Social Impact of an Investment Banker?

How much social impact does an investment banker truly have? Will it become something that I'll be able to somewhat feel good about?
I'm wondering because I will be attending a target school this fall, and my family is struggling financially. If I become a doctor/lawyer (which I suppose has "more" social impact), I will be taking out loans and won't really be able to help them. But if I go into IB, I'll be able to help them out financially... so there's a conflict for me there.

 

i think it depends what product you end up working in. i’m in securitized products and we create social impact by helping companies across the world structure ‘green’ deals (wind farms, solar panels, etc).

this isnt something thats too popular in the US yet, but green deals are certainly becoming important for european insurance / institutional investors

 

I'll put a disclaimer here for those of you who think you are virtuous and can't take a thinking exercise critically, I obviously agree that doctors do a lot of good however it is largely overplayed because none of us really understand what a day-to-day looks like or put enough intelligent effort to making an apples to apples comparison of "impact".

BUT here's my OG comment: yeah dude being a doctor or lawyer really doesn’t have much value to society either e.g. how much are you really contributing to society by helping people who got too drunk and need their stomach pumped, broke their arm, etc.

very, very few medical cases really require your agency or are really saving lives or having real impact. it’s all a stretch honestly- how about being on the boards of impactful non profits etc. or donating money for people who can actually spend hours making an impact on lives?

if you’re a lawyer it’s the same thing as banking except being a public defender means you’ll be poor and most often representing useless criminals of society- sure, every once in a while you might be able to help someone wrongly convicted but helping society through upholding public rights is not really meaningful.

All these things have ‘cog in the system’ effects where you don’t really make much of an impact but are very important. Public defenders and doctors definitely could use more people but is it really that much more meaningful? You yourself will define your own value and perception of things and have more control than you think. Being in finance can make a lot of difference if you want but you don’t have to. Idk. The value of actual finance jobs is much more abstract but at the same time you make many times more of an impact- at a BB hundreds of thousands of people may be impacted by a merger directly, and millions more customers, etc. PE companies employ millions of people in the US and are more resilient in times of difficulty. Does your ‘social value’ need to be the one applying the bandaid, or the one facilitating the investments behind the hospital that does all the ground work? Facilitator vs. being a foot soldier but being impactful in high finance will always have a magnitude of impact over a single hospital or something but that work is directly ‘more important’.

But if we’re being honest I don’t think doctors and lawyers really do that much social good either. it’s all about how you use what you have e.g. helping rural areas in the world without access vs. helping fat Americans who have heart disease and cancer. Who says that is really a service I’m not sure if it’s a fair characterization

 

This is an insane downplay of what physicians do. Pumping people’s stomachs and treating “fat Americans”? Not sure why you have such a blatantly negative view of the career.

Sure, doctors aren’t saving lives every day but they frequently are able to provide significant value to their patients’ lives, whether it’s curing a cancer patient through treatment, improving a terminal patient’s quality of life, repairing an ACL so someone can keep pursuing their athletic passions, etc. Can you seriously say that doctors/surgeons/physicians don’t add significant value to countless lives throughout a month, a year, their career?

I’m obviously working in finance but I’m not going delude myself and claim that medicine doesn’t serve the world that much more than finance. I’ll fully admit that it serves the world way more than finance does.

 

Dude where is your nuance or critical thinking. Nobody even disagrees with your sentiment (e.g. 'administering band-aid' or that doctors by virtue have a halo of societal good to them), but you made a horrible job explaining your own points. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for 25-30% of Americans. Most problems are caused by obesity in outsized proportions, many medical solutions in this country are elective, and a vast majority are self-induced- the point here is that you're agnostic to the type of work being done and enabling people to live their lives in a capacity they want. Maybe you're helping someone who was in a gang who was running and tripped. See how individual situations are stupid to argue core points? Try to look at what the job really does. If you want to suck off a dying person to make their life better go ahead but you don't need to make it out like they are angels either (would you say prostitutes should be given this same reverence you are giving for doing such a service to society? If every school shooter had a prostitute would you think they'd go through with their plans?).

Using physicians to make your point is poor, because they are essentially facilitators and experienced webMD's themselves e.g. they give referrals and rarely actually do any care. They're not even the ones who administer shots to you. They look at what problems you have and suggest solutions, but are rarely administers of those solutions necessarily other than looking at care solutions (e.g. drugs). They don't do ACL work and again you're creating a strawman if you think anyone believes they don't add any real value to people's lives. Even so, the work of a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, regular surgeon, or physician, nurse, etc. are all so different. A better comparison would between someone in IB (proportionally to all people in Finance) is to someone in surgery or something in terms of magnitude of impact.

But let me expand on a point about facilitation. Those in the Finance field facilitate invention, improved products, a more robust system, increase of money to people who are good with it. Medically, you are improving people's capacity in their lives as a result of them being fucked up (e.g. repairing a leg) and rarely improving it outright (taking a normal out of shape unhealthy person and turning them into a God). Both jobs actually revolve around improving capacity of other people and amplifying it, but the medical profession (rightly or wrongly) has a halo around it because it is very simple to understand what is happening when you apply a band-aid on someone who is hurt. They get back closer to 'normal'. This is emotionally powerful, financially (costs so much), spiritually, etc. for someone to go through that and they are reverent in kind- just like if you give some starving kid in Africa $5, or even the monetary equivalent in what went into the surgery. These are different kinds of amplification and magnitude in the same comparison with a janitor or prostitute or plumber. But the reality is 95% of cases in Medicine are not these serious problems, they are writing a prescription for ear infection medication, or re-upping your cholesterol meds. You could even make a case that by having some of these solutions you are enabling poor decisions (if being obese meant you would die, would we be obese? obviously not advocating for a reduction in medical services but pointing out how easy it is to view things in different but valid ways). In the same way we don't put a halo around a bank teller for 'being a banker', regular nurses aren't brain surgeons who solve complicated problems. In general I see a halo around the medical profession but why really? Everyone helps other people in their jobs, that's why they exist. In terms of actual measurable impact it is complicated comparison so everyone (myself included) will always say the medical field is 'better for society'.

Not to mention many physicians can give bad advice which was my point about a job being what you make of it and how you perceive it, as well as existing for a reason because it provides value to society. In many cases the best help a physician could do is give sound exercise and nutritional advice, yet many are clueless when it comes to nutrition (limited to a few old courses in school). Being good in any job requires agency and motivation, and in a field where there are 1,000,000 physicians and many fewer high finance professionals the type of work will likely be much amplified by someone in Finance simply because of supply and the type of work being dealt with (e.g. facilitating the creation of a hospital, or even in PE where you better situate a company that makes masks or defibrillators, etc). The good physicians and Finance people of the world are doing amazing jobs alike, but they are simply vastly different types of work and deservedly someone in the care profession gets the 'halo' however it's a challenging conversation to compare with other fields.

The problem with your point of view is that it's overly virtuous and without any real critical thinking. No one even disagreed with you that the type of work you mentioned is more directly impactful. However, it is very difficult to compare apples and oranges between different types of work (few people frame finance v. medical field as amplifiers and simply as 'good doctor' vs 'evil finance guy') which is why people can justifiably chase the biggest paycheck (e.g. the market defining what value they bring which is not the best but a very simple way of doing things). Anyway, curious what you think about my prostitute example. But again, no one is disagreeing with you and any one of us who might agree with even my most 'rude' points are agreeing with you in base sentiment. It seems like you don't even understand what arguments were being made, or what you're arguing against... Again, you can't compare apples to oranges easily and my point is that being a doctor is virtuous (like the sentiment you have which we all have to a large degree) because we can 'see' the direct impact they make. But they are simply more magnified versions of your plumber, janitors, prostitutes, etc. and make a more 'dignified' life (justifiably, but identifying those reasons is intelligible and important). You can't make the comparison to Finance people well and it's hard. Finance people can facilitate and make decisions with much more magnitude generally, but everyone is a 'cog in the system' for the most part. You're not inventing anything as a surgeon unless you're already intelligent enough to be an inventor, and you're not changing the principals of investing by funding an invention by said genius. Everyone has value add in this world and in generalizing, the medical and high finance fields are characteristically different. A brain surgeon is WAY different than a heart surgeon as to a regular surgeon to a physician. They are all different and important, but so are Finance people in a more abstract way. Thoughts?

 

I don’t want to come across as the hippy guru on this one, but it feels pretty dumb having these arguments.

Let’s use your ACL example.

What about the RE specialist who owns and operates the hospital property? What about the financing team that merged two health entities to provide increased care to a broader community? What about the insurance company who is covering the cost of surgery? What about the engineers who designed the ortho imaging machines? What about the chemists and scientists who provide the drugs to prevent infection and sedate you?

Without all of those components Mr. MD doesn’t get the chance to draw a line in your leg and pop a few staples on your new ACL.

When you start thinking about shit this way it feels dumb trying to organize a podium and hand out feel good medals to any one person.

Stay in your lane, operate with an ounce of decency in your day-to-day, and maybe the wheels keep on spinning.

 

I am in a similar boat to you but interning in IB this summer. I knew before starting college that I did not want to do any more school after undergrad before working. Sure, lawyers and esp doctors can make good money when all is said and done, but being able to sustain myself, having a strong financial start with a 150k salary and minimal debt, and hopefully help my parents out financially to retire as they get older are very important for me.

 

As a banker you will have readily available access to capital that allows you to donate it quicker to non profits that need it and hopefully increase your donations as your salary increases. Every NPO needs money, every vaccine needs money, impoverished communities need money, education needs money, you get the point. You don't have to be the next Gandhi to make a difference but you do have to be view money in a way that isn't exclusively for personal gain but for society's gain.

 

No one makes a direct social impact at the start of their careers because you don't have the skillset or knowledge to do so (this applies to 95% of people).

This is even harder to do in banking where there is a lot of knowledge to absorb before you can become a competent professional. I would say for at least 10 years you should work on mastering your craft and then in those 10 years think about things you can do to leave a social impact, such as helping companies raise financing that are trying to solve a social issue, volunteering and using your client contacts to bring awareness to this issue.

You get the idea.

 

One part of my job is to scout innovative companies, meet them, fund them and make them grow their business. What ultimately leads to multiples of your investment (=cold, hard profit), is enabled through creating jobs, securing nascent industries, motivating people to believe in themselves, and helping them with our network.

In just the last FY, my management and my team have put investments in place that created more than 300 full-time jobs on a global scale (within these young startups). These 300 employees are now able to feed 300 families, send their children to educational facilities and pay up to 300 mortgages.

If this is not a social impact, I don't know what is.

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You don’t have to define your social impact by what you do for work. think of it this way, using the money you make as an investment banker to support your parents / family of your own is a good deed in its own right. maybe it didn’t help the whole world but that doesn’t make it meaningless.

Speaking more broadly, if you truly care about something you’ll make time for it. it might be difficult in the first 1-2 years of banking, but if volunteering or community involvement are that important to you, you can make time. I did. Part of that requires building a solid enough reputation that you can set boundaries with your team. I’ve never had an issue arise from saying that I will be taking a Saturday once a month or a week during the summer to do volunteer work. if it’s really not doable for whatever reason, then there’s nothing stopping you from donating.

 

OP this is a good question so I'll give you an honest answer. How much social impact does an investment banker have? The same amount of religious impact a hooker has on society

 

For context I'm a physician trying to expand my career into non-clinical roles. I think you need to reframe the question from "what will have the most social impact?" to "what will provide me with intrinsic satisfaction?". Both Finance and Medicine have tremendous social value, even if in Finance it is less readily obvious. But in reality in order to advance society you need to be a business owner/creator/innovator. Simply being an employee and collecting a paycheck is fine but doesn't really advance society. The people who are advancing society are forming new innovative businesses, inventing things, discovering things etc. You could do this in either field. In my field of medicine new minimally invasive surgeries are being developed every year and displacing big open surgeries with similar results. Advances are being made with cancer etc. I think you can carve out an innovative career in many different ways in many different fields. But you need to decide what will fulfill you intrinsically. We can debate whether Medicine or Finance has more value to society but that's really not the point. The point is what will create satisfaction and a sense of purpose. For me, there is something incredibly rewarding about taking Grandpa who is having a stroke and can't talk or move half his body and surgically removing the clot so that by morning he is chatting with his family and crying as he and the family thank you. Or performing surgery on a cancer and giving someone another quality decade of life. Or emergently treating a pelvic bleed after a 16 year old got hit by a car. There is something non-financial that can give you pride and purpose. Perhaps someone in IB can speak towards their experience with something similar in their careers. For me this is pretty special. The financial aspect isn't bad, ~$6-700k but after 10 years of training and $250k student loans, but the ceiling is lower and why I am trying to pick up additional admin roles in addition. Medicine is great. Finance is (probably) great. Determine what you value and make a decision based on that. You need to shadow and talk to many of these professionals though because they are fundamentally very different on the day-to-day workflow.

 

Everyone suffers from a grass is greener mentality. As shown on this thread, many finance people glorify physicians while the physicians glorify the finance people. The truth is there are pros and cons to both types of work. You are both adding value and doing admin shit in both careers.

Will update my computer soon and leave Incognito so I will disappear forever. How did I achieve Neanderthal by trolling? Some people are after me so need to close account for safety.
 

I think you might be getting into banking for the wrong reasons if you’re trying to have a social impact on the world... not saying it’s a bad thing, but you will find it hard to see the social impact when you’re formatting slides at 02:30.

I don't know... Yeah. Almost definitely yes.
 

lmao finance industry and you’re asking about “social impact” we’re here to get rich bro

 

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