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gjm comments on Open Thread April 11 - April 17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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So I was wondering what career is best in terms of being able to accumulate wealth and having a decent quality of life. I've heard finance jobs are good.
Good for wealth. Not so good for quality of life. Also, finance has the reputation of being pretty brutal: if things go badly for you you could find yourself out of a job and not so wealthy after all.
(Also also: changes in the regulatory environment or in economic performance could have a larger impact on how lucrative finance is. It wasn't always as much a money-fountain as it has been lately.)
[EDITED to fix a typo: I accidentally wrote "had" instead of "has" in the third sentence.]
That looks to be a popular meme which is not true in reality.
Of course, there is the usual question of "compared to what?"
I imagine it varies a lot. For what it's worth I'm not going only off the popular meme but also off what I've heard from people in finance.
Of course. The same goes for wealth, of course.
With wealth at least there is some data. There is a distribution of wealth in a given society and you can look up the quantile of any wealth value easily enough. But quality of life? To start with, it's not even a well-defined term as it is usually used as a catch-all bin for everything except money. I have no idea what a distribution of quality of life would look like.
Fair points. I think that when people complain about "quality of life" in finance they mostly mean working hours and (secondarily) stress and job security. Working hours, at least, are pretty readily quantifiable, though I don't think they're surveyed anything like as thoroughly as pay.
I don't think I myself have strong data about the issue. Do you have any empiric data?
Anecdata in the form of observations that people working in finance don't seem to lead horrible lives.
Of course there is selection bias present: there are certain narrow career tracks in finance which require high-motivation full-effort workaholic overachievers. People self-select into these career tracks so it's no wonder that they work a lot of hours and don't spend much time sitting on the couch in front of a TV. I wouldn't call their quality of life "low", though, because they chose to do it and because there are side benefits like being able to fly to the Caribbean for a weekend if they feel like it.
Plus finance is a large industry. If you start as a teller and grow to be, say, a bank branch manager, your worklife will probably be quite placid and uneventful.