A moral side to Wall Street?

And they say Wall Street bankers have no morals. Sam Polk, former hedge-fund trader, in today's New York Times:  

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

I'm not that surprised at Polk's ethical turn. One curious thing about the crash of 2007-2008 is just how many of those involved knew that something was amiss and ultimately destructive, as much for them as for society as a whole, and yet went about their business all the same. 

Debating culture

Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has been out for a while now, and receiving all sorts of attention, not all of it positive. Chief among the criticisms is that Chibber's analysis is too heavily loaded in favor of rational choice theory. Bruce Robbins over at N+1 is only the latest to level this charge. Check out Chibber's response published online at Jacobin Magazine.

On the question of culture, I find this passage particularly illuminating: 

So what is the view that I endorse? Do I reduce agents to asocial automatons? What I actually say in the book is three things. First, that people are largely shaped by their cultures, but that culture does not go “all the way down.” There are some needs that exist and endure independently of culture, and chief among these is the need to attend to one’s physical well-being. Second, that people are typically cognizant of this need and it therefore generates interests that influence political and social interaction. And third, that it is the universality of this need that explains the universality of resistance to exploitation — since the latter typically undermines the former. Note that I don’t simply assert this argument — I show that the actual historiography of the Subalterns themselves validates this proposition, even though they deny it (with the exception of Guha, who never denies it).

None of this entails a commitment to rational choice theory. All I am offering is one route to what was once called materialism, and those are two very different animals. I do not imply, indeed I explicitly deny, that people are welfare-maximizers. Nor do I suggest that people are selfish or competitive individualists — the two implications most commonly associated with rational choice and which are rightly rejected by others. What I do say is that people have a healthy appreciation of situations in which they are being oppressed or exploited, that this appreciation holds steady across cultures, and that it generates reasons for action. This is why what we typically see is what James Scott called “everyday forms of resistance.”

This is not controversial in the least, and yet it's amazing to see how many critics get tripped up on this point. 

The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

So, I'm trying this again. You know, a blog. This time around, I'll keep things simple. One, maybe two posts a week, I'm thinking. Also, short posts. Things I'm reading, liking, etc. A repository, if you will. What to expect: posts on current and developing research interests, including social mobility, or lack thereof, in India and the evolving discourse on ethics in business schools and financial institutions post-2008. Stay tuned.