I won't bore you with a detailed recapitulation of David Brooks' column about some kind of Goldilocks government, but I do want to draw your attention to a single sentence that represents an often repeated sentiment:
The geniuses flock to finance, not industry.Other, perhaps, than these geniuses' own self-testimony, I can see exactly no reason to believe that this is true; indeed, I see every reason to believe the opposite. Thieves aren't geniuses, and though there are certainly some whizbang mathletes on Wall Street, it's not as if loudmouth asshole business-major twenty-somethings are actually building or programming the blackbox Culture Minds that make marginal trades on gazillions of shares every picosecond.
But you know, genius is a bit of a term of art, so maybe I'm being a little harsh here. Perhaps it is possible to be a genius at inventing acronyms for repackaged assets, and yet, no, Brooks' unoriginal thesis here is not that finance is full of savants but that it is full of Leonardan superminds who, if they were not busy stealing houses and wrecking pension funds and concocting pyramid schemes, would be curing cancer and building nanotube space elevators. Um, huh, wut? How are these transferable abilities? Do you sit in the concert hall and think to yourself, wow, that Hilary Hahn is a great young violinist; I bet she'd make an even better exotic particle physicist!
Google and Facebook and the Terminator-building department of Carnegie Mellon University and the Doctors Moreaux at Monsanto etc. do not actually seem to have trouble attracting young mad scientists; they do not seem to be chewing their nails in existential worry that either the next Einstein or the next Edison is pretending to work late at Goldman Sachs instead of inventing warp drive.
Why, it's almost as if this idea of all our native geniuses dashing to Wall Street were . . . oh, you know, proposed and promoted by Wall Street. More drivers are switching to Geico! Great taste, less filling! The ultimate driving machine! It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno!
39 comments:
Well, there isn't a literal connection, Dude.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves down to Wall Street at dawn looking for an angry fix...
Regardless of who is or isn't smart here, US finance may be a special case of Dutch disease, where bullshit stands in as the natural resource.
It's funny, too, that you mentioned google and facebook as examples of a lack of brain drain, as both of them, but google especially, have built a business on poaching NASA and former bell labs employees to work on advertising and the "poke" feature.
Y'know, for kids!
Kurt Vonnegut remarked, re the passage Montag has quoted, that he didn't think the best mind of his generation were English majors in college.
One thing we know for a certainty though is that there are no geniuses wasting their talents on the New York Times editorial page.
"Leonardan superminds". Like the sound of that, but wtf?
One thing we know for a certainty though is that there are no geniuses wasting their talents on the New York Times editorial page.
I take it you haven't seen the latest opus from Stanley Fish. Although, he might qualify as an idiot savant.
He probably should have said "Da Vincian".
Not delivery? Are you shitting me?
great as usual but i concede davidv this;that many of the best thinkers trained is engineering, chemistry, physics and math are lured to wal st with big capitalist pig $$$$$$, just because of thier math and mathy probelm solving abilities. I agree with you that its broderific to suggest that da genises go ta wal st. as if all of them or even most of them (although its clear they arent making their way into jazz, rock or pop these days) go to wal st.
IOZ, if you weren't so clever with the phrases I would be disappointed. Brooks is such an easy target.
You have a post tag called "morons"? Isn't that implied in pretty much every post?
mistah charley,
Yeah, I think it's safe to say that Ginsberg may have been engaging in a bit of self-aggrandizement-by-association with that line. "The best minds of my own exceedingly limited social circle" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Ioz, there is something else at play here that you may have missed. Brooks is betraying that tautological class bias, which holds as an axiom that if you are wealthy and successful then you are so by virtue of superior innate abilities. The wealthy are geniuses by definition according to this world-view. Now let's see if the usual caste of characters exploit their chance to hijack this thread and expound on their racial-genetic theories of intelligence.
although its clear they arent making their way into jazz, rock or pop these days
How wrong you are... There is fantastic music going on all around you - you just need to do more work to find it, as those who recognize genius stopped going into the recording industry long ago. Or maybe the same self-promoting genius 'thieves' who wander Wall St. took over the recording industry long ago...
They were Culture Minds, Dude?
HOWL
Say what you will about the tenets of Eudaimonaic Posthumanism, but at least it's an ethos.
Justin, Justin, Justin...
I think the phrase you had in mind was: 'Round up the usual suspects'.
Idiot savant works around these parts, too.
Hmm. Nony above is right. Leaving the questions of "genius" aside, the examples of braininess that IOZ uses (particle physics, engineering, etc) actually ARE the kinds of fields that get their talent poached by Wall Street. A lot of very smart (meaning: good grades, high test scores) kids at MIT with majors in physics, math, computer science, and engineering actually do end up working on Wall Street. Some do this because they can't find a job doing what they actually want to do; some because they really like money; some because they become cynical about the system after they've already invested their youth in it, and so decide they'd rather be its beneficiaries than its tools.
actually ARE the kinds of fields that get their talent poached by Wall Street.
That would be one for every hundred morons with an MBA from Harvard.
@ lucid
from about 1925-1975 was a "golden age" of American folk music. Im including Blues, Jazz, Grand Ol' Opry and the Rock n Roll and Pop that was derived from them. Probably its no coincidence that 25-75 was a very creative and prodcutive era in America in general. You have a point about the way music is produced commercialy though. the great producers like Tommy Dowd, and the great impressarios like Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, were just as much "in it for the money" as any studio hack today, but they had no idea what was going to sell. they "threw it against the wall to see what would stick. there was a plenty of bad music mixed in with the good. still there was a whole lot more good than is being made now.
knowing nothing about finance beyond what i read in non-financial media, i feel perfectly comfortable saying that wall street folk are stooopid. dumb bastards shoulda gone to oberlin, they'd totally have a blog by now.
"still there was a whole lot more good than is being made now"
I'd take Autobahn over June Carter any day of the week
The geniuses flock to finance, not industry. we go where the money is.
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Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Regular thieves aren't geniuses because it isn't renumerative. People willing to risk jail-time for sub-minimum wage rewards are generally a combination of not too bright and with poor impulse control. Lots of MBAs may be assholes, but they're smarter than average. The average American is dumber than the average commenter on political blogs. And the average American rightly considers the average criminal to be considerably dumber than themselves. The Wall Street quants may not be as bright as the superstars who dominate pure math/physics (and whose ego is entirely wrapped around that intellectual game to the exclusion of other mindshares), but that's like saying James Simons isn't as rich as John Paulson.
That second link is a reference to "g", short for "general intelligence". Leaving aside the basis of "intelligence", performance in any task commonly thought to rely on intelligence or cognitive ability show correlation with each other (the exceptions I've heard of are rhythm, recognizing faces, and I think vegetable picking). So someone good at bullshitting investors could be doing something more useful even if they weren't near the top of the heap in endeavors which don't require bullshitting. So not Leonardos, but we don't live in an Ayn Rand novel.
knowing nothing about finance beyond what i read in non-financial media, i feel perfectly comfortable saying that wall street folk are stooopid.
yeah, that's the problem. we need to listen to the geniuses themselves tell us how smart they are without any of those pesky empirical facts getting in the way. obviously it's only propaganda that makes people think that maybe these people are just crooks.
fuck off and drop dead, you useless burlap sack full of diseased, squirming shit.
In Liquidated, Karen Ho describes the process of recruiting for the finance industry. It basically involves holding a lot of events at Harvard and Princeton, and constantly telling the undergrads who show up that they will be working with the most brilliant minds in the country. About half of the undergrads at those two schools were winding up on Wall Street at the height. If you think the geniuses are concentrated at those schools, then, yes, they go to finance. If you think they are mostly a bunch of overpriviledged douchebags, no.
nony @ 8:10
you sure sound like a man rich in empirical fact.
Solomon was a Marine and went to public school. Let the ignorance continue...
Maybe the best minds of our generation are working in hedge funds, for the defense industry, petrochemical companies, Monsanto, pfizer, and Ely Lilly. No doubt they all sit around reading Blink and Freakonomics.
To quote on from the small circle of friends "No job is too dirty for a scientist"
We vant ze money Lebowski!
Thanks for the rec, anony at 8:50. I like Todd Harrison's (SUNY - Syracuse alum, iirc) recounting of days on Wall St, working with that f'n lunatic Jim Cramer. Yes, it's a special kind of genius on Wall St.
Anon @ 10:54---
Between this IOZ post and the one just before, the immortal Astley should be adapted thusly:
"Never gonna knock you up,
Never gonna jew you down....."
As someone with an engineering degree, I would love to sell out to Wall Street. Sadly, they aren't buying.
@ enron
perhaps, and if we were talking only about "autobahn" or june cater, it would be autobahn, 1 june cater 0. until we counted some more votes. cue the rick roll
@anon 10:54
wow. wasnt it genius the way rick got "lie" and "goodbye" in there? cause lie and goodbye sound almost the same, for some reason. its uncanny. too bad his career was tragically cut short by only having one song that top 40stations would play. There had to be more words that sounded nearly alike we could have been amazed by, every other verse or two.
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