values have been devalued, the one way that a person can secure meaning and sense to life is through the objective measurement of success that capitalism offers. In such a world, the pursuit of wealth, as Max Weber saw, is stripped of all need for spiritual justification, and emerges simply as a sport, a game in which not only the spoils, but also the sense of significance and wholeness, go to the winners.

-RB