While your comment is a great piece of rhetoric, I have to point out that nobody in their right mind would confuse a startup engineer with a financial quant. The quant has a much better understanding of statistics and probability, something you might not want in the startup engineer, who works in an industry where 99% of their work crashes and burns in obscurity. "Wealth creation" is a misnomer; wealth destruction would be more accurate for their efforts.
Fundamentally, the banks' role in the subprime crisis was to remove the incentive for lenders to do their due diligence before offering mortgages to people. There was a whole chain of "just take the money" - from the janitor buying a mansion, to the lender transferring the loan, to the banks packaging the loans into derivatives, to ratings agencies rubber-stamping AAAs.
At every level, money was offered, and money was taken. This is what this much-maligned 1% has done, in their own eyes. I believe this is no different from what happens to the 1% in the Valley. Witness the recent spate of startups cashing out. People on HN rose to defend (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089634) this behavior. "The VCs offered money, founders have no reason not to take it", seems to be the general consensus. Pot, kettle, black?
I work at a startup myself. I believe things like Twitter and Reddit et al., while unprofitable, still contribute to human wealth in the sense of changing society and fostering communication. But I don't believe this sort of thing gives us the right to cast stones at the financial industry, whether or not they want to call themselves engineers.
We wouldn't exist without them.
(99%s and 1%s intentionally hyperbolic, just like the protest.)
The big difference between startup risk and financial industry risk is that when 99% of startups fail, the losses are contained to those who took the risk. When the banking system fails, the losses are systemic and uncontained and affect people all over the country and world.
I'd also debate your point that the average quant understands statistics and probability much better than startup founders. The former have created a system where the expected payoff is negatively asymmetric, the latter a system where the expected payoff is positively asymmetric. Which world do you want to live in?
And do I even need to mention how quants' recent attempt to use Gaussian statistics to model a non-Gaussian world became one of the primary causes of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
Yes there are smart, savy quants like Paul Wilmott & Co. whose intellectual integrity is impeccable. But so far they've been the exception, not the rule.
Fundamentally, the banks' role in the subprime crisis was to remove the incentive for lenders to do their due diligence before offering mortgages to people. There was a whole chain of "just take the money" - from the janitor buying a mansion, to the lender transferring the loan, to the banks packaging the loans into derivatives, to ratings agencies rubber-stamping AAAs.
At every level, money was offered, and money was taken. This is what this much-maligned 1% has done, in their own eyes. I believe this is no different from what happens to the 1% in the Valley. Witness the recent spate of startups cashing out. People on HN rose to defend (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089634) this behavior. "The VCs offered money, founders have no reason not to take it", seems to be the general consensus. Pot, kettle, black?
I work at a startup myself. I believe things like Twitter and Reddit et al., while unprofitable, still contribute to human wealth in the sense of changing society and fostering communication. But I don't believe this sort of thing gives us the right to cast stones at the financial industry, whether or not they want to call themselves engineers.
We wouldn't exist without them.
(99%s and 1%s intentionally hyperbolic, just like the protest.)