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pessimizer
The larger the ratio of the size of the financial industry to the size of the productive economy at the same standard of living, the less efficient the economy is. Growth in the financial industry is like growth in the amount of oil you have to add to keep your engine from seizing up.
ultrasociality
Sounds about right. There's a strong argument that the bigger the size of the financial industry the less innovative and the more extractive an economy becomes.
gozur88
Just because you don't understand the value someone provides to society doesn't mean they don't provide any. That's why planned economies don't work.
ultrasociality
All economies are planned in some way. That's just human history. Once you get to a certain level of large scale organization it's impossible to avoid some level of centralization.
gozur88
But not to the level where bureaucrats pick wages. That way lies poverty and strife.
kwhitefoot
Then they shouldn't pick rules on who gets the right to strike either.
gozur88
Who does that? In the US only government employees and "essential" services don't have the right to strike.

That's the deal when you work for the government, and you know it going in.

panic
It seems to me that the bankers were just as necessary to the Irish as garbage workers were to New Yorkers. Why couldn't the people of New York set up their own program for trash disposal just like the Irish set up their own replacement banking system?
ultrasociality
Because it's a job most people don't want to do and that has little reward?