Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know the specifics of your friends' jobs, and with more data about them I am completely open to being wrong about it.

Most people in financial jobs also harm no one, and though they accept higher wages, they also create far more value, and there could be endless arguments over whether or not there is trickle-down value, whether managing pension plans adds value, etc.

But what concerns me more is that most employees in any organization exist solely for the short term gain of their bosses (somewhere up the food chain). A fourth-grade teacher exists more to make a principal look good for advancement to superintendent than for endowing society with the value of educated children. The fourth grade teacher has to put up with arbitrary state standards, political fighting between staff, inappropriate parental involvement, turning the other way on some issues they feel strongly they should not turn the other way on. It's a political shitstorm like anything else, where a few people on top of something (no matter how small scale that something may seem by comparison to a huge bank) are applying pressure to make the teacher's job more about subservience and fealty than about efficacious results.

I think that problems get worse and worse as you go up the academic and research food chain. You might be able to make an argument that being a pre-school teacher in a small rural town, or the pastor of a small community's church (modulo one's beliefs about whether promoting religious faith can ever be morally or ethically good), are actually "ethical" jobs, but I'm not totally sold that you can, and I don't believe much beyond this can even enter the discussion.

It's not so much about whether you overtly participate in something wrong. It's about whether the aggregation of all the tiny little microscopic job duties you do to comply with bureaucratic hierarchy ends up summing up to unfair gains mediated towards someone who doesn't economically deserve them, or that the gains end up being wasted.

> Most people in financial jobs also harm no one

This is a complicated issue. Are you harming others by investing other people's money into oil companies or weapons manufacturers? Are you harming others if they expect you to make a certain return, and you fail to meet that? (More on that below)

> and though they accept higher wages, they also create far more value

This is actually very, very debatable. While the finance industry is helpful and lubricates all other parts of the economy, it's also rife with abuse. I worked at a financial software company for a while, and you would be blown away by the corruption, greed, and irresponsibility of that industry (among ratings agencies, bulge-bracket banks, and hedge funds). If the general public in the US knew about it, there would probably be mass panic.

Furthermore, a lot of finance involves wealth management, and there's no evidence that wealth managers actually generate any value unless they're actively, illegally gaming prices. I don't have time to get sources right now, but it's pretty easy to Google. Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer is very enlightening in that regard, since he admits to illegally gaming prices because all of the top-tier wealth managers have to do it.

> This is actually very, very debatable.

I agree. I just think it's just as debateable for pretty much any other mode of employment.

I too worked in quant finance for several years. Believe me I understand. I quit finance because of the wanton greed and dysfunctional politics. But what I found when moving on to bright-eyed start-ups and education technology companies was that there was just as much wanton greed and dysfunction there (in some cases, even more).

I'm familiar with the literature on mutual funds and active managers. I worked for a team that focused exclusively on the low volatility anomaly in equity pricing, and our team's pitchbook was all about how most active managers lose (and yet, we were an active manager, heh).

The problem is that asset managers don't add value by growing or protecting the value of the assets they manage. That is not what their clients want from them nor what they pay them for, and failure to do those things is also not why they get fired.

What really happens is that someone who sits on the board of directors for a pension fund or some other large retirement fund, like say the association for retired firefighters in some state, is tasked with managing some huge-to-them pile of money from which everyone's retirement money is paid. But that task is daunting to a non-specialist board member, and they need someone to act like a management consultant. If the management consultant is wrong, the board member has plausible deniability (e.g. "How could we have known ... the fancy asset manager seemed great ... we all voted to use them.")

Using asset management companies is just a career cover-you-ass tactic for people embedded within the pension and retirement boards themselves. It's truly, truly not about actually growing the endowment or the plan value.

But who is to say this is bad? The "value" that someone is seeking (the "value" of having a cover-your-ass asset manager you can fire and save face in front of the other board members if things go bad, or milk for kudos if the market turns up) is provided by the asset manager.

You and me both probably don't think that sort of "value" matters, but it does matter to somebody, and they're OK paying a lot for it, and most everyday people don't seem to care enough to do something like boycott their company's 401(k) in order to invest directly in low fee index funds themselves. So by what standard do we judge this somewhat scammy thing as certainly worse than all the other kinds of scammy things in all sorts of industries that go on all the time?

I'm not trying to be cheeky when I ask. I'm really asking. What's the "ethics metric" we're supposed to use. When I just think about this stuff from a sort of common sense "be good to people, try to add value, don't be wasteful" perspective, finance looks a little worse than other fields, but not that much worse. Maybe defense and government spying and torture looks significantly worse than all the other things, but beyond that the rest of it all just looks like one big pile of more or less equivalent scamminess.

When you say a job is unethical, who exactly is being unethical? As far as I know, only human beings can act either ethically or unethically; inanimate objects can neither be ethical nor unethical. So is your claim that any human being who does a job is acting unethically?

I still remember some of my grade school teachers. They had a profound, and I would argue, very positive impact on me. Was it unethical for them to become teachers?

By doing seemingly ethical things on a day to day basis, you can be helping the larger organization to do such significantly unethical things overall that it more than overtakes the aggregation of your small ethical actions.

So the choice to you is: since I can personally behave ethically in my job each day, in which role will the aggregation of my labor output up through the organizational hierarchy end up least enabling unethical higher-ups to carry out larger-scale unethical agendas?

My feeling, which is certainly debatable, is that this doesn't work out significantly differently whether you work for an NGO, Volkswagen, Nickelodian, or Goldman Sachs. Unless you try hard to actually be one of the unethical higher-ups carrying out bad larger-scale agendas, then in virtually any mode of employment, you'll be acting equally as ethically, in terms of your own personal daily actions.

But I do think that part of an individual's duty to act ethically involves accounting for whatever others might do with the output of your labor. If I write software and don't do anything unethical all day, but I know that my boss will use it to cheat on emissions testing, then every time I don't quit my job or blow a whistle, I am being unethical, directly.

I doubt this applies to many people in their day to day jobs though, since they are not aware of how their labor products are being aggregated for less ethical purposes. So whatever job those folks are doing, whether it's performing free dental work to orphans in a third-world slum, or writing some code for a big bank, the degree to which those individuals are "being ethical" is about the same, certainly not different enough to make some big hand wavy guffaw about how bad banking or finance is compared to the rest of industry.

Maybe there can be outliers, like someone who not only donates labor to the third world, but also thinks about it in an effective altruism way to make sure that the by-product of that donated labor doesn't end up contributing to something bad in some counter-intuitive microeconomic way that is hard to think about when we're all consumed with the warm fuzzies of thinking about third-world labor donation. Or a pre-school teacher that is not tied into really any management hierarchy that could possibly be extracting anything from the teacher's labor output for some other, unethical purpose.

But I think we'd all agree that these modes of employment are exceptionally rare. Clearly even if every single labor market participant wanted such a job, only a small fraction could physically get them. We'd still need people doing all kinds of ethical-for-them-in-the-day-to-day-but-unethical-in-terms-of-its-aggregated-affect-on-society jobs.

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