The setting is a surpassingly in-love-with-itself Ivy League University--i'd call it an elite institution, but, my dears, that goes without saying.... Whoever it is that graduates the students says the graduating words. And the MBA class holds up dollar bills and waves them around their heads. The rest of the graduating classes do the obligatory thing with the tasselled cap or have the abashed good grace to mill around and high five each other or whatnot. We look at the MBAs with a combination of contempt, strained amusement and pity. The pity is decidedly misplaced.
If they noted or cared at all about our reaction to them, they might have appropriately responded with the chant witheringly deployed by the student body of elite insitutions when one of their sport teams is getting drubbed by, say, some grubby state college--It's alright, it's okay,/You'll be working for us some day. And had they done so, they would have been proven exactly right.
These MBAs have carried the day. They won. And we all mostly work for them or at least dance to the tune they call.
And the law students at that graduation ceremony. They didn't wave dollar bills around in a ritualistic enactment of orgiastic greed. What about them? Well, lots of them wanted to go work for Mitt Romney at Bain Capital and some did in fact do so. They used their JD to buy entree into the world of predatory investment banking and relinquished or were prepared to relinquish their trained-for profession before even starting in it. Fucking sellouts. Absolutely, but not appreciably more so than most of their classmates. You know the ones who went to the big corporate law firms to defend Union Carbide from those whining Bopahl "victims" or to help Ron Lauder leverage buyout his way to multibillionaire status. A lot of these guys--the most ruthless and efficacious--were eventually invited into the world of investment banking and were able to escape the sordid, little ethics-trammelled legal profession..
Surely, though, there were some whose motivations weren't exclusively mercenary. Wthout doubt. The story goes this way. A highly accomplished and prominent poverty lawyer came to the school to speak to an assembly of law students. He asked all the students if they wanted to do poverty law work. A hundred or so hands went up. He then asked the group of hand raisers how many of them were second year students. About two dozen hands went up. He finally asked how many of the hand raisers were third year students. There were four of those. He asked those four to meet with him at the end of his presentation.
Michael Lewis in his best-selling book Liar's Poker talks about how the world of investmest banking seized hegemonic power over our society. It is a story about money, lots and lots of money. Enough money to have seduced politicians, regulators and those aspiring to a prominent position in society. Somehow high finance became the only vocational dream worth dreaming. And an alarming number of our brightest-although hardly our best-flocked to it.