
For the Love of Money (2014) - Priem19
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html
======
_bxg1
> I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were
> talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street
> thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a
> whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look.
> I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the
> system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

> I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money,
> despite all that he had.

> From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed
> the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses
> after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher
> taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their
> bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk?
> He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix.
> Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the
> trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the
> heroin runs out.

------
ignoramous
> _I recently got an email from a hedge-fund trader who said that though he
> was making millions every year, he felt trapped and empty, but couldn’t
> summon the courage to leave... Maybe we can form a group and confront our
> addiction together... Let’s create a fund, where everyone agrees to put,
> say, 25 percent of their annual bonuses into it, and we’ll use that to help
> some of the people who actually need the money._

On that thought, when I first stumbled upon it, I found real value in jefftk's
[0] _earning to give_ line of thinking [1].

Since it is Ramdan right now, most Muslims would voluntarily [2] and
obligatorily [3] give away a portion of their wealth to the welfare of the
others.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829330)

[1] [https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-privilege-of-earning-to-
give](https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-privilege-of-earning-to-give)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadaqah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadaqah)

------
evmar
To tie this closer to what we do:

I often think of another NYT article in a similar vein, where they profiled
people in the Bay Area whose net worth was in the ~$10m range.

This is an enormous amount of money and you'd think nobody would stick at a
job they didn't like once they were at this point. As I recall in the article,
the people in this situation kept thinking "I just need a little bit more" to
enable some important next step on the luxury ladder, like horse lessons for
their children.

I found this chilling especially because as a person who is wealthy but not
that wealthy (note that if you make $40k/yr you're in the top 1% of humans
already) I could see myself making similar sorts of rationalizations, not
about luxury specifically but more around whether I have enough.

I encountered this attitude a lot in the Bay Area for the ~15 years I lived
there and it was one of the reasons I recently left -- I worried my son would
grow up around it and think that it was somehow normal behavior.

~~~
askafriend
> note that if you make $40k/yr you're in the top 1% of humans already

Ok but $40k/yr in Mississippi or Africa is markedly different from $40k/yr in
a place like the Bay Area...

