SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — If you’re like me, you still don’t see what all the fuss is about Greg Smith. 
 
 Smith, you may recall, was the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. /quotes/zigman/188479/quotes/nls/gs GS +0.38% banker who left the firm last year in a blaze of glory. He wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about how standards at the bank had fallen away in the last decade. He said some at Goldman referred to clients as “muppets.” He wrote that he was leaving the firm out of principle. Read why Greg Smith might make you ‘feel sorry’ for Goldman. 
 
 
 
 Grand Central Publishing 
 
 Now, Smith, 33, has released a tell-all book “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” about his time at the investment bank. To promote it, he agreed to be the subject of a “60 Minutes” segment Sunday. Like the op-ed, Smith goes on and on about what a wonderful place Goldman was until greed became the prevailing measure. See ex-Goldman banker Smith on “60 Minutes.” 
 
 If it sounds familiar it’s because you read this book in high school: Smith casts himself as a Holden Caulfield of Wall Street, lashing out against the phonies who have taken control of the joint. 
 
 Debate about “Why I Left Goldman” and Smith’s TV appearance has been intense and divided among party lines. Goldman denies his story and has hinted in a leaked internal report that the former employee’s complaints stem from a middling career and “unrealistic” pay demands. Critics of Goldman have seized on the book as a “told-ya-so” moment. Read about Smith the ‘con man.’ 
 
 It’s a hand-wringing, gut-check issue that, as Susanne Craig of the New York Times wrote, “could have a long-term effect on the firm and its ability to recruit and retain new talent.” Read Craig’s analysis. 
 
 To which I say, malarkey. No right-in-the-head individual is going join or not join Goldman because of some disgruntled employee’s book, just as no one who cares enough to fall out of bed in the morning thinks that Goldman is the altruistic place it claims to be. 
 
 Click to Play Goldman grapples with more Greg Smith drama As former equity derivatives salesman Greg Smith interviews on '60 Minutes' and releases his tell-all book, Goldman goes on offense. Liz Rappaport has details on Markets Hub. Photo: AP. 
 
 Which is to say, Greg Smith has added nothing new to the conversation. Read William Cohan’s piece on Smith the ‘con man.’ 
 
 We’ve been hemming and hawing about Goldman — and Wall Street at large — since the financial crisis. We’ve witnessed the bailouts. We’ve had CEOs, including Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, paraded in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, we’ve heard the sordid tale of Abacus, the Goldman deal that resulted in a $550 million settlement with regulators. Mention the “vampire squid,” everyone knows what you’re talking about. 
 
 Taken together, there’s a good case out there in the public record that Wall Street — and Goldman in particular — is reckless and driven by greed. 
 
 So what? No one cares. The market /quotes/zigman/627449 DJIA +0.24% /quotes/zigman/3870025 SPX +0.43% is nearing the bubble heights of five years ago. Bank stocks are the hot pick for a rally in the next six-to-12 months. Goldman itself is expected to be one of the big winners with Barron’s predicting a 25% jump. See Barron’s ‘Built to Win’ Goldman piece. 
 
 And yet the Wall Street media continues to fawn over the Smith story as if he was Floyd Landis to Blankfein’s Lance Armstrong. 
 
 
 
 Reuters 
 
 Phooey. The reality is that Goldman’s descent from a white-shoe brokerage firm to ruthless trading boiler room is well documented. One only needs to scan the company’s annual reports since it went public in 1999. Read about how Goldman became a trading-first firm. 
 
 Moreover, Smith’s narrative is unlikely to be the “wake-up call” he intends because the public already has seen how the Goldman sausage is made. They’ve heard former Citigroup Inc. /quotes/zigman/5065548/quotes/nls/c C +0.31% chairman Sanford “Sandy” Weill say banks should be split up. They’ve heard former Morgan Stanley /quotes/zigman/182639/quotes/nls/ms MS +2.26% chief executive John Mack say compensation is too high on Wall Street. 
 
 Jane and John Q. Public could either care less or have resigned themselves to the system. 
 
 Also, consider a finding by Jack Duval at the Original Forensic Analysis + Visualization blog. He noticed that as the market has risen to a five-year high, complaints by investors against brokerages have fallen to a five-year low. See correlation between S&P 500 and broker complaints. 
 
 Nor do Goldman’s clients care. Those getting hoodwinked think they’re getting great service. Those that know better are people like John Paulson of Paulson & Co. They’re in on the deal. Goldman ranked first among Fortune’s most-admired banks last year. See related commentary on bank reputations. 
 
 So, if the public doesn’t care, Goldman doesn’t care, it’s clients don’t care, then to whom is Smith getting an audience? The media, of course. We keep beating the drum saying “look here, another witness to the claim Wall Street is ripping you off.” 
 
 And that’s why someone like Greg Smith continues to be front-page news. We’re giving him the only thing he really wants: attention. 

 I haven't been very interested in former Goldman Sachs VP Greg Smith, his book, his op-ed, his 60 Minutes appearance, or any of the rest. But the ferocious anti-Smith push from Goldman Sachs PR and Smith's critics in the media have me interested again! 
 
 Hamilton Nolan offers a fine defense of being outraged by things everyone "already knows," but more generally what needs defense here is the very concept of moralistic outrage itself. Can you look at the world in a certain way and say that it sounds naïve and almost preposterous to be complaining that Goldman Sachs is a business enterprise whose aim is to make money and not to benefit its clients, counterparties, or the world at large? Yes, you certainly can. And we shouldn't expect selfishness to vanish from the face of the Earth or deny that one of the fundamental strengths of market capitalism is its ability to channel selfish impulses in constructive directions. 
 
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 And yet the Buenos Aires dog-shit problem is also an important aspect of life. Why should you waste your time picking up your dog's excrement? Fear of a fine? Clearly if everyone just leaves the poo where it is, no police department is going to invest the resources necessary to make a citywide crackdown work. For that matter, why should a police officer do his job correctly rather than just take bribes? 
 
 Norms matter. People work for money. But people also work for status, and people work because they take pride in a job well done. Ideas about what kinds of financial success merit high status and what kinds of jobs constitute a job well done are important. A doctor who bragged to you at a party about scoring a great deal on season tickets is doing something very different from a doctor who brags to you at a party about scoring season tickets after swindling a woman out of a bunch of money for unnecessary medical treatments. A doctor isn't supposed to be hustling patients. Everybody knows that. The vast majority of journalists are working for for-profit enterprises that are publishing stuff in hopes of making money, but it's much better to live in a world where the editorial personnel don't understand themselves as merely engaged in a transactional quest for money rather than a genuine effort to entertain and inform the public. The idea that there's a difference between making money by being clever and inventing something useful to sell to people and making money by being clever and inventing a way to persuade people to buy something useless is fundamental. 
 
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– Greg Smith's new book bashing former employer Goldman Sachs has been met with a yawn, its critics complaining that it contains no bombshell revelations not found in his celebrated New York Times op-ed. "Everyone already knows the 'squid' isn't on the side of the angels," writes David Weidner at MarketWatch. But Matthew Yglesias at Slate thinks there's value in being outraged over things "everyone already knows," and indeed, thinks we need to revive the concept of moralistic outrage in general. "Norms matter," Yglesias writes. "People work for money. But people also work for status, and people work because they take pride in a job well done." Sure, Goldman Sachs is a business designed to make money, but everyone's in business to make money. If a doctor bragged that he'd made money conning patients, we'd frown on that. We can't outlaw all the "bad" ways to make money, "but that makes it more important, not less, to maintain a social sense of outrage around sleazy behavior." Click for Yglesias' full column, or for Weidner's full column.