There’s so much insanity in this piece about financiers whining about how everyone hates them that it’s hard to know what to pick out. I’ll just say this. Of all the things these guys don’t “get” — and there are a lot of them — it’s that nobody is particularly frightened by the thought that this crew might decide that the new world sucks and they’re going to stop putting in the long hours and get out of the banking game. If all of America’s surgeons decided they were overtaxed and going to quit, then people would worry. Even if all the investment bankers slinked off to Galt’s Gulch we would miss them.
But a world without investment bankers? Without hedge fund managers? Who would care? Who would miss them? I would be comforted by the idea that quantitatively adept Americans were streaming out of the no-longer-attractive finance sector and going to work designing computer chips or whatever. What’s disturbing is the vision of a universe in which lots of people want to go work in finance.
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