&gt; This is actually very, very debatable.<p>I agree. I just think it&#x27;s just as debateable for pretty much any other mode of employment.<p>I too worked in quant finance for several years. Believe me I understand. I quit finance because of the wanton greed and dysfunctional politics. But what I found when moving on to bright-eyed start-ups and education technology companies was that there was just as much wanton greed and dysfunction there (in some cases, even more).<p>I&#x27;m familiar with the literature on mutual funds and active managers. I worked for a team that focused exclusively on the low volatility anomaly in equity pricing, and our team&#x27;s pitchbook was all about how most active managers lose (and yet, we <i>were</i> an active manager, heh).<p>The problem is that asset managers don&#x27;t add value by growing or protecting the value of the assets they manage. That is not what their clients want from them nor what they pay them for, and failure to do those things is also not why they get fired.<p>What really happens is that someone who sits on the board of directors for a pension fund or some other large retirement fund, like say the association for retired firefighters in some state, is tasked with managing some huge-to-them pile of money from which everyone&#x27;s retirement money is paid. But that task is daunting to a non-specialist board member, and they need someone to act like a management consultant. If the management consultant is wrong, the board member has plausible deniability (e.g. &quot;How could we have known ... the fancy asset manager seemed great ... we all voted to use them.&quot;)<p>Using asset management companies is just a career cover-you-ass tactic for people embedded within the pension and retirement boards themselves. It&#x27;s truly, truly not about actually growing the endowment or the plan value.<p>But who is to say this is bad? The &quot;value&quot; that someone is seeking (the &quot;value&quot; of having a cover-your-ass asset manager you can fire and save face in front of the other board members if things go bad, or milk for kudos if the market turns up) is provided by the asset manager.<p>You and me both probably don&#x27;t think that sort of &quot;value&quot; matters, but it does matter to somebody, and they&#x27;re OK paying a lot for it, and most everyday people don&#x27;t seem to care enough to do something like boycott their company&#x27;s 401(k) in order to invest directly in low fee index funds themselves. So by what standard do we judge this somewhat scammy thing as certainly worse than all the other kinds of scammy things in all sorts of industries that go on all the time?<p>I&#x27;m not trying to be cheeky when I ask. I&#x27;m <i>really</i> asking. What&#x27;s the &quot;ethics metric&quot; we&#x27;re supposed to use. When I just think about this stuff from a sort of common sense &quot;be good to people, try to add value, don&#x27;t be wasteful&quot; perspective, finance looks a little worse than other fields, but not that much worse. Maybe defense and government spying and torture looks significantly worse than all the other things, but beyond that the rest of it all just looks like one big pile of more or less equivalent scamminess.