I don't think so.
People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It's also a good way to get into a PE/VC firm or a hedge fund. Because those firms do their own deals and have a lot of autonomy from their "clients" (LPs), the jobs aren't quite so demanding. Finally, some people just want to stick it out for 8-10 years, save up a couple of million dollars, and do something else after.
Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up.
For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again."
My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)
That's an incredibly broad statement to make for the whole population. Everyone is different and have different tolerances.
I would agree with you to the extent that people are able to know their tolerances and stop, but that doesn't seem to be the case for banking.
I always say, Money (and hence career) is a solvable problem. Health less likely. You can't always solve away your chronic health issues by working harder, spending more money on it, etc.
It would be nice to ask all those people with chronic back pain, chronic insomnia, etc. that isn't easily fixable if the "opportunity" was worth it.
It's not missing fingers and hands like you might have encountered in an early 20th century factory, but that absolutely sounds like long term health problems from a few years of banking work to me.
The original article is about an intern who died. So your comment is really quite stupid.
If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.
Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
I can't speak for the UK but in France it is not allowed for an intern to work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstances, yet in many industries you still see 60+h workweeks as a standard for interns...
Because by any means, an intern subject to this kind of unacceptable working conditions will not speak up since that would annihilate his chances to get a job at the end of his internship (and might even discredit him at other companies in the same industry)
Thus "You'll have to be at your desk for insane hours. You won't be doing much work. You increase the chance of fat-finger[1] errors. We know you'll probably have to take illegal drugs to stay awake that long. We're borderline illegal. We're opening ourselves up to serious legal liability (eg, causing harm to our workers). But hey, you'll get a shitton of money. (Where shitton is not that much, and less than you'd get from other more normal jobs)"
It's a perverse incentive because there's money slopping round in banking, and there are not adequate controls on how that money makes its way from A to B to C.
The bank does $SOMETHING, and the customers are happy and pay, and the bank pays $BONUS. But there's randomness in the system and often the $SOMETHING has very little to do with actually making any money.
Why do you care? In particular, why do you care enough to force the employer and the employee into a different understanding?
People do all kinds of things that I don't want for myself. I wouldn't want to be a boxer since I don't like having people punch me in the face repeatedly.
Doesn't mean I would want to forbid others from being boxers.
Let people have their freedom and stop trying to control everyone else's lives and choices.
IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO.
Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!
In my corporate finance class they described how some countries (I forget which) had experimented with auctions instead of using i-bank underwriting, and in the end they had all gone back to using i-banks.
I don't know anything about M&A, but on structured products I agree they are just for customers who don't know any better.
I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it".
It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.
I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.
That really depends on what you're doing.
We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.
So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government.
That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them.
Do I have that about right?
The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.
I was thinking about how tuna fishermen cast dragnets that often catch many other things, up to and including sharks and dolphins. Hence, you couldn't really call such a net a "tuna net", since it more just catches tuna by coincidence of catching everything even remotely fish-shaped.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Economic_elements [2] - http://isreview.org/issue/84/debts-role-history