Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums College Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be

Right. Some people are so amazing, they should have stars upon thars.

Maybe they do. Maybe that's how they recognize each other during job interviews for Important Positions --- the "interview" is really just an identification exercise.

If you've none upon yours, don't waste your time applying (or theirs, because their time so much more valuable than your time).

Ohhhh, okay.

Apart from being a close observer of the housing apocalypse, I work in the finance industry, and my observation is that the industry is extremely talented at hiding their talent, which means they're really, really talented, and definitely deserving of as much money as we can shovel at them.

In all seriousness, though, you have to be impressed by people who can get so wealthy by doing their jobs so badly. Physics dictates that a parachute of gold would perform badly, but those cats land ever so softly with them.

Policies intended to help those at the bottom can hurt them and society in general. The "college for everyone" crusade may hurt the bottom half of the IQ distribution, as has been discussed here before. The housing bubble and associated financial crisis was caused in part by a "homeownership for everyone" crusade, which necessitated lowering mortgage underwriting standards.

Wall Street played a role in the housing bubble and financial crisis, but so did politicians who pushed for easy credit, quasi-governmental entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who purchased low-quality mortgages, off-Wall-Street mortgage brokers who encouraged people to borrow too much, and home buyers who borrowed too much and lied on their mortgage applications. Blaming Wall Street alone makes for a tidy morality play but is not accurate.

My apologies for inserting a serious thought, but this video on the value/not of college-for-all is worth viewing (Citrus College, "Success in the New Economy"):

https://vimeo.com/67277269

Yes, well-- all of them are far too important for things like Garden Variety Blame, Introspection about Consequences, or Responsibility to be applicable, anyway.


It's not personal responsibility anyway when it is just a policy decision. Personal responsibility doesn't apply to corporate people. Er-- or anyone of any Real Importance.


(Snark again, in case it wasn't obvious).

You've got it.

In the 1980s, Leona Helmsley told us that taxes were for little people. Nowadays, we're learning that personal responsibility is, too.

In fact, the ones who are exempt from personal responsibility have the job of ensuring that the little people are bound by it, as in, "You chose your actions and you have to suffer the consequences."

Clearly, being one of the little people is a personal choice, and one of the consequences is the requirement for personal responsibility. For example, "You signed those 32 documents written at a 24th grade level in 3-point font giving you a home loan you didn't really qualify for, and it's YOUR fault that the mortgage company lied to you and misled you about what was in those documents. It is also your fault that your toxic loan, along with a few million others, was packaged and sold to organizations who should have seen through the lies the analysts were telling them."

Is it clear now?

You have reaffirmed the critical importance of Going to HYP.

There are so few places where you can develop talent sufficient to actually *drive* the global financial hyper-economy.

And, as you illustrated in your post, the complexity of the global financial hyper-economy is overwhelming to those without talent.

Aggressively speculating in toxic paper, while levered 100-1, to achieve competitive profitability vis-a-vis peer firms in order to achieve permanent dynastic relevance is certainly not for the faint of mind.

Well, sure, there were others that "had a role" in the disaster, just like there are passengers who would "have a role" in a bus flying off the overpass... but there's only one driver.

First of all, there's almost no difference between Wall Street and the federal government anymore, because they all went to the same schools, they're constantly exchanging employees, and the latter owes its job entirely to the campaign financing of the former. So pretending they're different entities is a waste of time... they're both privileged members of the top 1% financially. This is not to be confused with the top 1% IQ... a Venn diagram of the two groups would look not unlike the view through poorly-focused binoculars.

Also, by "quasi-government entities," you mean, "private companies which enjoy a legislative guarantee to privatize their profits and socialize their losses."

By "off-Wall Street" you mean mortgage servicing firms, who were being doggedly pursued by Wall Street to produce more product, being paid lavishly by Wall Street to do so, and were assured that, since the mortgages were being sold upstream, the servicing companies would have no skin in the game.

Then these same Wall Street analysts who cooked up this pyramid scheme began repackaging loans, trading default options and buying insurance amongst themselves, while making absurd guarantees to their investors, buying favorable investment ratings that had no basis in reality, and overall creating such a fantastically elaborate fiction that they even started believing it themselves... because... talent?

Good grief. I attend to my job for a few hours and look where we've gone. But thanks all for helping me reset. My thinking had gone astray.

Now I must get back to adding to my worth by …taking excellent care of myself and my family including our pg/2e child.... No that's not it. Volunteering in our local public school.... Nooooo, not that one. Developing my professional skills.... Meh. Making More Money. Ahhhhh, there it is.

But wait! First I’ll Zillow my home value to make myself feel elite-ish because housing prices in Silicon Valley are definitely not completely irrational and my skyrocketing home price is solely a result of my … talent …. and there definitely won’t be another housing bubble because … Regulatory agencies (noooo)... Wall Street (noooo again)... Financial institutions (nuh-uh)... we pathetic little people (that's it!) have definitely learned our lesson. Right?

I love you (little) people!

Sue

And thanks aeh for the actually relevant link! Very interesting.