And by selfish, I mean pursuing it also for supporting your family/loved ones counts as they are not "others" in your lives. I can see how other professions can be altruistic despite potential earnings.
Think about it, I'm sure there's also money in Law, Medicine, and Tech if you do well in those fields.
But an aspiring doctor can be motivated mainly because he/she wants to cure and heal the sick.
An aspiring, idealistic lawyer can be motivated mainly because he/she wants to uphold justice and defend the oppressed.
An aspiring tech guy can be motivated mainly by being part of the next Uber in disrupting industries and changing the world.
What about banking and finance??
You can say "Well I'm motivated by providing the capital to companies that make meaningful changes to society and giving jobs to people, etc.". But quite frankly I've never met an aspiring iBanker or aspiring hedge fund manager say such a thing.
Would it then make sense to say that Banking/Finance is the only industry when you can truly say you're in it because of the money/prestige? After all it is the only field that deals mainly with money (and power).
Every banker I've met (including myself) are in it either for the money, power, prestige, "the game itself", or both.
Like I've heard someone say that "Investment banking is not where you go if you want to save the whales" or something like that.
Just because someone is not motivated by altruism does not mean that they are necessarily motivated by money. For example, an aspiring banker may be motivated by the idea of power or importance. A quick look at the number of “prestige” threads on WSO will verify that premise. You could argue that prestige is still a measure of money, in the sense that it might affect future earnings potential; however, I think there is plenty of evidence that esteem alone can motivate someone. Likewise, a trader may be motivated by the 'game' rather than the payoff itself.
Excellent point mate, I should've been more clear with my question, I recall meeting a girl in a bar and she said she was a teacher and she also said that she had this notion that working as a banker is a selfish thing to do. In which case I guess a better question would be is that "Is Pursuing Banking/Finance mainly a selfish goal?" since it's hard to be altruistic in a profession that has an industry revolving around money, prestige, and power itself.
Compare the standards of life in countries without functioning capital markets to those with.
In the macro sense, finance helps fuel the jobs machine, including the jobs of those “altruistic” career paths. In the micro, yeah plenty of bankers are selfish dbags.
who cares, the world is selfish. i personally don’t understand peoples’ fixation with doing “something meaningful.” it’s such a first world problem, can’t believe people aren’t content just to be making far above the median income in their country and leave it at that.
I agree with you 100%. Fuck them all. The only person that matters is you, once you've given yourself a good mental and financial foundation then you can help others.
It's only as selfish as you make it out to be. Ultimately, a job exists because there's a need for it, might not always be able to see the net impact of your work but even the most "meaningless" roles keep the world running.
This doesn't make any sense..
Every job has a purpose otherwise it wouldn't exist and no one would be paying anyone to do it. The purpose of any career can be twisted to seem negative or selfish or any other "bad" term - it's all one massive value judgement call and probably a misunderstanding of what the career's purpose is.
Finance is necessary. You need a well-oiled capital allocation, liquidity provision and financial intermediation machine to keep the complex economic needs of the world running. Just because it pays well on a micro level doesn't somehow discredit the industry's role in how the world works.
Your comment on tech and law are hilarious. Spend just a bit of time on any tech-centred forum and you'll see just how money obssessed folks in Silicon Valley-esque companies are. Everyone's optimising for "total comp", everyone wants to cash out that fat startup check - nothing noble or altruistic about that. Law? You think folks at BigLaw firms care about saving the world?
Point is.. Your career doesn't determine if you're selfish or not. You do. You and your decisions/attitudes about how you spend your additional resources and time are what matters.
Mate, that's not the point. Nothing in my post touches on how banking / finance is a "purposeless" career, as a matter of fact, quite the opposite (check the middle section of the post in case you missed). Though I agree with the points in the first 2 paragraphs, that's not exactly where I'm getting at so it's pretty much a waste of character space and pixels.
And just because tech and law can be pursued to focus more on societal contribution rather than selfish gain, that doesn't mean that such fields are not filled with professionals who prefer the latter ("I can see how other professions CAN BE altruistic" (but not necessarily)). It's actually the opposite as you mentioned, especially law, where the "unethical, deceptive, money-mongering" lawyer image is almost archetypal and stereotypical among people.
The purpose of my citing how one could aim to contribute directly to society by being in law, medicine, and tech is to show that those are the typical avenues by which you do so while carrying out your work. To think that all or most (or even a significant portion of) professionals in such fields are altruistic would be utterly foolish, and my having said such examples in my post already implies such. Unfortunately, and quite hilariously, that hasn't been picked up along the way.
I agree with LeonTree that finance is directly beneficial, and necessary, to society on a macro scale. But on a micro scale there's not much of a direct (note the word - direct) contribution to the betterment of society as a whole. One cannot clump together all lawyers and doctors into one, monolithic, group as the specializations are as diverse as (if not more so than) in finance. Some specializations, especially in law, have more direct contributions than others, such as criminal or family lawyers. But as a whole, I think such professions have more direct impact to society.
Take for example my beloved field IB, even at the MD level where you're working on deals that will raise funds to grow businesses and give more jobs to people, you're several times "separated" to the "direct" positive contribution to society (Company CEO/CFO decides to raise funds -> contacts you or the other way around -> CEO/CFO gets funding -> Uses funding to grow business -> hires more people at the company) as opposed to a doctor who is providing the "direct contribution" to his patients (you know, like treating your illness). Let's not even get to traders and hedge fund managers.
I'm no saint, I'm in IB because I like money, to make money, and work with money, no different from the thousands of other bankers / finance professionals (and lawyers and doctors) out there. I'm just asking this out of curiosity and seemed like an interesting topic. And while I do agree that selfishness is primarily determined by the individual and not the field, that's not the point.
I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make beyond the obvious one that some professions have more 'direct' impact on society than others due to the degrees of separation to the underlying client or recipient of the service.
As a previous poster mentioned the definition of 'indirect' or 'direct' impact on society is in itself a big value judgment call.
The issue is also one of scalability, yes a doctor or surgeon is obviously going to have a more direct and obvious impact on society, but it will be focussed on a very small number of people. There are an estimated 10-15 million doctors in the world, by contrast there are an extremely small number of people who work in high finance with meaningful decision making level seniority. It becomes another value judgment call, large scale and indirect impact or small scale and direct impact?
Just because WSO users in their twenties are primarily obsessed with money, models/bottles and prestige doesn't mean there aren't many financiers who aren't motivated by helping their clients.
Btw I'm unconvinced that the average tech worker has any meaningful 'direct' impact on society (apart from indirect impact of contributing to subversion of democracy, encouraging endemic societal narcissim, mass scale tax avoidance and socio-economic cleansing) but hey that's just me. Bear in mind nowadays that a lot of people go into tech as nowadays there is more prestige in tech than finance.
All Philanthropists will tell you, you can’t be a serious one until you make a lot of $. So banking is one avenue to make good money and possibly do good with it.
Is that being selfish?
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