
Is Wall Street Beneath Business Students' Standards? - lujim
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-12/is-wall-street-beneath-business-students-standards-
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p4wnc6
What kind of job can you get that actually is ethical? I don't know of any. To
me, it seems like you just have to pick which vertical scam you want to give
your labor to, and choosing between them based on which affords you a
better/more comfortable life isn't unreasonable.

If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But
what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine?
Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these
ethical? Some fields may have generally nicer people within them, but the
people on top (executives, university or hospital administrators, corporate
attorneys, investors, whatever) are generally paid way beyond the value they
add through capital or labor, and implement many policies or pursue regulatory
capture or whatever else to ensure this type of arrangement persists to their
benefit.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that it's a problem of mate
selection. If by agreeing to work in a certain field you are tainted with a
social stigma that prevents you from attracting the type of mate you want,
that might motivate you to use some kind of ethics argument as a
rationalization for the true behind-the-scenes status argument.

But I have a hard time believing this matters to finance. Money still tends to
be a huge factor in mate selection, ethics be damned. Maybe it matters if
you're very low-level in a huge bureaucratic bank, so you get all of the
social stigma downside but not a lot of the financial upside. But apart from
that... I don't see it. No other choice available to you is significantly
"more ethical" than just personally being honest and working in a financial
corporation whose higher-level scamminess you can't influence or control.

I mean, it's certainly depressing that it's like this... but this is just how
it is.

~~~
smt88
> _If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But
> what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government?
> Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers
> any of these ethical?_

You're not making an argument. You're just dismissing perfectly valid (and
widely-held) viewpoints as though they're foregone conclusions.

I have friends in education and research that harm no one, make very little
money, and make the world a better place. It's easy to argue that their jobs
are ethical. They create more value than they accept. Many scientists are in
this category.

~~~
p4wnc6
I don't know the specifics of your friends' jobs, and with more data about
them I am completely open to being wrong about it.

Most people in financial jobs also harm no one, and though they accept higher
wages, they also create far more value, and there could be endless arguments
over whether or not there is trickle-down value, whether managing pension
plans adds value, etc.

But what concerns me more is that most employees in any organization exist
solely for the short term gain of their bosses (somewhere up the food chain).
A fourth-grade teacher exists more to make a principal look good for
advancement to superintendent than for endowing society with the value of
educated children. The fourth grade teacher has to put up with arbitrary state
standards, political fighting between staff, inappropriate parental
involvement, turning the other way on some issues they feel strongly they
should not turn the other way on. It's a political shitstorm like anything
else, where a few people on top of something (no matter how small scale that
something may seem by comparison to a huge bank) are applying pressure to make
the teacher's job more about subservience and fealty than about efficacious
results.

I think that problems get worse and worse as you go up the academic and
research food chain. You might be able to make an argument that being a pre-
school teacher in a small rural town, or the pastor of a small community's
church (modulo one's beliefs about whether promoting religious faith can ever
be morally or ethically good), are actually "ethical" jobs, but I'm not
totally sold that you can, and I don't believe much beyond this can even enter
the discussion.

It's not so much about whether you overtly participate in something wrong.
It's about whether the aggregation of all the tiny little microscopic job
duties you do to comply with bureaucratic hierarchy ends up summing up to
unfair gains mediated towards someone who doesn't economically deserve them,
or that the gains end up being wasted.

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smt88
> _Most people in financial jobs also harm no one_

This is a complicated issue. Are you harming others by investing other
people's money into oil companies or weapons manufacturers? Are you harming
others if they expect you to make a certain return, and you fail to meet that?
(More on that below)

> _and though they accept higher wages, they also create far more value_

This is actually very, very debatable. While the finance industry is helpful
and lubricates all other parts of the economy, it's also rife with abuse. I
worked at a financial software company for a while, and you would be blown
away by the corruption, greed, and irresponsibility of that industry (among
ratings agencies, bulge-bracket banks, and hedge funds). If the general public
in the US knew about it, there would probably be mass panic.

Furthermore, a lot of finance involves wealth management, and there's no
evidence that wealth managers actually generate any value unless they're
actively, illegally gaming prices. I don't have time to get sources right now,
but it's pretty easy to Google. Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer is
very enlightening in that regard, since he admits to illegally gaming prices
because all of the top-tier wealth managers have to do it.

~~~
p4wnc6
> This is actually very, very debatable.

I agree. I just think it's just as debateable for pretty much any other mode
of employment.

I too worked in quant finance for several years. Believe me I understand. I
quit finance because of the wanton greed and dysfunctional politics. But what
I found when moving on to bright-eyed start-ups and education technology
companies was that there was just as much wanton greed and dysfunction there
(in some cases, even more).

I'm familiar with the literature on mutual funds and active managers. I worked
for a team that focused exclusively on the low volatility anomaly in equity
pricing, and our team's pitchbook was all about how most active managers lose
(and yet, we _were_ an active manager, heh).

The problem is that asset managers don't add value by growing or protecting
the value of the assets they manage. That is not what their clients want from
them nor what they pay them for, and failure to do those things is also not
why they get fired.

What really happens is that someone who sits on the board of directors for a
pension fund or some other large retirement fund, like say the association for
retired firefighters in some state, is tasked with managing some huge-to-them
pile of money from which everyone's retirement money is paid. But that task is
daunting to a non-specialist board member, and they need someone to act like a
management consultant. If the management consultant is wrong, the board member
has plausible deniability (e.g. "How could we have known ... the fancy asset
manager seemed great ... we all voted to use them.")

Using asset management companies is just a career cover-you-ass tactic for
people embedded within the pension and retirement boards themselves. It's
truly, truly not about actually growing the endowment or the plan value.

But who is to say this is bad? The "value" that someone is seeking (the
"value" of having a cover-your-ass asset manager you can fire and save face in
front of the other board members if things go bad, or milk for kudos if the
market turns up) is provided by the asset manager.

You and me both probably don't think that sort of "value" matters, but it does
matter to somebody, and they're OK paying a lot for it, and most everyday
people don't seem to care enough to do something like boycott their company's
401(k) in order to invest directly in low fee index funds themselves. So by
what standard do we judge this somewhat scammy thing as certainly worse than
all the other kinds of scammy things in all sorts of industries that go on all
the time?

I'm not trying to be cheeky when I ask. I'm _really_ asking. What's the
"ethics metric" we're supposed to use. When I just think about this stuff from
a sort of common sense "be good to people, try to add value, don't be
wasteful" perspective, finance looks a little worse than other fields, but not
that much worse. Maybe defense and government spying and torture looks
significantly worse than all the other things, but beyond that the rest of it
all just looks like one big pile of more or less equivalent scamminess.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
_Business school deans say some students who consider themselves "highly
ethical" are avoiding careers in finance because they consider the field
beneath their standards._

Hasn't this always been the case? You go in to it for the money, for the
thrill, because that's what you're in to. Or you go in to it for any number of
reasons. Maybe you consider yourself _highly ethical_ and go in to finance
because you think you can make a difference.

 _Christine Lagarde ... said ... one of her sons had told her he might not
talk to her if she were to work for a large investment bank._

Right. And one of her daughters told her she wouldn't speak to her if she
bought that dress. So what?

~~~
AC__
Christine Lagarde gives me the creeps. Back when MH17 was still fresh I was
trying to discern for myself what transpired, anyway didn't find out much just
ended up reading some pretty out there shit. Here's a note I made on it at the
time "So, I was reading a bit about the MH17 incident and stumbled upon this
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/From-CIA-assassination-cock-
ne…](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/From-CIA-assassination-cock-ne…) Basically
an article outlining some of the wild theories being circulated on the
internet in regard to the incident...but then I got to the part about
Christine Lagarde Managing Director, IMF and I figured I might as well check
out this speech and see what exactly these "cryptic uses of the number 7" were
that these people seemed to believe were present in her speech. So that
brought me to this video, an unedited, unabridged, video of her speech, given
on January 15, 2014(this date becomes important):
[https://youtu.be/LJ3oZN_dzZI](https://youtu.be/LJ3oZN_dzZI) -just so there is
no question as to when this speech was delivered here is a link to the IMF
site with a transcript of the speech "As prepared for delivery":
[http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2014/011514.htm](http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2014/011514.htm)

WTF is she saying?

All the conspiracy theory stuff aside, there are several references to the G7
in this video. The G7 was officially still the G8 at the time of this speech.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G8-](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G8-)
"(Russia)-was excluded from the forum by the other members on March 24, 2014"
and the Crimea incident didn't begin until February 23, 2014
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimea_crisis#Timeline"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimea_crisis#Timeline")

~~~
AC__
That was an impossibly fast downvote lol

~~~
peter_l_downs
Probably another conspiracy!

~~~
AC__
My comment made no claim of conspiracy, the original dailymail article did. I
simply stated the G7 was still the G8 and if anybody else were to give that
speech with 7 this and 7 that, 7-7-7, they'd be in a padded room haha.

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marssaxman
I'm surprised they're surprised. What a strange bubble they must live in.

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Animats
If the better business students think finance is unethical, that indicates
good judgment.

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falsestprophet
How does one distinguish between being ethical and highly ethical?

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peterjancelis
As a former business student, I don't remember us having standards.

