side note: dsquared from CT to FT: quoted in “Well-established banks best placed to reap rewards”: “daniel Davies, analyst at Credit Suisse, says: ‘[The winners are] those who have never needed capital or those who raised it early. There are going to be national champions.’”

Edward Lucas is urging small countries in Eastern Europe to write up legislation allowing them to nationalize their banks before they crash and Russia tries to buy them.

And even those people will be fine compared to, say, AIDS orphans in South Africa, Palestinians living in the Gaza strip, slave workers in China, Brazil or wherever – so if somebody wrote an article about the problems facing blue collar workers in the US, should they be accused of having ignored the existence who are even worse off? I read Warner’s article as an account of her personal situation and that of her peers and find the implication that she is generally unaware of other people’s suffering to be unwarranted.

We are willfully marginal, and we can survive so long as at least half of our friends can make rent. This is probably just the nail in the coffin of any thoughts of repayment on our student loans.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Value is not bound to merit, nor is it’s worth always shared.

I realise also that any talk along these lines will be coloured by the unpleasant political rhetoric of the last twenty years or so.

Once I built a railroad, made it run… Brother, can you spare a dime?

I confess I’ve never felt that loser-feeling she got from being around the Masters of the Universe. I remember when my fellow physics grad students were all becoming Wall Street quants in the late 90s, thinking mostly that they were being played for chumps. But I don’t live in New York.

It is clear that far greater regulation is needed in our financial sector. But I also believe that for the health of our society, we need to find a way to stop rewarding the ultimately socially useless skills of the typical Wall Street jackass. It is clear they don’t provide much of anything of value, and the cultural implications are also corrupting.

Fear can leak out all over the place, of course. The only antidote I can think of is to remember that if you’re good at something, there’ll continue to be a role for you. Most people are good at something. The threat to accumulated pension funds, etc. is much harder to deal with, and I suspect it’ll require political engagement the like of which hasn’t been seen in a while.