<p>The reason prop traders and hedge fund managers are well compensated is that they’re good at helping rich people make even more money. The rich people then pay them a cut for their services. It says nothing about how much value they add to society. </p>
<p>Then again, I don’t see any way the government (or anybody for that matter) can bring a stop to this. So as long as the party’s still going, why would you settle for a lab technician job when you can get in on the action? Makes no sense unless you really like science/engineering for its own sake.</p>
<p>If you really want to do something of value to society, join the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Those guys don’t get much money.</p>
<p>Hahaha “hopelessly stupid”…high school kids talking about i-banking? It’s almost as if the other 99 percent of the world struggling for grains of food doesn’t exist in their developing minds.</p>
<p>A. Less than 20% of the world is starving.
B. Get off your effing high horse. What have you done for the impoverished? And what can you do for them as a scientist except come up with technology they will never see? In fact, investment bankers and those involved in finance have the greatest potential for humanitarian change. Venture capitalists invest in growing agribusiness in Sub-Saharan Africa to get local farmers on their feet.
C. You’re the reason why people hate liberals. Stop giving us a bad name and being so pugnacious.</p>
<p>When are you going to wake up and realize that not everybody is constantly thinking about the impoverished of the world or ways to help them… the world doesn’t work like that. People cannot force themselves to care too deeply about certain things. You’re blessed if otherwise.</p>
<p>A. Billions of American dollars are helping to support the less privileged.
B. We need innovators (scientists, entrepreneurs, finance people, etc) to help all of humanity.</p>
Perhaps I should rephrase. Getting funding for good ideas is pretty easy. The fact that 25MM+ was gotten in the second round of financing (if you can even call 100M a round of financing) shows as much. At that point it’s merely the terms - how little ownership stake can be given up in order to get the funding required to grow the business. Funding is required, but who it comes from is generally unimportant.</p>
<p>If you are a small tech company with a profitable business model (or one that could potentially generate huge profits) you get offers for funding quite frequently. That’s just my impression from friends that work in start ups.</p>
<p>I’m incredibly selfish. I’ll admit that. I’m from India, and about 45 years back my family was nearly as ‘impoverished’. We (I say we, even though I wasn’t born then) used to live with 5 other families in a 1 bedroom flat. My grandfather had to go outside and study under a street lamp because there was no space, and no electricity inside.
Until about 30 years back he used to go to work on a bicycle because he couldn’t afford anything more.</p>
<p>So don’t talk to me about ‘impoverished’. I see poverty everywhere I go, everyday. The guy who comes to teach me how to drive, the shopkeeper of the grocery store down the street, the man dying on the edge of the street because there are no resources to take care of him, I see all that, and that’s why I want the best for myself. Its so that I can bring my family above all of this. If, later on, I get the opportunity to give back to society, I will. But I’m not going to sacrifice my career for this.</p>
<p>You want to know why Indians and Chinese work so hard? Its because we’ve seen the alternative first-hand.</p>
<p>“maxellis brought out a good point. A person’s compensation usually correlates with his/her productivity/contribution to the society (though not always the case). Bankers are in it to contribute to the world. Why shouldn’t the smartest people on earth aim to use their talent to contribute as much as they can to the world? They should, and that’s why they pursue high paying jobs in finance, medicine, and law, because these jobs typically enables them to contribute more than jobs in other fields.
If the smartest people didn’t go into finance, then it’s likely that most if not all products and services in this world would be produced much less efficiently, lowering everyone’s standards of living overall.
If you are suggesting that a person taking on a math job would generally contribute more to society than an investment banker, then please back it up with evidence.”</p>
<p>This is crazy ********. Bankers don’t really do ANYTHING for ANYONE that contributes to the world’s prosperity so much so that they are deserving of the ludicrous amounts of compensation they so greedily desire and frequently receive. Compensation isn’t necessarily a measure of how valuable you are to society. You can sell a billion ice cream bars and become a billionaire but in the end you’re still just selling ice cream. You aren’t nearly as valuable as a scientist who is researching a cure for cancer.</p>
<p>“This is crazy ********. Bankers don’t really do ANYTHING for ANYONE that contributes to the world’s prosperity so much so that they are deserving of the ludicrous amounts of compensation they so greedily desire and frequently receive.”</p>
<p>If you are so good at selling ice cream, as illustrated by your huge success, then you are making people happy and contributing to society.
Do you even know how the world operates? People like you can’t see beyond the superficial. You can’t see the value added to people’s well-being provided by a relative healthy financial (though there are glitches once every now and then) and legal system.</p>
<p>“if you are so good at selling ice cream, as illustrated by your huge success, then you are making people happy and contributing to society.
Do you even know how the world operates? People like you can’t see beyond the superficial. You can’t see the value added to people’s well-being provided by a relative healthy financial (though there are glitches once every now and then) and legal system”</p>
<p>Sure, but you’re also a heavy contributor the growing obesity in this country and in the end, people are fickle and can and will like just about whatever shiny or tasty thing is put in front of them. This doesn’t mean that whatever they like inherently has societal value in the eyes of the objective. Just because you sell crack to people, and they are happy and you are consequently rich, doesn’t mean you are “contributing” to society in any meaningful way.</p>
<p>And don’t even get me started on the legal system. Most of it is just poppycock concocted by greedy lawyers who, with the use of overly technical jargon, have made the legal system all but unnavigable by anyone that isn’t a lawyer. You need a lawyer to understand the people’s law–a set of governing rules and regulations that meant to be and once was easily readable and understandable by the common man. Flash forward to the future and lawyers have forever guaranteed the continued survival and prosperity of their profession by making it so that the layman of society cannot easily decipher the rules of the land that govern his entire way of life. He needs a lawyer to argue his case in court and three more to understand just the conventions and definitions of the entire process in itself.</p>
<p>Working at a hedge fund, regardless of whether or not the majority wish to admit it, is solely a goal predicated on the prospect of amassing enormous amounts of ill-gotten wealth.</p>
<p>You completely missed his point about spreading happiness = contributing to society. Tell me, what does the Make A Wish Foundation do? They don’t add any measurable value to society. They spread happiness. By your logic, they shouldn’t do that, because crack spreads happiness too.</p>
<p>"Wow. You just compared crack to ice cream. "</p>
<p>My point is that selling crack and ice cream can people happy while concurrently resulting in ludicrous amounts of compensation. Through this example, I illustrate that IvyPBear is wrong in his thinking that compensation that leads to happiness and therefore meaningfully contributes to the fabric of society relative to social workers and doctors and research scientists. If you cannot say a wealthy crack dealer and ice cream merchant equally contribute to the fabric of society, given the fact that both support a destructive and unhealthy habits (addiction and obesity) while amassing mounts of ill-gotten wealth and makeshift happiness, then I find it difficult to say that bankers deserve a different definition of greater merit.</p>
<p>Bankers do beneficial work of a kind, just as crack dealers and ice cream men do in supporting happiness, but regardless of what bankers actually do with themselves, it is never and will never be morally equivalent to the good that comes from the efforts of those many professions fixated on helping and healing and improving the human condition. Bankers, in essence, subsist on human failure.</p>
<p>Well, at that time Google did not have a profitable business model. It was before they came up with selling ads, which made it so profitable. Back then it was just a search engine. It was popular, but they did not how they would make money.</p>
<p>If you are trying to imply it is not a word, its been commonly accepted that either more stupid or stupider are acceptable. You are also only serving to further my point that most of this thread is a waste of time, so thanks.</p>