Harvard Narcissists With MBAs Killed Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Narcissists With MBAs Killed Wall Street

bloomberg.com

"If you travel through Italy, you can’t help but notice the many Roman bridges that still stretch across that nation’s waterways. How is it that the Romans could build bridges that would last thousands of years, while the ones we build today collapse after a few decades?"

You don't see bridges that have already collapsed thousands of years ago =)

A lot more women and minorities work on Wall Street today compared with forty years ago. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps not.

Why is this drivel on HN? Not only is it off-topic, it's based on very tenuous logic.

Agreed. This is one of the worst articles I've ever read.

Another result is less wiggle room for design error. Hence, modern bridge’s predilection for collapsing.

[citation needed]

I don't know what else to say about this. Plenty of bridges failed catastrophically before we had computers. Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge? Computers would have given us a better understanding of the forces at play. (Notice that the present-day Tacoma Narrows bridge hasn't collapsed? Interesting coincidence :P)

Anyway, this article had no citations for the "facts" it stated, used the word "probably" when there were no facts, and wasn't even written well. (Notice the misused apostrophe in the quote?) It was also boring.

Yes, that bit about the bridges is pretty bogus. A lot of stuff in the ancient world fell over. It seems to us that ancient architecture can last thousands of years because it's now thousands of years later, and the things that lasted are all that's left.

By a similar logic. Somebody told me that in the past people used to live longer. The proof was that he knew a lot of people that were 70+ and they were still alive. Of course he never met all the people that died young!! ....And he does not know how many of us will live to be 70+

I'm proposing a theory for this, sort of like Godwin's Law:

Stories about the soul-warping power of wealth increase in number with increasing material prosperity. They peak some time after the onset of a financial downturn. If the downturn is severe and long-lasting enough, they become so unpopular as to be unmentionable.

I've read similar numbers elsewhere, but came to an entirely different conclusion. Wall Street lured a lot of really smart people by promising them a lot of money. Then, in turn, they asked of those same smart people to create as much money as they could, as fast as they could. Smart people are good at solving problems, so they created all sorts of new and interesting ways to make money quickly. Nobody in management worried about the long-term ramifications and didn't ask the smart, creative folks working for them to worry about the long-term either. Blaming computers or Harvard or narcissism is illogical. Greed trumped foresight while they all got rich, simple as that.

I read this on RealClearPolitics this morning. I really enjoyed the parallel between engineering in Rome and the financial system. Less information makes you more careful...

Substitute "reckless greed" for narcissism and this article would be more acceptable for me.

As the submitter, I read this and thought: gee, this is sure to get a very profound reaction from the guys over on HN. It has all the touch-points: elite education, the recent financial downturn, faith in models.

Also it's written poorly and follows no train of logical thought. It's more like story-telling or something you'd hear at a bar.

If you don't like it, flag it. Apologies for taking your time. But if you're going to multiple post about how much you dislike it, if nothing else it's kicked you in the head a bit.

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