Finance, Society, UW

I'm going to try something different here. I have submitted an opinion piece to Excalibur (York U's community paper). If all goes well, it gets published, and this blog post will serve as a supplemental to that article. If it does not, then at a later date, I will post the original on this blog.

To give you some background, my (hopefully soon to be published) article talks about the role of culture, financial system, and the current economic crisis. I asserted that the excessive, note how I bolded and italized the word excessive, consumer culture is partly responsible for the current economic crisis, or can be seen as at least a contributing factor (as in, if consumer culture didn't exist, then we wouldn't have the current economic situation).

Anyways, here's another observation. A lot of bright, young people are being influenced by consumerism, and that it is why a lot of them, instead of focusing on studying the real drivers of productivity in an economy, things that produces real innovation, like science and engineering and fine arts (not the "liberal arts" crap), they are being lured into the high-paying world of finance, where little productivity is actually created. This is not a sentiment that I share alone. In an interview on the Economist with Vince Cable, shadow chancellor of the Liberal Democrats of UK, he said that:

(In Britain), "we've neglected a lot of areas like mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, which is sort of the bedrock of a society that has to have industry, industry in the wide sense, information technology and the rest of it. For a mixture of reasons, it became fashionable five to ten years ago for clever people to make their way in financial services, rather than these core disciplines that are the basis of a productive economy."

I'm going to attempt to state my opinion on this. I think that the allure of wealth and gratification is too tempting for many young people, leaving them content with living a worthless life of consumption and gratification. Let me give you a personal example.

I used to go to the University of Waterloo for a degree in math. Yes, mathematics.

This particular university has a large and fairly well-regarded Math faculty, which is unique because not many schools even have a Math faculty, let alone a respected one. What's more remarkable is that its considerable size and the administration's attention it demands rivaled the other "traditional" faculties in the university, such as Arts, and Science and Engineering (Science and Engineering do not share a faculty in UW, unlike most schools where Science and Engineering or CS and Engineering are grouped together).

Now, what drew me in mathematics when I was in high school is the philosophical approach I took to it. In high school, I REALLY liked math, while a lot of people hated it (cause they sucked at it). I think it's because I understood math differently. I took a more artsy approach to it. Let me explain: the way that I understood math allowed me to notice its artsy aspects, such as aesthetics, the appreciation for the expanse of nature and how the universe works, the beauty in elegance, 'big picture' insights, and all that yummy artsy stuff. Did I liked math because I like doing repetitive tasks and thinks that's sweet? No. Did I liked math because I was a math genius and am positively reinforced every time I go through blocks of algebra really fast? No, I am actually very slow at going through blocks of math. Did I liked math because it's very profitable? No, because at the time, it wasn't obvious to me that math would be a "profitable" career (the only people that I knew with math degree at the time were teachers), nor did I really feel strongly interested in a 'money-maker' degree (math wouldn't have been my first choice if that was what I'm going for). Maybe that's originally why I wanted to get a degree in pure mathematics (the most unmarketable but artsy of the maths specializations).

When I went to UW, I realized that a lot of frosh in my program intended to declare a specialization in the Math faculty called 'actuarial science' (actsci). This is curious, because you can't declare actsci as your specialization because that's an upper year specialization and no training in actsci is given in lower years anyways. What ended up happening is that a lot of froshies introduce themselves as an actsci major, even though they are just a worthless, nameless frosh that should really just introduce themselves as a 'mathie' instead. What's more curious is that the size of the actsci program is disproportionally small compared to the size of the so-called "actsci frosh", and that despite being highly specialized (too industry specialized, in my opinion) and extremely boring and soulless, this is still one of the most popular specialization in the faculty . Let me explain what actsci is and why I think actsci is so popular.

Actsci is used mainly for things like calculating insurance, risks, and other stuff. This thing is very mathy and this program is something that would be in high demand in the financial industry and financial sector. In fact, this program is extremely industry specific and inflexible. Once you're a committed actsci, you're married for life (well, you can do something else later in life if you don't want to do it anymore, but it's going to be a messy divorce). The reasoning is that the financial sector has a lot of money to throw at froshies (note the difference between the financial sector and the 'financial system', which has even more money to throw at the frosh). In other words, people want an actsci degree for a comfortable and plushy job in the financial sector.

Many young, bright, capable, and intelligent students, filled with enthusiasm and brimming with youthful potential, chose to come to UW as a mathie; they come and choose arguably the least interesting, least intellectually stimulating, and the most robotic of specialization to declare; with the hope to land in the least emotionally and intellectually rewarding profession, which occupies some of the most dismal corners of our economy and society.

Sure, this job pays well, but it is monotonous, offers very little challenge, very little satisfaction, and nothing to be proud of other than a fat paycheck. A mid-life crisis of a job if there ever was one.

This huge influx of bright people sucked into this field of is evidence of a potentially damaging relationship and influence of finance on culture.