2rafa
1hr ago
£120k? Even junior commerical barristers in their first year post pupillage earn multiples of that each year. From the website of One Essex Court (top Commercial Chambers), bolding mine:
They’re the very very highest tier and in the most lucrative corner of commercial law, the average new commercial barrister makes nothing close to that, and for those in crime, chancery, family they make much less still, often even at the height of their career. It reminds me of that funny story going round a few weeks ago about Oxbridge grads laughing Goldman Sachs out the door because they were getting offers at quant firms for £500k or whatever out of the gate, but of course it wasn’t “Oxford grads”, it was a tiny handful of senior researcher PhDs at the tiny quant finance institute moving into industry after a decade plus of academia, a handful a year of them. The base graduate salary in front office in the City is probably still like £50k, and at the Bar it’s similar too. Even so, a mid career highest tier commercial barrister (even at OEC) is making perhaps a million, 1.5 a year; even a top commercial KC tops out at 2.5/3 unless he’s uniquely lucky or mercenary, the cap at top American law firms for a partner is much higher.
But yes, while we can quibble about exact comp it’s extremely good per hour and better than almost anything in finance on an hourly basis unless you’re extremely good, senior or lucky.
Almost makes me question my life choices... I think I'd be good enough to get pupillage and then tenancy, maybe not at OEC but very likely at one of the other similar caliber sets, I know how to turn up the charm when necessary and while I don't speak in RP I think you could safely describe my accent as "exotic" in the good way.
Maybe, I tend to think it’s all connections really, although of course they say otherwise. It’s a cartel and they do very well for themselves, but it’s important to say that they are an extractive profession of the kind that was largely abolished with the end of the guild system (again, notable exceptions like the AMA notwithstanding). If I had been born in Britain I would probably try to have become a barrister, it seems to be what all the relatively smart people with good verbal ability from reasonable backgrounds do. I’d probably do something a little more exciting, like crime or divorce, though. Still, one can’t complain too much.
2rafa
5hr ago
I know places like Jane Street etc. are expanding out into more traditional type banking and trying to eat the lunch of these dinosaurs billing $100m on something that can be done faster and better by smarter people running a leaner operation but providing a more complete service for under $10 million (while the employees still work something resembling a 9-5).
Jane Street, Point72, Citadel etc are massively scaling up their hiring. It’s like back in the dotcom era or early 2000s when people were saying Google would become one of the biggest companies on earth with only 5000 employees since you dont need that many people to maintain a search engine. Now they have almost 200,000 employees, mostly unnecessary, because everyone wants their fiefdom and when you start making money everybody wants a cut. As the big funds and quant shops start expanding into traditional banking territory they will hire bankers (as they already are) and they will bring headcount, because that is what humans do when there’s money. Jane Street is growing headcount at like 50% a year; revenue is growing faster, but my suspicion is that much of that isn’t due to the headcount.
Similarly in the legal world I know there are now barristers who with their junior bill around £700-£800 an hour but as a one two team coupled with a very hands off instructing solicitor produce more robust documents with a faster turnaround than the overcharging magic circle firms but the MC firms still get a ton of business from clueless corporate charging more to produce worse results just because clients want to communicate with people that have "Clifford Chance" on their letterhead rather than "4 Stone Buildings" even though your average junior at 4SB is higher human capital than a partner at Clifford Chance.
I take a rather dim view of barristering as a profession. Many barristers are great people, but it’s always seemed like a job for the Oxbridge debate types who don’t like to work very hard and who get paid insane hourly rates to re-enact the Oxford Union in court, RP accent and all. Top solicitor partners make more but they really do seem to work much more too. Maybe I just don’t understand it as a foreigner, but my barrister friends barely seem to work and get paid big time hourly or daily (not sure which it is) to regurgitate the same arguments, cadence and so on for new clients. Plus it’s the clearest example of an AMA-type employment cartel in the UK, because they deliberately restrict training places to a trickle so that fees remain extremely high. The UK decided that lazy people with high verbal IQ and the right accent who read literature or languages at Oxbridge ‘deserve’ a comfortable £120k a year and so they have this process of the conversion course and bar school and then the pupillage bottleneck to give them the job.
2rafa
5hr ago
Even reading this makes me go "yuck" at the whole business model of these places. Prop shops etc. manage to produce more value per employee by only working them 40-50 hours a week (notable exceptions excepted) than investment banks manage. All that talent which could be put to good use elsewhere to benefit humanity gets wasted in IB make work.
Investment banking isn’t really an 80/100 hour a week job. No job is, there is research about productivity dropping off a cliff after 50/55 hours anyway. Investment banking is more like one of those jobs where the gap between personal time and work time is dictated by the role (like the army, or working on a ship) rather than a regular 40 or 50 hour a week professional office job.
For example, your investment banker friend says he works 9am to 1am every day. OK. Firstly, he’s not in at 9. You could walk through any bulge bracket investment banking floor at 9.05am and not even 20% of juniors would be in. The usual start time is maybe 9.45am, often 10 if it’s been a late night in the office. So your friend comes in at 10am. He drops his stuff off, then makes a coffee, checks his emails, all the rest of it. There’s usually no last minute work to do unless it’s the literal day of a pitch because the MD (who works from home 2 days a week, sees clients 2 days a week, and comes in from 8-4pm the other day) started reviewing changes to the deck at 8am over his breakfast in Surrey anyway. The junior reads the news, halfheartedly sends a few emails to the lawyers / client / whatever, attends an internal meeting and does some ‘research’ (a YouTube video and ChatGPT) for a couple of long shot rfps that the global vertical head wants to say the bank pitched for.
Then it’s lunch, quick trip to Farmer J, then a coffee, then a walk around outside, then he picks up some dry cleaning. Catches up with a colleague from another team over another long coffee. Then comes back to the office and sends a few more emails, MD comes back with a few small adjustments, maybe some light modelling, pull a few news articles to lazily include in a daily sector market recap summary he will send to some clients that they never read alongside the similar email from every bank and brokerage and research provider and newspaper. Then it’s 4pm. Your friend goes to the gym for a relaxed 90 minutes. Comes back at 6pm after a shower. The day really begins as the MD / director comes back with comments. VPs start getting more demanding. He orders dinner at 7 for 8. He eats, has another coffee, then gets down to real work while “chill beats to work/study to” plays in the background. He works through to 1am then goes home.
If you compare it your archetypal hardworking 45 hour a week PMC, the banker still has time to get his dry cleaning, have a long lunch if he wants to, go to the gym for a long time every day (there are others who sit in the lobby or a cafe and read, take a nap, go for a swim, go shopping, etc), do any “life admin” he needs to (he can go home briefly at 2pm to let in the plumber if he wants, as long as he’s back later), he doesn’t need to make dinner or clean up because it’s paid for every day etc. He actually has a lot of leisure time, my first staffer would play video games for like three hours a day in the afternoon and nobody cared. He doesn’t even necessarily have less sleep than the average worker (company car has him home on empty night roads by 1.30, he showers and sleeps, wakes up at 9, he can easily get 7 hours of sleep). He just needs to technically show his face in the office by 10 and then do his actual work between 7pm and 1am, so the MD can review it over breakfast.
2rafa
8hr ago
DoorDash without immigration would perhaps be slightly more expensive (immigration has depressed prices for low wage labor, but welfare has increased them, and we don’t know what policy decisions were made in this alternate universe) without immigration. If the US just adopted a Gulf-style kafala system then prices would probably be the same, Americans could just be safe in the knowledge that everyone goes home at the end of their stint rather than getting the vote.
Investment bankers work long hours because they want to. Well, not the individual analyst, but it’s not a demand issue. The client (ie the CFO, possibly an few less lazy directors and a few corporate development or treasury depending on what it is guys who actually halfheartedly read (skim) the pitchbooks) doesn’t care whether that pitchbook is 20 slides or 300 slides. The modelling is bullshit anyway because it’s designed to produce a specific output that the client wants, and again everybody knows it. Everybody also knows that all the banks are interchangeable and that for any big normal M&A or E/DCM every major player is capable of achieving exactly the same result, and that in the end they will pick Goldman because nobody got fired for hiring them or Citi because the CFO plays golf with the vertical head or JPM because the CEO and the respective vice chairman went to boarding school together or whatever it is.
The reality is that investment banking is and has long been (probably since the late 1980s and the arrival of spreadsheets and digital data providers) hugely overstaffed. Analysts and associates shouldn’t even exist, they have a role in equity research and on the buy side, and maybe as job titles in sales and trading, but in actual advisory it’s a fake job. In 1975 the analyst was the guy who physically walked seven floors down to the corporate library and spent three hours finding the 1962 annual report for Philip Morris with the archivist so he could underline some figures and bring them upstairs and then spend four days building the most basic valuation model on paper spreadsheets that is vastly more simple and with more assumptions that whatever FactSet has already pre-generated today. The job is fake.
But everyone knows that clients have money and that you can’t bill $100m on a mega M&A deal if even the client knows you literally have a 5 man team on the job (that privilege is reserved for the Robey Warshaws of the world) , so it serves the industry to let juniors into the game in exchange for creating a hierarchy of fake-work make-work where cascading levels of VPs, associates and analysts invent pointless tasks to do.
2rafa
9hr ago
Food was good in 1959 (though I haven't personally tried it).
Almost all modern gastronomy (I’m not just talking about Michelin starred fine dining, but like basic techniques) is downstream of French cooking, including the techniques a 21st century upper-middle tier restaurant in Indianapolis or Salt Lake City might use.
In 1959, what a normal PMC American today would consider “good [western] restaurant food” (again, with no pretensions to ‘fine dining’, just the kind of thing you get in the decent restaurant of a four star hotel), existed in maybe 20 restaurants in NYC and a dozen each in Los Angeles, DC and Chicago. A few others scattered around the country in various other cities, maybe a few in Boston, that kind of thing. The food that The Four Seasons in NYC, probably at that time the best restaurant in the country (and which itself only opened in 1959), was on a level below what you could find at thousands, probably tens of thousands, of restaurants across America today.
2rafa
9hr ago
They have easy app food delivery even in countries without mass immigration, and (get this) they also have it in countries with mass immigration where that immigration is temporary, limited, of economic value and NEVER leads to even the hope of any pathway to citizenship (like the gulf countries).
2rafa
2d ago
The relative proportion of translators in the Afghan population is challenged only by the proportion of journalists in the Gazan population.
2rafa
2d ago
I’m not really talking about actual welfare like medicare, food stamps and social security, which most federally elected Republicans have essentially accepted since the Great Society / their implementation; even libertarians like Massie are only halfheartedly lukewarm on them. Machine politics is a mix but again Republicans have embraced it at various times before if never quite to the extent of the most famous Democratic cases. The general popularity is kind of vibes based though, and I think the triumphalism around the vibe is somewhat overwrought. The credit cycle will end at some point (it has every time in the 350 year history of capitalism), times will get tough, an economic populist message will hit and the left have one pre-made. The right can rehash the Tea Party ideology but it’s very far removed from the large scale deficit spending of the Trump admin.
2rafa
3d ago
I think Trump is holding the Republican coalition together. I do think that a lot of the recent obsession (Dreher etc) with the “groypers” is somewhat overdone - which isn’t to say they aren’t a major force - but there are divisions. There was a lot of triumphalism on the right this year, some of it overestimates the hatred for the entire left platform, which was more about the total cavalcade of woke stuff than every individual point. A lot of the particular rightist beliefs taken for granted even on regular trad (not dissident right) twitter are not hugely popular or widespread among many groups who vote Republican. Violent crime rates are also falling in many places, and suddenly rising crime rates from 2020-2023 was a very real and powerful driver of Republican gain in vote share among all demographics.
2rafa
3d ago
Trump doesn’t like her, and Trump retains the support of much of the public (it can’t be overstated how many of his fans aren’t obsessively online about the Epstein thing, even if they’re vaguely in favor of disclosure when polled).
Carlson and Fuentes are both far less ideologically rigid than they sometimes seem. Tucker’s journey from libertarianism is more known (and because of his age, longer), but Fuentes has changed with time too. He won’t ever become a neocon, but there is a case to be made that he is moderating his antisemitism over time. We will see what happens, I think that as automation and AI and their economic consequences becomes the central question in politics a lot of things will be up in the air.
That was how it worked under Gaddafi and by all accounts the Europeans have tried to replicate the old arrangement.
This is almost entirely untrue, the Italians made a brief but largely failed effort to negotiate an arrangement but Frontex undercut them at every turn and it’s not viable without a broader deal, which requires a border agency that doesn’t undercut that kind of arrangement at every turn. Even if it wasn’t possible to stop crossings, of course, that doesn’t prevent an even simpler arrangement, in which every migrant illegally landed is simply deported, immediately, by air to Libya without any European legal process whatsoever, whereupon the local warlords can do with them what they wish. A second crossing (unlike the English Channel) from North Africa is beyond most of their means, so most would return to their countries.
If dumping money on warlords was enough to create a state then the Taliban wouldn't have rolled over Afghanistan faster than the Marines could leave. Forget 500m, they absorbed trillions and for all intents and purposes that money may as well have been thrown into a bonfire for all the good it did.
As I’ve stated many times, victory in Afghanistan was absolutely possible in 2001. Restore the highly popular king (which America refused to do out of some absurd ideological republicanism) and execute about 1-3% of the adult male population per year. Implement a strict two child policy. Introduce communal and summary punishment, including the extermination of whole villages. Internal population transfers to rotate people away from traditional ethnic communities, breaking up family and ancestral ties. Extreme control of the Pakistani border to prevent almost all crossings. Regularly kill large numbers of ruling warlords (under the king’s nominal authority) to prevent complacency, and in certain territories kill a large proportion of tribal patriarchs to dismantle Pashtunwala by force, the same way Stalin and Mao handled rebellious tribes (they failed in some cases, as in Chechnya (where they weren’t close to tough enough), but succeeded in many others).
Of course this was unpalatable to western liberal elites, but I can’t stand the idea that it was impossible. With enough brutality, almost any society can be dismantled and reconstituted. It is only a question of will and incentives.
In 2006 Iraq was in the midst of a bloody campaign of sectarian violence in which Sunnis were purged from most of Baghdad. Estimates for the number of refugees and casualties created by the chaos of the period ranges between six and seven figures.
Savagery around the world is pretty common. As in Syria with the Alawites it was unlikely that Sunni minority rule over the largely Shia population would end entirely peacefully. It is still clear that, very dumb “Buh buh GDP doesn’t mean anything” European-leftist type arguments, average quality of life in modern Iraq for many people is substantially higher than in 2003.
2rafa
7d ago
Unless the Europeans are willing to sink migrant boats by the thousands and let them all drown then simply "saying no" is about as effective as a 5'2 woman "saying no" to a 7' felon.
There is no need to deliberately sink the boats (although to be clear, you wouldn’t have to sink many to prevent all crossings; most people don’t want to die). You go to Libya, find the most powerful warlords on the coast (there are only a couple of major factions) and pay them $500m a year to deal with the migrant issue, payment upon results. They could use the money and will be happy to help.
West Germany had higher per capita GDP in 1955 than Germany in 1935 too, are we to conclude that Hitler was a humanitarian success?
If GDP per capita was higher in 1946 there might be a point. In Iraq there has been largely continuity of government since 2005. The Shiites dominate but that is expected given they are a majority.
2rafa
8d ago
It is absurd slander to suggest that the war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or anywhere else is “responsible” for mass immigration to Europe.
-
Many Muslim migrants to Europe arrived as guest workers from places like Pakistan and Turkey that were at peace at the time of mass emigration; they arrived in large numbers decades before 9/11.
-
Many recent migrants come from places like Eritrea, Congo, India and Somalia which, while sometimes subject to localized conflicts, people leave mainly for economic reasons. The average Somali doesn’t move to Sweden to “flee war”, they move for an easier, better and more comfortable life. The “war” framework is literally buying into the leftist idea that they are legitimate refugees.
-
During the entire history of global colonialism countries routinely invaded, conquered, sacked and otherwise reassembled the affairs of countless other countries (including much of the Middle East) with zero mass immigration to Europe. You can just say “no”. Dick Cheney didn’t make Sweden the “humanitarian superpower”. He didn’t make Angela Merkel say “wir schaffen das”. China doesn’t have all of Burma and Mongolia walk in because people know there’s no hope there and they will be returned.
-
The most expensive outlay in the War on Terror (the Iraq invasion) was a humanitarian success. Certainly there were issues (like the brief ISIS thing) and there is a good case to be made that it was a bad deal fiscally for the US (I agree with this assessment), but Iraq today is far more prosperous than it was in 2003. Dollar denominated GDP is up over 1000% (so in real terms), GDP per capita is up 4x even though oil has been in a slump since 2014 (indicating again real economic growth rather than just higher resource revenues). Baghdad is a boomtown now.
2rafa
8d ago
True, but this was an act by the Labour government. The reason reason is that it was recommended in a report about the riots last summer that suggested that if the public had been immediately informed it was a British citizen of African descent and not a small boat refugee (as had been alleged in some early TikTok posts) then the riots wouldn’t have happened. I’m not sure that logic is sound but it did lead to the new ‘presumption’ that suspect race is now reported immediately in high profile cases.
2rafa
9d ago
Strangely the government recently committed itself to immediately publishing the criminal’s actual race in major cases. Why they thought this would be in their interest is anyone’s guess.
2rafa
10d ago
So if I’m a respectable middle class person and I don’t want to pay my deductible or whatever, I just email the hospital and say “I don’t want to pay $10,000, how about $500?” and then…they just say “yeah sure, you got us, here’s the link”?
2rafa
11d ago
My conversations with a few in the know and my personal experience has led me to the understanding that in the US, in many cases, paying hospital bills is essentially optional. Like many modern systems, it's one that relies on the charity of good faith actors to subsidize deadbeats.
It’s optional if you’re poor or a criminal. If you have fixed, easily confiscated assets like property, a brokerage account etc then I think they can and will just go through the courts and get a lien.
2rafa
12d ago
Great question and certainly an interesting topic.
So now I ask you - what is your reason to think that (Tamil) Brahmins are high-IQ? (also I would like to ask @self_made_human and @2rafa, as they make this claim too) For Tamil Brahmins is it based on similar calculations as mine?
At some point, you have to ask yourself why half the Indians you meet at the top of every high performing PMC job belong to a tiny minority that makes up 0.15% of the Indian population. Something similar happens when you realize that in many cases it feels like a majority of PMC Africans in the West in fields like medicine, finance, big law etc are Igbos (although the outperformance is less great; there are a lot of Igbos). In both cases there are partial emigration dynamics explanations - the socialist government of Tamil Nadu after independence forcibly acted against the dominance of the Tamil Brahmins, stripped them of their caste names, removed them from positions of power, and drove many into exile, and of course for the Igbos there was the whole Biafran War thing, but those explanations are insufficient. Plenty of other tribes, after all, have faced similar circumstances without that outcome.
You also become adept at recognizing Tamil Brahmins, even if they no longer have the Iyer/Iyengar names because of anti-casteism policies in their home state. I see them everywhere now, they are impressed when I recognize them, although they can instantly recognize each other.
Quantitative data is limited; it is sometimes forgotten that the only reason we have good data on Ashkenazi Jewish outperformance and various European groups in general is that they were present and recorded in the early 20th century at the height of the scientific study of group differences; Tamil Brahmins were not (certainly in large numbers). Data is more limited. Nobels tell part of the story but, like chess competitions, far from all of it. Performance can be depressed in various ways. Clearly today when international emigration is commonplace, Tamil Brahmins outperform almost all other ethnic groups per capita in terms of leading roles like making it to the top of US corporations, senior PMC jobs, especially when accounting for legacy effects (like a corporation run by a Jewish or white gentile guy appointing his son, nephew or whatever as his successor) that they don’t have access to.
Nepotism is a poor explainer; there are so few of them and North Indian Brahmins, who are far more numerous, often look down on them for being from South India, having darker skin (lighter than all other Tamils, but certainly darker than northern Indian Brahmins) etc.
And what about for generic Brahmins? (as I mentioned, online sources just give the generic Brahmin IQ as 80. My model gives a more favourable 88IQ, but even that is not very high)
Generic Brahmins are best seen as the hereditary ancient higher segment, but remember that there are almost a hundred million of them, in some places well over 20% of the population. The best analogue is to the aristocracy in somewhere like early modern Poland where 15% of the population were technically nobles. A tiny percentage of them were actual elites, lived in palaces, had hundreds of servants, owned lots of land. Most were essentially kulaks, smallholders, people who would be considered barely above (or indeed) peasants in more restrictive European estates systems. Most Brahmins in India are rural poor, the average urban middle class person of any caste is much richer.
2rafa
12d ago
It’s a widely made argument that Epstein was an intelligence agent from the start. If he was merely a rich guy with influential friends who occasionally brokered largely made-up intelligence for fun or minor favors as a side hobby in late middle age, then a substantial part of that argument collapses, he’s just another informant, not an agent. It also challenges another argument of the agent thesis, namely the mysterious source of his wealth (which, again, has been shown relatively conclusively was Wexner). This in turn ties into things like an alleged blackmail operation (targeting…already zionist billionaires) being largely about his personal fetishes, which he occasionally invited friends to participate in, rather than an intelligence-led scheme. So yeah I’d say it’s relevant.
2rafa
12d ago
Yes there were a few very brief outages or periods of bad performance over the years, but nothing like what’s happened over the last couple of months.
2rafa
13d ago
The Motte’s Declining Audience
Several times this month I have tried to load the site and it’s been very slow, looked weird (with a kind of almost rdrama pink theme and unusual spacing) or failed to load at all.
I’d guess that this is a big reason why, after 5+ years of relative stability, the last few months have seen a huge drop off in culture war thread comments. Posting here for visibility, but this seems like something we should fix or this place is going to die pretty quickly.
Immigrants don’t mean great food (don’t they say Tokyo has some of the best French food in the world?). But most American restaurant food in 1959 would indeed by pretty bad compared to what we’re used to today!
More options
Context Copy link