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Comment by jabretti | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to getting laid, or speculating about what's going to happen on Game of Thrones, or thinking up clever things you should have said half an hour ago, or complaining about what's wrong with Star Wars these days.

Or arguing on the internet.

Just a teeny portion of our species' intellectual output winds up creating or discovering anything of real value, but that's fine, we muddle through nonetheless. The finance industry has its role to play in ensuring the lights stay on and there's food in the supermarket.

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I don't think intellect is much of a factor in getting laid. My bet here is that intellect, or at least use of intellect, has an inverse effect on success in that area :).

The biggest difference between my example and your examples is that it's a job. This talent pool is using their working hours (and quite often most of their waking hours) pursuing a goal that provides almost nothing to society.

The "finance industry" that we're talking about here is self-serving and in most cases is having no positive relationship with the lights or the supermarket.

The transportation industry, by comparison, has a profit motive but ultimately turns human creativity and intellect into things that arguably make life better for a large number of people.

This is unfair, finance is basically an abstraction over our resource constrained world. We didn't get to choose not to live in a world with limited supplies of everything, and removing money from the equation doesn't change that constraint.

Given that we've chosen money as our method of resource allocation, it makes sense people who want access to more resources would try to optimise their profit building strategies, and smarter people are going to make better choices. It is why financial hubs, such as London or New York, have more resources to play with and so can provide a higher quality of living.

People aren’t talking about money itself, they’re talking about hedge funds and prop shops and traders, which didn’t exist prior to the 70s and even Wall Street traders weren’t trading pure securities until the early 1900s (it was slaves and real shares before then) Economy worked just fine without the quants, and ever since trading has been a major segment of Wall Street they’ve completely crashed the markets three times and had to be bailed out by the fed (1929, 1973, and 2008). If you take the capital allocation justification at face value they suck at it. They’re losers underwritten by the government not winners smartly allocating capital.

Supermarkets were full of food and lights were on before hedge funds and prop shops existed. The first supermarkets weren’t even financed by wall street but a real estate tycoon with his own money.

Wall Street is a welfare program for traders, underwritten by the taxpayers and paying for the financial sector’s total losses in 1929, 1973 and 2008.

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