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It is a shame that the best and brightest get funneled into zero sum laptop jobs in this era of financialization. Imagine the outcomes that an educated, civic-minded intellectual powerhouse could create in their home country if they were properly educated and pushed towards making an effective difference. It'd be a real shame if a series of checkboxes just led to this raw genius sitting optimizing financial transactions instead of contributing at all to any sort of human development.
*Excited Chinese noises*
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Something like >30% of Ivy League graduates go straight to Wall Street. I assume another >30% go straight to SF to optimize addicting people to rage slop (I actually think this is a worse use of human capital than playing esoteric financial games against each other).
I'm glad you highlighted the zero-sum part. I think about this a lot.
I'm quite pro capital markets, as they're clearly the best mechanism we have as a civilization to allocate limited resources thus far. And both PE and VC, despite their reputations, play extremely important roles in the "ecosystem" as do banks and institutional funds and everyone else.
I doubt this is controversial here, but I think capital allocation mechanisms/markets are one of the greatest human inventions along with steam power, electricity, etc.
But I wonder a LOT about when (and maybe we didn't, but I doubt it) we hit the point of extremely diminishing returns/zero-sum with the financial sector.
Because it's obvious that no financial markets results in terrible price discovery and terrible allocation of resources. Having great capital markets means good price discovery means resources allocated well and the human race benefits as a whole as great ideas are rapidly rewarded and scaled. The pie grows for everyone.
But at some point, or many points over time, it does very much seem like there was a shift from "making the pie bigger hy effectively allocating capital" to "getting increasingly sophisticated at fighting eachother for slices of the pie as it grows slowly in the background". I don't think this was a nefarious plot by hedge fund managers. Ironically I think it was probably my man Marx's chickens coming home to roost. Economic growth in the developed nations has slowed a lot since the "golden age of capitalism" , the pie doesn't get bigger faster like it used to. So it's a natural shift , but it sucks.
If I had to pick a moment, my gut says somewhere around the invention of high frequency trading. That is pure zero-sum fuck fuck games.
Yeah but you also get people optimizing purely for the allocation of capital thus all the bubbles and semi-scams you see in financial fields. You can do a lot of hard, intricate work at optimizing your arm-wrestling techniques, but when end of the day it's just PVP arm-wrestling there are limits to what you can derive out of that in the end.
Also frankly as somebody who lives in the 'developing world' and meanders around it a lot, it feels in pure material terms like the best parts of mid-tier countries are perfectly on par in terms of human comfort with the richest Western countries. There hasn't really been that much innovation in terms of stuff like building houses or infrastructure in the last decade or two, and later adopters get the advantages of being able to build it with the benefit of experience plus generally having less ridiculous red tape to handle.
Not at all, the productivity of the construction sector in North America has been flat/down over the last 20 years
Such a big issue, and no one is talking about it
Yeah and later adopters have social technologies like 'removing homeless and drug addicts from the commons' that mean that frequently the nicest parts of the developing world are better than world cities.
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Imagine a Haitian Elon Musk returning to Haiti.
Oh, right, he gets set on fire.
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Shame I agree, alas the state doesn't fund jobs where these people can actually make a difference with salaries anywhere near the ballpark of what high finance pays. They don't even have to match the pay, just provide something that doesn't make it look like one is working for free and is "respectable", even paying 50-60% of high finance would be enough to pull a lot of people over to working for the public good rather than playing zero sum financial games. But hey, the common man would throw a tantrum if it turned out the British state was paying clever 22 year olds 3x the salary of the prime minister to improve things and generate an order of magnitude extra value for society than what they're getting paid, even if it were below what that 22 year could get on the open market. I don't blame the government, at least not directly; they still have enough smart people to know what's what. I blame the populace who make it politically impossible for the government to do what's optimal.
Increasingly I disagree. You can actually achieve the same outcome by not paying people at all.
Imagine if all the senior positions in the government, MPs, ministerial positions but also the most senior civil servants were all completely unpaid. Then implement a maximum age of 55. Keep the same exam.
The civil service would be staffed entirely by the children of the rich who are committed to public service, plus a few people sponsored by the unions (who, again, are already in politics). You would get some champagne socialists, but you get them already anyway. Most importantly, you’d cut out all the strivers. Let a man make his money and then send his son to parliament.
It wouldn’t even increase corruption, since the corrupt will be so anyway on a current civil service salary.
Or just want to collect power to further enrich themselves and their friends?!
It can always get worse, but also lmao true.
I actually think we should do the opposite. We should make elected politicians salaries approx $1million yearly for a member of Congress or other equivalent in other countries. I want massive competition for each seat.
The $1 million salary would also come with unfathomably harsh consequences for corruption. We're paying you fat stacks to work for the people. If you fuck with that responsibility, straight to gulag.
Have to agree with this. No one takes senior government positions for the salary. They take it for the insider trading and revolving door to industry sinecures. I'd go a step further and just put a flat out lifetime gains cap that gets progressively lower with increasing rank. I often wonder if the benefit of better aligning incentives away from corruption would be worth giving, as a crude example, a >1 million per year stipend for life to each of the president and first degree family members but completely disallowing any other source of income or gifts.
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Your proposed model is actually not too dissimilar to what used to be the case before 1911. MPs used to be unpaid before that point and the civil service was mostly gentlemen of independent means or (more regularly) their sons. It sort of worked because everyone involved was mostly properly educated and formed and despite the usual minor corruption was genuinely invested in seeing Britain stay Great.
The Roman Republic was surprsingly similar as well, the cursus honorum was ruinously expensive for everyone apart from the top patricians and therefore the people who took those positions didn't have much of an incentive to loot the state unless they were trying to prefigure Crassus or something (which of course didn't work out).
The problem is that this only works when the people at the top who take these jobs are properly forged and not merely selected. These people went to Eton and Harrow followed by Oxford before taking on their government posts and back then this was a proper rigorous education in the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. Back then these institutions didn't make you run the rat race to get in, if your stock was good and you could pay (or even if you couldn't but were academically excellent, Newton went to Cambridge on the back of nothing but his own intelligence in the 17th Century) you were in. The prestige you got from graduating form these places came from what they taught you and put you through, not because you were chosen by admissions committees as being worthy from amongst the huddled masses yearning to be given entry.
These people were formed properly before their public service began and this formation was necessary for them to do a good job. However today who are the sons of the rich by and large? With few exceptions it's mostly people who made their money in finance and technology, people who don't have much "institutional pedigree" in the intellectual sense and got where they are through "sharp practice" which of course percolates down to their children's mindset as well.
Their upbringing by and large consists of expensive private schools that optimize relentlessly for university admissions: little Johnny should do 8 weeks working in a lab with Prof. X on Drosphilla not because he cares one whit about cellular biology but because if he gets his name on a paper doing something menial but necessary then that will help him get his admission at Princemouth after which he's basically set for life. Handing governance to this class on the theory that their wealth frees them from financial incentive is like handing surgery to someone on the theory that their steady hands free them from the need for medical training.
What is far better is to have the formation without the careerism. The solution isn't to make the positions unpaid so that only the rich need apply but rather to make the formation so demanding and the culture so oriented toward duty that the careerists self-select out. ENA at its best did exactly this: the sortie, the ranking system, the culture of public service, all of it was designed to filter out people who were merely ambitious and retain people who were ambitious for the right reasons. That it failed to do so perfectly is not an argument against the principle, merely against the execution, and certainly not justification for giving it the chop.
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A man could take a year's savings or even less and try to make effective changes to their place of origin, as well. Instead of abandoning it in favor of zero sum absurdities.
Those "effective changes to their place of origin" aren't limited by money or (usually) even talent. They're limited because those in power at the place of origin are actively preventing them from happening.
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