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Comment by thatguysaguy | Hacker News Reader

Are quant firms positive sum for society? I can imagine that some trading leads to goods being priced more efficiently or w/e but I doubt the level of alpha these firms are chasing has positive externalities. If not, you should shouldn't really care about this hurting their industry.

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You highlight a more general problem: the social/economic function of finance is to be a service industry to ensure there is liquidity available (that other people can use for their purposes).

What bugs me is that somehow society lionizes people in the money industries over those doing equivalent service jobs like gardening, lawyering, much less more important ones like garbage collection.

Society does not do that. They can extract more capital, so they’re considered more important.

If gardeners were paid 500k/year, they would be exalted. It has nothing to do with the work or the value provided to society.

People just love money and praise those that have it.

Worship of the rich is a sickness in society. Like I said, the value of banking is akin to the value of gardening, and worshipping the bankers just enables destructive distortions.

They are a net negative in the sense that you have some of the brightest minds in the country working on derivatives instead of being in STEM labs

They are really not. The growth of financialization coincides with economic stagnation in U.S. If anything, the data shows the opposite. Finance sector is more or less a parasite on the productive economy.

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