171–180 of 225 posts
What I find most intriguing is that the whole banking intern hours thing is that it's not the result of a resource constraint - they have plenty of money and plenty of intern applicants. It's also not about getting particularly difficult work done - intern-level spreadsheet and PowerPoint work isn't the sort of thing that only a select few can handle. It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.
see also: bootcamp, fraternity hazing
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All that doesn't make it any less wrong.
If you believe in the liberty of people to live life as they choose, it makes it a ton less wrong. They are living life with goals in mind. Some of these goals might even be, dare I say, valid. If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.
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Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That…
Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take. The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by…
No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.
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All that doesn't make it any less wrong.
You said: "You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream." Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America…
The original article is about an intern who died. So your comment is really quite stupid.
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I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.
Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That…
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Economic_elements [2] - http://isreview.org/issue/84/debts-role-history
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Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take. The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by…
in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.
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> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday. Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done. I find it hard to believe that working…
Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth. In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it comes at the cost of bandwidth. Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to re…
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It is rather a matter of missing regulations.
And what regulation(s) would you suggest? People always suggest "more regulation!" as if it's some magical panacea.
There are strict limits for extra hours. As an employee working more than 48 hours per week is allowed only as an exception and working more than 60 hours per week is simply put illegal. Extra time has to be balanced with free time. We also have a minimum of 24 payed vacation days. Most people have more.
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Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth. In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it comes at the cost of bandwidth. Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to re…
So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates. The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing grunt work.
Juniors don't make decisions, they do analysis to support the decision makers. If a decision maker proposes something in the afternoon, he wants the analysis by morning to make the decision.
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> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday. Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done. I find it hard to believe that working…
Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth. In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it comes at the cost of bandwidth. Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to re…
They would take less time because people involved would be getting adequate amounts of sleep and as a result would be able to function normally.
People who insist that other people work absurdly late hours are demonstrably not interested in efficiency or thoroughness and are actually interested in making themselves feel powerful and important by forcing other people to adhere to irrational standards.