Why financial types have no brakes, psychologically

Financial types and technical types tend not to get along. If you want the long version of that, read Henry Ford’s autobiography. Technical types want to make products that are good, financial types want to maximize short-term cash flow so they can play investing games with the money. The sooner you get money into the markets, the more time compound interest has to work its magic. In practice this means financial types are always trying to push the release day up so they can put the money in the markets and technical types are always trying to push the release day back so that the product isn’t an unholy abomination. Looking at it from the technical perspective, the business cannot continue to exist after consumers realize it’s selling cars without engines in them. Looking at it from the financial perspective, the business will of course continue to exist because it’s making more money from its portfolio than it ever did selling cars, which we could someday invest back in the business. We won’t, because the portfolio is now the profit center and car production is now the cost center, but maybe someday.

In the big picture sense, this is the same as selling off the productive capital for a big pile of cash and using the cash to become an investment bank. It’s an individualistic strategy (ref. r/K) in a societal dilemma (ref. Schneier): good for you if you’re doing it, bad for everyone if everyone’s doing it. So why don’t the smart financial types put their heads together and stop it?

Technical types have brakes because you learn quickly, relative to the length of your career, that perfection is not profitable. You can do investing without production, but you can’t do production without investing. You want to sell people Buckminster Fuller’s vision of a better world, but what consumers want is drugs. Eventually you settle on something like 50% bullshit, whatever proportion of drugs is currently legal, and the rest is genuine Buckminster Fuller. Then you take your paycheck home and build geodesic domes in your garage, sell a couple on Etsy at a loss, and read science fiction books. Market equilibrium! So beautiful it brings a tear to my eye, actually crying right now :’-))).

Financial types don’t have brakes because they cause bubbles and then busts, and in times of scarcity the richest of the group survive (ref. Gregory Clark), which means the most selfish, Machiavellian, and short-sighted financial types get selected. In the short term you can satisfy your personal needs with money, so you have no rational incentive to build a more general understanding of the world and every reason to specialize (ref. specialized Machiavellians). You have no reason to learn and every reason to remain deluded, and furthermore to keep everyone in your group as stupid as possible. In concrete terms, it’s like you have an evolutionary compulsion to sell other people’s farms and use the gold to buy food from other nations, and then when famine hits you’re like “boy, those peasants sure were stupid for not hyperspecializing in global finance, look at them all starving”.

On the irrational level…I’ve become fond of saying “There’s no reasoning with someone who’s high on the hog.” Dopamine spiraling produces megalomaniacal grandiosity and sabotages critical thought and Piagetian accommodation. I.e. Success makes you retarded, and especially success in your particular evolutionary niche as a highly specialized human phenotype. You also have enough money to meme any other type of success you want to as if from thin air, like unto God himself. People say we don’t have a space program? I’ll single-handedly BUY you a space program motherfucker! I’LL SPEAK THAT SHIT INTO EXISTENCE. If all of your ancestors culled their genetic competition by surviving famines they created from thin air, you’re going to feel like you’re the culmination of a great chain of the Great Men of history. I absolutely, 100% assure you that every single billionaire on the planet thinks he or she is the simultaneous reincarnation of Napoleon, Einstein, and Ghandi. I don’t like to use the word Moshiach to describe myself, fellas, but let’s be honest, we were all thinking maybe Moshiach. Or maybe it’s in my bloodline, you should see my kid Zhaden* do his times tables, he’s going to be a world historical genius. In fact, if you’re looking for a good grift, write a book about how simultaneous reincarnation is totally real guys, we’re in the most perfect moment in history to sell that shit.

This model answers the following questions:

• Why societies always seem to have organized crime at the top of them.
• Why specialized Machiavellians appear to be unable to act differently than they do.
• Why they always settle on some brand of Satanism for their gang rituals (ref. “and furthermore to keep everyone in your group as stupid as possible”).
  • Why they appear to have levels of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity (true belief vs. conformity signaling) comparable to other groups.
• Why Jesus said money is “the root of all evil”.

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*Pronounced Jayden.