A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance | Hacker News Reader

A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

nytimes.com

75 pointsdanso73 comments

Kind of disappointing. They go on explaining the agency effect side of capitalism's double-edged sword, but never really give any alternatives or solutions.

Sure, certain economic behavior, that may not align with the good of society, becomes necessary to survive in a given industry or market - but how would they recommend fixing this? Surely they aren't suggesting that their students throw away rationally beneficial opportunities?

I was hoping by the end of the article they would propose something.

Surely they aren't suggesting that their students throw away rationally beneficial opportunities?

They probably should, this is somewhat at the heart of the problem. Economic theory suggest that you will act in the best interest of society if you act in best interest of yourself. But this is obviously not true, there is nothing that justifies the assumption that maximizing your gains will simultaneously maximize gains for society. Quite the opposite is true - improving your gains a tiny bit will often decrease gains for the society as a whole by a disproportional amount.

Economic theory suggest that you will act in the best interest for society if you act in best interest for yourself.

There are many economic theories, but I don't know any that asserts that in such a general way.

Right, I was referring mostly to capitalism as we see it in the real world, not economic theories in general. The idea goes back all the way to Adam Smith. And you are of course also correct that if you look closely at what people have said you will not find such a generic assertion because it is so obviously wrong that nobody would dare to assert it. But then look at reality. People cherry-pick the bits and pieces that make their actions look good and ignore the rest.

> The idea goes back all the way to Adam Smith.

Adam Smith argued that landlords (those living off land rents) had interests aligned with the common good, as did wage laborers, but that capitalists in general had interests divergent from and often opposed to the common good of society. (See, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11.)

That is why I said if you look closely you will not find such generic assertions. Another example is that Adam Smith realized how much efficiency can by gained by division of labor but he also said that this leads to inhuman labor conditions and should be avoided. But what is our reality? We pick the efficiency gain and ignore the negative effects as long as we can. If workers start complaining we do the bare minimum, rotate them through a couple of different tasks, but that is obviously far from trying to avoid division of labor as much as possible.

The workers, by complaining, are also acting in their best interest. As you see, sometimes that can also be good for society.

I am definitely not arguing that self-interests and the interests of society can not be aligned, I am only arguing that they do so much more rarely than people like to pretend.

you will not find such a generic assertion because it is so obviously wrong that nobody would dare to assert it.

Or because nobody actually believes it. Even the more staunch laissez-faire defender believes some self-beneficial acts to be contrary to the common welfare, like stealing or getting reelected after promoting anti-market policies.

Likewise, anti-capitalists argue that many self-beneficial actions are also beneficial to society, like demanding to be paid fair wage or even taking control of their means of production. "Workers, unite!" is not a call for self-sacrifice.

People cherry-pick the bits and pieces that make their actions look good and ignore the rest.

Sure, but that's not an economic theory.

You are of course correct, I should not have written economic theories when I really mean real-world economics. And I of course neither doubt that self-interests can be aligned with the interests of society nor that people realize that self-interests are not necessarily aligned with the interests of society.

But when you look at the real world rational actors is often not much more than an euphemism for greedy actors. Exceptions not withstanding. While real-world capitalism without doubt enabled an enormous gain of total wealth that is hard to imagine in more fair - or whatever you want to call it - economic systems I see no way that you could argue that it was the best option at least for the last couple of decades or that we should or even could go on in the same way.

But the thing is: few people argue for the current system. If you want to find agreement with the statement "this system is deeply flawed", you can almost look anywhere (and certainly at the laissez-faire economists).

An example: http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Deformation-Corruption-Capit...

What you won't find is agreement over what exactly is wrong with the current system, what exactly causes those problems, and what to do about setting to solve them.

> Economic theory suggest that you will act in the best interest of society if you act in best interest of yourself.

Which economic theory are you referring to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357713

>But this is obviously not true, there is nothing that justifies the assumption that maximizing your gains will simultaneously maximize gains for society.

That's not clear to me at all. If society gets wealthier as people pursue their own interests there's more money to devote to things like cancer research.

>_If society gets wealthier_ as people pursue their own interests there's more money to devote to things like cancer research.

The if is the crux. That money in very few countries find itself back into public good, in recent years.

That isn't the case if the way you're becoming wealthier is by frontrunning by a few milliseconds. By doing so you're effectively leeching off other participants in the stock market, including large institutional funds (like universities, which spend on basic science research).

Sometimes people get wealthy because they help create value. Sometimes they get wealthy because they're leeches. So maximizing your gains clearly doesn't always maximize gains for society.

Looking through the comments here, I can't help but feel like folks are missing the forest by looking at individual trees in the article.

It doesn't matter if you go into finance or washing cars - it's the mentality that you have toward life and others.

It is the short sightedness that we are born with, that breeds selfishness and leads us down the path of ignorance that the author laments. The idea of 'get mine, worry about the rest later' attitude. That's a child's attitude.

When there's unrest in the minds of parents, they worry and urge their children to go for the sure thing. That's ok. But do they remind their kids that once you land a good job and make a living, that there's more to it than that? That if you're going to do something, do it well? That if you're in a good place, be nice, be humble?

I don't know. I've seen the mass media apparatus grow more and more desperate, risk averse and pathetic to please their lords of 'More money, more! Or else there's somebody else in line who will make more and replace you!'

It's become so bad even the modern billionaires (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others) are devoting time to trying to fix the system.

We're going toward recognizing we have to be supportive of one another and Americans have poisoned their own well of compassion while fighting against the Soviet Union. 'Communism' is a bad word and as soon as you speak of doing something positive and broad for others without getting 10x returns on your investment, people associate it with communism and have a sour taste in their mouth.

There's no quick solution that I can see in sight but the idea of only doing things for profit has to go. Just stop, be nice, be humble, learn, give and receive. When you get sick, that money isn't going to buy you friends and family who sit by your side and care for you.

I like the fact that this article identifies that finance serves a purpose, that it can do a lot of good. At the same time, it also recognizes that not all finance is useful or good from a societal point of view. This distinction always seems to get lost in the arguments that result when articles like this are posted on HN.

Take HFT, the perennial point of controversy. It is true that it provides liquidity (though, I would suggest not necessarily when you need it), but is it true that more liquidity is always better? At some point, I would argue that the market is liquid enough, and continually pushing the limits of HFT is quite simply rent seeking and may have other detrimental market and/or societal effects. To bring my comment back to the article in question, I have to agree with the author that it is somewhat sad to see people pursue careers in fields of dubious societal value, but if I were offered the paycheque, I would almost certainly take it, too.

but if I were offered the paycheque, I would almost certainly take it, too

One would think everyone would take the paycheck if offered a position on Wall Street. There's almost nothing left that pays equally well.

There are plenty of people for whom money is not the driving factor in their decisions. However, for me, finance is a very interesting field, and I would probably quite happily play the game for a fat paycheque regardless of what I think of the societal value of what I am doing.

Well, considering: the extreme working hours (that can in extreme cases result in death, or a psychiatric disease), high risk of exposure to drugs, the fact that the starting banking positions do not pay that much money, the fact that you often do things you absolutely do not care about, well, the answer is not that simple.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-to-silicon-valley...

The trouble is this: with the price of NYC real estate being what it is, how can you afford living in NYC, except by working in finance?

Of course you can live elsewhere, but the cultural offerings in NYC are really exceptional.

Many people voluntarily leave Wall Street to do other things.

After they've built up a stockpile of money taking that Wall Street paycheck.

Don't think everyone wants to earn a lot of money. There are many other things to take into account when choosing a career.

Conversely, some people choose finance because they find the job interesting, and not for the money.

You talk as though earning a lot of money was just a lifestyle choice. The problem is that as income inequality increases, not earning enough money becomes career limiting in itself, regardless of what you would like to do in your career.

I would not. I prefer engineering, even for less money. It's not even close.

I'm not so sure the pay is that much better after you factor in taxes and the cost of living. The difference would have to be enormous before I moved to NYC.

The liquidity benefit is a straw man in the entire HFT debate. It's easy to poke holes in liquidity as a value add.

The real benefit from HFT is what it has replaced.

Before HFT & direct access trading we had a closed system run by specialists and market-makers. Every single trade had to go through a specialist or MM. Spreads were wide and the system made incredible returns skimming each trade. That system was replaced by HFT which had the effect of opening the market up to anyone willing to run an HFT operation, tightened spreads and yes added liquidity. The fact that HFT 'skims' of trades is nothing new to the system, the real benefit is how much less we all get skimmed today than we did 20 years ago. Is it perfect? No. But it's a step in the right direction.

Unless I misunderstand it seems you're pointing out a benefit of automated electronic trading, not HFT. Most people distinguish between the two when arguing that HFT is detrimental.

And on top of that, how many of us are actively trading day in and day out? The added value there doesn't benefit the vast majority of society.

EDIT: People with pension funds, 401k's, IRA's, and the like are not trading day in and day out. They typically purchase funds which do the trading on their behalf. Most of these funds are controlled by institutions that aren't subject to be skimmed by the MM's as they are the MM's themselves.

Anyone with a pension fund?

I'll say it more plainly. Long term or short term holders of stock... doesn't matter... if you are invested in the market you need to exit or enter a trade. Today you get less screwed than you did twenty years ago, that's a fact.

That's what HFT are.

This critique of Michael Lewis recent book goes into HFTs: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/michael-lewis-...

> Back in the days of pit traders, if you threw a huge order at the pit, you might get a fill on a couple of round lots. The rest of the pit is going to change their prices, because they figure anyone swinging 10,000 or 100,000 share orders around must be informed traders. If they’re informed traders, they need to pay for their immediacy. Informed traders may be criminal insider-trader creeps, they may be people with really good trading strategies; it doesn’t matter -they’re informed somehow: they know stuff. If the market maker doesn’t adjust their prices in front of an informed trader, the market maker will go bankrupt. That’s market economics 101.

Sure. But is it possible that there is a limit to its value? Could it have reached and passed the point of diminishing returns? It was not really my intent to start up yet another debate about HFT in particular. I don't necessarily claim to know the answers to these questions. My point was more that there is a lot wrong with the financial system, but there is a core of good as well. It is a false dichotomy to argue between it being an evil broken system and a system that is working perfectly well that provides nothing but good. I was hoping to provoke a more thoughtful debate than we usually get around these matters. (And actually, your comment is a step in the right direction.)

>> That system was replaced by HFT

Actually computer trading replaced that back in the 1980's, which was a prime suspect in the 1987 crash. It preceded HFT by almost a decade:

"Program trading", as it is commonly called, has been accused of injecting what critics call wild and unwarranted swings into the market, regardless of the economic fundamentals underlying stock prices.

This computer-assisted trading has been credited with helping feed the remarkable runup in stock values that began in 1982. But in the wake of Monday's historic 508-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average, the technique was being viewed as a destructive force.

"I think program trading is awful. I think that 508-point drop was caused by it," Richard Wholey, a broker-analyst at Wayne Hummer & Co., a small Chicago investment firm, said Wednesday. "There was no other reason for the markets to react the way they did."

Haskel b. Benishay, professor of managerial economics at Northwest University's Kellogg School of Management, described program trading as "a bit of a monster which makes money for a few people."

source: https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1P2-5415858/analysts-accus...

I guess we still haven't learned our lesson yet.

Huh? Automated trading wasn't the 'system' HFT replaced? HFT is automated trading. HFT replaced humans who operated the specialist booths and the market making on NASDAQ.

Automated trading in the 80's was still run through people to execute trades.

I don't think you can conflate automated trading with HFT. You could certainly gain the benefits of automated training without HFT, something that would probably save a boatload of cash.

It's not possible to conflate two things that are the same. HFT defines a trading style with shorter holding times but is still automated.

No, they are not the same at all. HFT requires automation, but you can (and should, IMO) have automation without HFT.

I was once adamant to become a researcher in physics, until I realized how difficult it is for any one to stay in that field. There are so many much more intelligent people vying for a single professorship, and most have no stability as they constantly hop from one post-doc position to another. I left physics to become a software developer and I did not regret a bit.

So the truth is, the world does not need or can afford that many people researching cancer, teach and inspire the next generation. Quit lamenting that people are leaving these fields. They are already overcrowded.

I agree with your last sentence, but not your third last. Society could easily afford to invest far more in research than it does, and the investment would be repaid many times over; unfortunately it has not chosen to do so. I don't believe this is a fundamental choice. People really do want things like clean energy and cures for cancer. It's just that the issue of adequately funding such has slipped down the cracks of politics.

If your comparative advantage is in politics, I would recommend that as the single most important potentially solvable problem of our time.

If your comparative advantage is in STEM, mind you, I think it's perfectly sensible to stay out of the rat race for the handful of physics professor jobs and become a programmer or petroleum engineer instead.

> People really do want things like clean energy and cures for cancer.

No, people SAY they want these things (because maybe it makes them feel good or because it gives them social capital). But when it comes time to actually put their hands in their pockets and give, they come short. I know this since I tried to crowd-fund for cancer research. It was hard. I got barely enough. I'm still backing the project out of my own pocket to the tune of 10-20%.

I've had my nonprofit website (with a donation link) on my lyft line profile for a week. I've had about 10-20 good conversations about what i'm doing. My conversion rate? 0%. In this time, I have had zero dollars donated to my nonprofit. It's ok - I am well within budget for my project.... But I'm just saying that it is facile to say people want these things but in the end one really wonders.

Fact of the matter is, that politics is not very good at funding these things either. A lot of grantsmanship goes into twisting your expertise to allow the bureaucrats to dispense their money into your project. There is very little accountability, and the administrators are trained in the same system that creates the professors, (and reviews the journal articles) so it is a bit of an echo chamber.

You seem to be implying that people who invest for a living are leaving money on the table for no particular reason. The truth is most research goes nowhere, and even research that generates a product, it often turns out to be a dead end.

The truth is like airline seats. Everyone says they want legroom, but what they really want is the cheapest seat, regardless of how uncomfortable it is.

I think he should lament that people are leaving those fields, and going into a field which does absolutely nothing productive for humans and serves only to extract wealth from others.

The article is actually about creating wealth and benefitting society as a whole instead of rent-seeking, not the number of people in field X. The article points out some of the wealth-creation done by financiers and lawyers, and some of the rent-seeking behaviour.

> So the truth is, the world does not need or can afford that many people researching cancer, teach and inspire the next generation.

I'm amazed that you think that. Why do you think that science is overcrowded, and more importantly, why is that the right thing for society? How would we know if we had too few, too many or exactly the right amount of people researching the fields you mention?

Science is overcrowded because there are too few positions and too little funding. Despite what many similar articles suggest, there are no shortage of smart students eagerly entering these fields, wishing to advance humanity one way or another. Many leave eventually after they realize the truth---they are not needed at all. Some of them even commit suicide after they find out that they have no position in the society after years of hard work and it is too late for them to change course. I am lucky to jump out before it is too late.

Perhaps that is not right. Perhaps we should call for the world governments to increase their funding. Except that is not actually feasible, given how voters across the globe consistently elect leaders who cut science spending even more. The society may be able to afford more researchers, but the voters do not want to, and politicians have no incentive to change that.

Until that is changed, calling for more bright minds to stay or enter these fields are insincere at best, talent wasting, life destroying at worst.

I also dropped out of a Math grad school PhD program to work as a programmer.

Instead of being a 40 year old postdoc permadjunct, I'm a 40 year old programmer that almost nobody wants to hire because of age discrimination. At least I earn a good salary, and can semi-retire or try to bootstrap a business.

I had the same experience. I was in my undergrad set on making physics a career. Pursuing a PhD is like becoming a line cook at a McDonald's financially. The state of physics graduate schools is a giant pyramid scheme. You are more or less encouraged to drop out/avoid starting in the first place by nearly everyone involved in the process.

I'm not going to deny its not a bit selfish or maybe even shortsighted, but I made more money my first year out of college (as a developer) than I would as a tenured professor at most universities or colleges. Probably 2x what I would be making as a post-doc at age 35. 5x what I would be making from age 22-30.

That being said, I've always fed coding is not a good long term plan and that I will inevitably replaced by a couple of fresh grads. Without specialization, there's no real job security other than a thriving tech sector.

I wonder if he has mixed feelings for students who take jobs getting people to click on ads...

He does. He's expressed those feelings before (though in a limited manner).

Where?

In a talk I attended which had him as a speaker. Sorry I don't have a linkable source. Maybe he's written something about it too, I'll link something here if I find something.

The entire article is about that. It's not against a specific profession, it's against people happily taking every opportunity to make $101 instead of $100 for themselves even if that additional $1 for them may cost society as a whole $1000.

It's easy to trivialize the value that Google, etc. provide, but think about how many businesses can now reach customers (with measurable ROI) that couldn't before. In a previous era they were paying 10-100x as much for newspaper or magazine ads they couldn't track.

At the end, the professor writes about the fact that lower income folks typically have variable income levels, yet still have to pay rent, forcing them to resort to payday loans.

There is a startup called Even that is trying to help with that problem: https://whatiseven.com

Resisting urge to register https://whatisthisicanteven.com.

Interest-free loans to people with low incomes for $12/month. I wonder how they're financing that, and still making money.

It depends on the loan size. If the loan is $1000 then that's 1.2% interest per month. They can make money with that, and maybe their average loan size is smaller than that in which case the effective APR is even higher.

Even expressly does not provide loans; since it uses an undisclosed algorithm to calculate "averages" that are expressly not actual averages, they can probably guarantee that they are more likely to be taking in funds that are above the "average" than paying out for below "average"; with an undisclosed algorithm, they could even guarantee that you can never receive more in "Boosts" than you've paid in previous deductions.

They also don't seem sure what their fee is -- their ToS says $5/week, other parts of the site say $3/wk.

This will not cure any "low income folks" woes. Simply averaging the paychecks will not help the fact unexpected issues arise... or the fact that they don't earn enough to live a simple life.

This service at $3 is silly.

> Simply averaging the paychecks

They aren't simply averaging; they expressly state that "average" is used loosely and they are using an undisclosed algorithm that is not a mathematical average.

This reminded me of a great piece in the Atlantic a while ago looking at the cause: "Elite students with few marketable skills are perfect forms for financial firms to mold." http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/why-do-s...

Required reading: Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Liquidated

Does the professor have similar mixed feelings when students take jobs in politics? What about in the academy? In the sciences 'Grantsmanship' is so often a euphemism rent-seeking.

There's a presumption here that there's an objective "good" for society, likely as defined by this professor. One of the primary virtues of capitalism is that it makes no such presumption and empowers and frees disparate tribes to pursue their own "good" within the bounds of a constructive construct.

Correspondingly, one of the vices(?) of socialism is the presumption of a single societal good. This of course makes sense when we have non-reproducible/limited resources like the environment or rights that could conflict like the use of force, but for all other resources like how we spend our lives, what we build, where we go, what we enjoy, freedom by definition means a subjective "good".

I always find it curious when postmodernism (skepticism of societal mores) presumes any form of objective truth.

> But the winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William B. Shockley, who have been widely credited with inventing the semiconductor, did not receive even a fraction of the wealth that their invention would help create.

I don't know about Bardeen or Brattain, but this was not because Shockley was an altruist. The fact that he could not capitalize on his inventions like he thought he should was a source of frustration for him.

Source: Conversation with someone he expressed frustration to.

Out of curiosity, has anyone heard similar frustrations from the authors of major open source code bases?

Eg, has Linus ever felt frustrated by all the millionaire tech company founders that built their product using Linux and/or Git, but didn't open it up as he did with those two projects?

I wonder if this is more of a higher education ecosystem problem of survival.

Smart Universities know the winds of change are coming. Up until recently, Ivy League educations acted as a "proxy" of future success to employers in the industrialized world.

Once more short-term apprenticeship-type learning start getting "accredited" (hack reactor, Udemy, etc.) and talent recruiters adopt the new reality - the traditional University will begin to become irrelevant.

Their only hope to survive is to make surefire bets on privileged background applicants who will become alumni gifters to keep the veiled Ponzi scheme going.

An assertion can be made that these types of candidates following a rote program for their life since birth may have wrote about how they want to change the world in their applications (or hired somebody else to write them). But, this very same background created an entity that no longer can think creatively and keeps following the path. Some awaken. Most do not.

There is a strong argument that transformational leaders who truly change the world and are not good at what "school" says what we should be good at, and don't think about education in this way. For example, many of these folks surely would not have been accepted at the Ivy Leagues: ( http://www.onlinecollege.org/2010/02/16/50-famously-successf... )

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I wonder how all of my EE professors feel that I dropped out of the academia track to be a code monkey for $$$.

In my little world "Rent-Seeking" individuals have always been around. Personally, I couldn't stomach making money off the poor, animals, or the environment, but for some people it just doesn't matter how they make their money. "If it's legal, I see nothing wrong with it?". They are in such denial, some think they are cute? The one's in my little world think no one knows, but we do know. You can be the Doctor who charges too much for addictive meds, the non-profit director who makes a very comfortable living off other people misery.(free preview Guidestar.), or the rich kid who made millions off plastic tooth picks(which don't decompose) and moved to another state to get away from daddy(inventor, funder, bank, cheerleader), dodge taxes, and act like Horatio Alger.

What I want to talk about is Payday loans. We need something else. My first introduction to these leach pits is when I drove a co-worker to the pit. She cashed a check for under $200 and was charged close to twenty dollars. (I tried to explain how she was being exploited, but she was just tired. Tired of life. I didn't give her a lecture. It was not the time--she just climbed out of Homelessness.)

Elisabeth Warren has a good idea on replacing PayDay loans.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/02/03/3239261/elizabet...

(Sorry about the popup, and remember Payday loans are not always dischargable in Bankruptcy court. The payday loan lender may challenge the discharge of its debt, and it might violate the law if you've written a post-dated check.)

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