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It's been an utter cultural disaster. We've missed out on so much original science and progress because these smart idiots threw away their talents on building machines to game the casino, when they could have made game-changing contributions to fundamental original research. Imagine if Shannon, Turing, Von Neumann, Einstein, and Dirac had done this. Yes, they put some money back, but not nearly enough to compensate for the damage. The real disaster has been normalising this kind of "success" as the best of all possible achievements, when in fact it's spectacularly cheap and unambitious compared to the goals of previous generations. If anyone thinks I'm overstating the heresy here, remember - a financialised economy is optimised for short-term gain, not long-term development. The flip side of "investment" is an economy where hundreds of millions are bankrupted by health insurance, where rents are unaffordable (never mind property), where workers are treated like spreadsheet assets and not like people, where fraud is endemic, where many people are putting off having kids because they literally can't afford them, where planes fall out of the sky, and where the entire machine regularly demands government bailouts because it's stuck in a manic depressive cycle of overconfidence and opportunism followed by collapse. That's not even looking at the incredibly toxic political effects. |
The vast majority of people who succeed in finance are very ambitious; if finance wasn't an option they'd just have found some other way to make money, not suffer as a peon doing fundamental research for mediocre pay in a lab somewhere. Just be glad they didn't go into politics where their ambition could have done even more damage.