Voltaire wrote that “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” The total absence of work is demonstrably a bad thing for most pe… - Andrew Yang

While I enjoy the work because of my love of mathematics, I luckily realized that this career path was simply designed to exploit inefficiencies in markets in order to extract profits from others. This financial realm known as trading is a zero-sum game where for every dollar you make, someone else loses a dollar, and I know I’m not destined to become such an obvious parasite on society. I only aspire to lead a meaningful, impactful life where I can apply my skills as an extremely analytical individual toward the benefit of humanity.

In 2009, Zeke and I decided to entertain suitors, in large part because Zeke’s charter school, the Equity Project, was in full swing.* It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt that having a well-resourced parent would ensure that the company would thrive in the long term. After a competitive bidding process, we agreed to be acquired by Kaplan and the Washington Post Company in December of that year. I remember the day vividly. After all the documents were signed, I sat there and waited for the transfer to clear. I was sitting at my web browser, hitting refresh over and over again until it cleared in the late afternoon. And there it was. I let out a “Yeah!” and emerged from my office. I walked around dispensing checks to employees, as we had set aside a bonus pool for both staff and instructors. It’s a lot of fun giving away money. I was Asian Santa Claus for a day. I went home for the holidays the following week. At this point my parents were quite pleased with me; my assuming the mortgage on their apartment likely had something to do with that. I zeroed out my student loans that week too. I’d gone from scrapping and scrimping for almost a decade to being a thirty-four-year-old millionaire.

Your expenses grow to match your income. As the decades pass and you realize that no, you’re not going to save the world, the money becomes a more and more important part of the justification. And when you have kids, you’re stuck; it’s much easier to deprive yourself of money (and what it buys) than to deprive your children of money. More important, you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing. It’s easier to think that underwriting new debt offerings really is saving the world than to think that you are underwriting new debt offerings, because of the money, instead of saving the world. And this goes for many walks of life. It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world. Sure, there are self-parodying, economically delusional, psychotherapy-needing, despicable people on Wall Street . . . but there are also a lot of people who went there because it was easy and stayed because they decided they couldn’t afford not to and talked themselves into it. A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them, although I do think they should do their best to keep their expenses down so they will be able to switch careers later. But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities — universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans — and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg.7