Bankers' excessive salaries as predictors of Depression
broadstuff.com
broadstuff.com
The evidence looks pretty weak, although it's hard to eyeball. It would be nice to throw up a simple regression and get objective.
It's interesting that banker pay continued to rise well into the Great Depression. I'm guessing that this was due to all the demand for financial talent to work the bankruptcies and restructurings, and maybe businesses needed more folks to comply with exponentially expanding government regulations.
On the other hand, maybe LOW banker salary correlates with depressions, since there are fewer deals to do. Thus, high banker salaries would be A Good Thing for a country, since it signals high economic growth, and low banker salaries would be A Bad Thing. The more that I look at it, the worse this "excess wage" statistic looks as a predictor. Sure, it grew during the housing bubble, but this is the millionth statistic I've been shown that shot up like a rocket during that period.
Lastly, what the hell is "excess wage"? That's surely the low-hanging hole in this analysis. They didn't teach me about that in Macroeconomics. It's hard to look at this graph and make generalizations when you don't know what the hell this new, undefined quantity is and how they calculated it. I guess someone could say, "well go look it up on your own". But then I could say, "Your blog presents pseudo-information that is not useful, and is frankly misleading".
Of course, the lesson we are supposed to take home is " Greed without Governance, allowed to build over N years, equals depression, and its absolutely predictable - now isn't that depressing....". Gee, I wonder if the blog owner came up with that after being exposed to this information, or before. And I can't think of any "governance" that would have stopped the massive capital flows going into the housing sector that is even close to a good idea for the long term economy. But that is another issue altogether.
On the bright side, reading inane writing in support of preconceived ideas like this inspires me to do better in my own work.
Correlation does not imply causation ...
"Correlation does not imply causation" does not imply that correlations are meaningless or uninteresting. Certainly, you can use strong correlations to predict a likely future even if you don't understand the underlying mechanism.
This wouldn't have been such a big problem except for the fact that (1) academia collapsed, becoming unviable as a career, during the same time, and (2) housing prices skyrocketed due to competition from the banker douches, meaning that standards of living declined substantially for the lawyers, doctors, etc. If these two things hadn't happened, I doubt that the people "lost" by the other professions would care that a few under-cultured jackasses in suits were pulling down millions. People don't go into academia or engineering expecting to be rich, but they expect to be solidly middle-class, which isn't available when mid-sized houses cost over $500k.
“The system”, he says, “filters out the thoughtful and replaces them with the faithful.”
This is a really great insight, and it reminds me of Ron Suskind's "Without a Doubt", on the "faith-based" presidency of George W. Bush.
I think the Strauss and Howe model of cyclical history (see: Generations, The Fourth Turning) is fairly accurate. Third Turnings are characterized by confusion, socioeconomic stagnation/reversion, and rampant inequality; Fourth Turnings, by crisis, hardship and rapid social evolution. The last 3T was approximately 1914-1928, with a 4T from 1929-1946. We crossed the 3T/4T interface again some time during the Bush presidency.
Do I think that the recent spell of inequality fortells a second Great Depression? Not necessarily. On the other hand, it was obvious even in 1995 that something was going to break in American society, and that we had to have a crisis in order to muster the will to move forward. The crisis came about 10 years earlier than I expected, but I have a lot of faith that we'll handle it well, given that we made an exceptionally good choice for President in 2008.
Really? I am utterly surprised by the thought of anyone choosing finance over academia for fear of "letting down the family". I grew up thinking of "Wall Street" as an uncultured and not very respectable profession.
My dad was disgusted when I told him (2003, during my junior year in college) that I was considering Wall Street as a profession. My parents both wanted me to get a PhD, and strongly insinuated that finance would be a waste of my talent.
I come from a family of inventors, architects, and writers, so although I grew up solidly middle-class, and my parents would've been happy with my choice had I been a high school teacher, the thought of me working on Wall Street was seen as a massive "step down" into unpreftigious nouveau-riche territory. (I softened my view toward Wall Street upon moving to New York; a lot of quants are brilliant, educated, and cultured people. I still do look down, reflexively, upon any "profession" connected to real estate. I can honestly say I'd never marry a woman who worked in RE, and only a woman from a real estate family if she had been purified through an elite college, a filter I otherwise don't care about in the slightest.)
I'm surprised that upper-middle-class UK families don't have an even stronger blue-blooded prejudice against "working on the exchange". Growing up, I always understood being an intellectual (academics at the pinnacle) as the epitome of preftige, and investment banking as the thing you did when your family lost its money/standing and you needed to buy it back by sacrificing ten years of your life to something unpreftigious but lucrative.
Because Ghod knows that folks who build buildings are the lowest of the low.
> I'm surprised that upper-middle-class UK families don't have an even stronger blue-blooded prejudice against "working on the exchange". Growing up, I always understood being an intellectual (academics at the pinnacle) as the epitome of preftige, and investment banking as the thing you did when your family lost its money/standing and you needed to buy it back by sacrificing ten years of your life to something unpreftigious but lucrative.
In other words, the blue-bloods and the wannabees are essentially parasites and that's a good thing.
Napoleon was defeated by the "nation of shop-keepers", not the professional poets. The blue-bloods marched working men into machine gun fire, kicking soccer balls and talking about their halcyon days at Eton. The mechanics and engineers invented tanks.
Also, my "ilk" have always had a lot of respect for inventors and entrepreneurs, who are the productive engine of our economy. My parents were thrilled when I told them I was joining a startup. We just don't like "business" scumbags-- politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats who masquerade as entrepreneurs-- who move money around but don't contribute intellectually to society, and real estate is especially disreputable because of that industry's exploitation of status-driven and simian emotions.
Then sales of art, clothing, jewelry, and pleasure vehicles must be beyond mention.
Thanks for the interesting perspective. As a peasant, I've always blamed the political class for the sins of "politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats".
Then again, I think that construction of a factory, house, or hotel is a higher calling than construction of a church.
I don't think it's fair to complain that "banker douches" raised house prices. There were plenty of non-bankers getting in on the housing price bubble. There were enough people that this TV show (http://www.aetv.com/flipthishouse/) was viable.
Incidentally, academia is solidly middle class and successful academics can easily buy a home. Tenured professors have almost no risk of default or prepayment and banks give them great loan terms as a result.
Another point of comparison: my Ph.D. adviser attracts plenty of golddiggers.
By the way, why all the hostility ("banker douches", "under-cultured jackasses") towards people who chose a different career path than you?
The housing price bubble was a national phenomenon that can't be pinned on bankers, but New York got hit especially bad, because of Wall Street, and has been slower to right itself than the rest of the country. One-bedroom apartments in Manhattan are still renting above $2000 per month.
Incidentally, academia is solidly middle class and successful academics can easily buy a home.
For outright stars, this is true, but the stars of other professions can easily buy several houses, so no point is made here. Hell; in finance, utter mediocrities can buy apartments overlooking Central Park. And if you know anything about academia, you'll know that you do have to be pretty much a star to achieve even a middle-class income trajectory relative to age. Getting into a top-10 PhD department is a hundred times more competitive than any MBA program, and the average student out of such a program (to say nothing of those who have to settle for upper-middle or middling grad programs) struggles to get even a mediocre post-doc in the middle of nowhere. I've heard that the average PhD from a selective department will write 70 applications to secure one or two offers. The mere fact of finishing a PhD program, for what it's worth, puts on in the top third or so of entering grad students, already the cream of the undergraduate crop.
By the way, why all the hostility ("banker douches", "under-cultured jackasses") towards people who chose a different career path than you?
Meh, I'm fine with quants and quantitative traders, but I don't consider them "bankers". I don't have much use for the 23-year-old douchebags who make a mess of Stone Street and expect to be treated as an elite caste because they're investment bankers. They're also not very smart; if they were, they would demand more interesting work than standard analyst fare, and get fired for their "sharp elbows". I know a few truly intelligent people who went into banking, but most of them found the environment hostile and either shot for quant/trading, or left finance altogether. The types of people who thrive in hierarchical corporate environments tend to be, on the whole, pretty useless; this isn't particular to bankers, but universal.
Price to rent has little to do with the housing bubble. You can't rent an apartment in the hopes of selling it later for a higher price. High rental prices suggest that prices were high due to consumption demand, not speculative demand.
The best statistic for measuringthe housing bubble is (Price to own) / (price to rent). Typically this quantity remains flat, but goes up during bubbles.
Prices going up because everyone wants to live in manhattan == not a bubble.
And if you know anything about academia, you'll know that you do have to be pretty much a star to achieve even a middle-class income trajectory relative to age.
I know a little about academia, being a postdoc myself.
Academia is a tournament. The winners get a solidly middle class salary, excellent benefits and "never lose your job ever" security. Note: middle class, not rich. You won't get an apartment overlooking central park (and neither do most finance people), but you will get a house.
The losers of the tournament are not academics; they wind up becoming quants, actuaries, programmers, etc, and typically make more money than the winners.
So yes, academics do get a middle class salary. They probably could get an upper class salary elsewhere, but I never disputed that.