I was being introduced to the world of finance these days. I find it boring, disgusting, illogical, ridiculous and often irritating. I took the liberty to tell a friend of mine who happens to be a finance geek what I felt about this subject and quick came the reply that I am really stupid. No arguments there as I feel the same about me, anyways.
I was a trained engineer who was meant to build things, innovate and create something which could improve the lives of people. Finance on the other side doesn’t create anything, doesn’t build anything, it build dreams instead. And I buy this argument about dreaming taking into account that I am severely sleep deprived these days!.
We are having a course which deals with analyzing a problem and identifying the root cause of the problem. Many people would find it quite hard to get to the crux of the problem and often end up applying balm on the symptom of the problem instead. The simple logic to find the root cause is whenever you find a problem ask the question “ what caused this” and if you cannot answer the question further, the problem at that point is the root cause and it should be resolved.
When Sigmund Freud came up with his theory that sex is the sole reason for all the acts that we do in our life times, many quirked and condemned this rather radical idea. Modern psychology was developed in order to counter argue this philosophy, but I think they utterly failed. But here is the fallacy. Freud never read finance, he missed the point that sex can indeed be brought with one thing, Money. I can get the most beautiful wife whom I can have sex with money, cant I?. I am an Indian, I can marry Priyanka Chopra if I am a billionaire! or may be a prostitute from Europe who is more beautiful than Aishwarya Rai. So we can give a little twist to the Freudian philosophy and can apply the root cause analysis and can say that money is THE most important thing which shapes modern human psychology.
No matter who you are, you can be a PM, you can be a professor at Harvard, you can be a rickshaw puller, overwhelming percentage of humans on this globe are greedy. May be all of them, I don’t know. I am greedy too. I am pursuing a degree so that I will be able to earn more not because i want to learn something. Toppers here go for finance industry because it pays more. Of course many wouldn’t agree but that’s because they can’t read their subconscious mind (again, yet another Freudian theory here).
When I see the last financial crisis which made this world a little worse that it was before, it’s because of greed of few brilliant individuals. CEO’s of top financial firms, Academicians who shape modern economy who have conflict of interests and B school toppers who wants to earn some extra bucks.
Human evolution is all about survival of the fittest according to Darwin. It was food for millions of years and its sex when Freud wrote his thesis and based upon our argument it is money now. Because food and sex can be brought with money (again applying root cause analysis!).
So if money and greed are shaping modern human evolution, Finance must be THE most important subject to read. I hope now you appreciate the validity of my friend’s statement that I am stupid.
