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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Major career decisions

  • Overestimating how much ScienceTM still worked like it did back when Richard Feynmann was still alive, causing me to waste five years of my life doing a PhD rather than going into finance straight out of undergrad.
  • Thinking that the 2009 rebound in conventional bank-based finance careers would continue and therefore not making more effort to jump into fintech before my skillset developed in a way which makes that difficult to do now.

Politics

  • I supported the Iraq War on the basis that Blair's career wouldn't survive being caught lying about WMD (false), that if he was lying the risk of getting caught was very high (true), and that therefore he must be telling the truth (false conclusion follows from false premise). I also assumed that the Bush Jr foreign policy and national security team would be competent, because the exact same group of people were competent when they were the Bush Sr team dealing with the messy collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I over-estimated how damaging minimum wages could be - the UK minimum wage is now at a level that I assumed would cause French-style unemployment, but empirically it hasn't done.

Race heresies

  • I thought that black African immigrants in London would be worse neighbours than black Caribbean immigrants because of the greater cultural distance and the fact that the source countries are more shitholey. In fact the Africans are better neighbours (and employees) because the process by which they got into the country was more selective.
  • I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them. (For the avoidance of doubt, they are much less powerful than left-wing anti-semites think they are).

Bush Senior’s foreign policy team was equally incompetent at handling the former Soviet Union, it just took twenty years for us to notice the consequences.

I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them.

You’re in London. Being Jewish in finance and having worked in both major cities, I’d be interested in your thoughts on what these actually are. If I had to guess what the most Jewish corners of finance are, I’d say NY / Florida (and to some extent a few other states) real estate finance, especially commercial real estate, maybe certain corners of the metals business (although far from the majority, and if I think about it even the ones I’m thinking of aren’t majority Jewish) in the Beny Steinmetz / Marc Rich / Glencore Glasenberg old guard sphere (but again, still hugely gentile, increasingly so now) and then some kinds of media / TMT private equity in the US although not in Europe. Of the big Jewish banks, Rothschild and Lazard are now overwhelming gentile-run, and Goldman will be there when the next big senior turnover happens after d-Sol leaves.

But in London? I’ve encountered more small PE and HF shops run by Etonians than Jews (okay, one by a Jewish Etonian). Fintech is also primarily gentile in London, and in the US for that matter. DM me if you don’t want to compromise yourself.

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