Your explanation on the above conflicts the experience I’ve had with the finance sectors who have caused the 2008 Financial Crisis and bankers’ fiesta with bailouts unless I’m misunderstanding the definition of ‘social value’. I believe the career still is a good option for those earning to give because of the exceptional amount of money people can make, which more than sets off against the socially widespread negative view for financiers if the use of earnings aims at saving the world.
The claim in the article is not “finance people earn a lot, therefore their work is socially valuable”. It is “finance people earn a lot; earnings generally correlate with social value to some extent; so we should at least consider the possibility that what they do is valuable, even if at first glance it doesn’t look like it”. The argument that follows merely observes that some of what happens in the finance sector is socially valuable, which I don’t think is controversial. No one is claiming that everything or even most is socially valuable, though it might turn out that way despite the obvious big examples where it hasn’t.
(One could argue, though I’m not sure I would, that the fact that financial crises can have such severe consequences is evidence that a properly-working financial sector is very valuable: if it weren’t, it wouldn’t matter much if it underwent a crisis. The weak point in this argument is that something not very valuable in itself can work its way into a position where its failure can cause disaster; a ruptured appendix can be a medical emergency even though we don’t need our appendixes much these days.)
Your explanation on the above conflicts the experience I’ve had with the finance sectors who have caused the 2008 Financial Crisis and bankers’ fiesta with bailouts unless I’m misunderstanding the definition of ‘social value’. I believe the career still is a good option for those earning to give because of the exceptional amount of money people can make, which more than sets off against the socially widespread negative view for financiers if the use of earnings aims at saving the world.
The claim in the article is not “finance people earn a lot, therefore their work is socially valuable”. It is “finance people earn a lot; earnings generally correlate with social value to some extent; so we should at least consider the possibility that what they do is valuable, even if at first glance it doesn’t look like it”. The argument that follows merely observes that some of what happens in the finance sector is socially valuable, which I don’t think is controversial. No one is claiming that everything or even most is socially valuable, though it might turn out that way despite the obvious big examples where it hasn’t.
(One could argue, though I’m not sure I would, that the fact that financial crises can have such severe consequences is evidence that a properly-working financial sector is very valuable: if it weren’t, it wouldn’t matter much if it underwent a crisis. The weak point in this argument is that something not very valuable in itself can work its way into a position where its failure can cause disaster; a ruptured appendix can be a medical emergency even though we don’t need our appendixes much these days.)