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gjm comments on Guardians of Ayn Rand - Less Wrong
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I don't really know why hedge fund managers are so unfairly maligned. Very likely, part of it is envy and part of it is incomprehension, but there is probably more to it than that. Blaming rootless cosmopolitans and 'international bankers' for all of society's woes has been a favourite demagogic tactic for so long, and across so many different nominal ideologies, that I think it may well speak to deep primal instincts. But it's not something I claim much insight into.
As for why they are more worthy of praise and emulation than scientists or academics - basically, on the margin, we have too few hedge fund managers (which is why they earn so much) and too many academics.
We have already discussed at length (see e.g. here and here ) my view of why academics and scientists are overpraised and overemulated, so I don't intend to repeat that discussion. But basically, the gains from science and academia are no doubt huge, but they are also infra-marginal. You can't convince me that CERN or academic literary criticism are worthwhile resource allocations, and you can't convince anyone else to spend their own money on these things either. Ironically, if science and academia were less praised, we'd probably have better science and academia, because then these things would have to justify themselves on their own merits rather than a mere patina.
Hedge fund managers, by contrast, are playing an important role in global resource allocation. We are in the middle of a huge Factor Price Equalization which is slowly making the world a more prosperous place, by increasing the productive capacity and wages of the Third World. We could do with some more of that.
Is there an implicit premise here along the lines of "If any group of people, collectively, earn very large salaries, that indicates that we need more of them"? If so, I would be interested to know why you apply that principle to hedge fund managers but not to
(I deleted "the inheritors of great wealth" because of course their wealth isn't a matter of how well they are paid. I deleted "Russian kleptocrats" because I don't know how much of their wealth comes from being paid as opposed to (e.g.) making investments and then manipulating regulations to make them grow.)
(I remark in passing that your use of the term "nomenklatura" may land you in the same mental pigeonhole as US politicians who, honestly or not, purport to think that Barak Obama is a communist and that the UN is some kind of vastly powerful world government that the perfidious Democrats want to hand over control of the US to. I dare say that's a risk you're prepared to put up with.)
There are different reasons why people get paid large salaries. Sometimes it's because they earned the money, sometimes it's because they stole it, and sometimes it's because they are skilled at abusing the political process to shut out their competitors. By default I assume people are in the first category, but sometimes the evidence indicates otherwise. Russian kleptocrats are in the second and third categories. UN insiders (whose salaries are fairly modest, by the way) are in the second. I suspect that executives at major commercial banks are mostly in the first category, but lots of people believe they are in the third, and not without reason.
As to your final point - I live in a country where it is uncontroversial to mention that the UN is opaque, massively corrupt, and whose permanent agencies are staffed by a connected group of permanent insiders. I didn't realise I was running up against some strange American taboo.
Not what I said, nor what I meant. I meant: there are a bunch of people around who have some strange and paranoid ideas about the UN and about communism, and if you casually make it clear that you think the leadership of the UN is just like that of the Soviet Union then you are liable to be thought to hold similar views.
(As it happens, we live in the same country unless you have moved very recently. I do not have the impression that it's uncontroversial here to say that the UN is just like the USSR. I suppose it might be uncontroversial simply because scarcely anyone here cares enough about the UN to have a strong opinion.)
I do not mean to imply that the UN is just like the USSR, nor do I believe that anything I wrote can reasonably be interpreted in that manner.