I usually eschew a 6000-word-plus essay but I found this one too compelling to navigate away from. John Lanchester of the London Review of Books spent that number diagnosing the ills of modern finance as he considered two books detailing the lives of a pair of financiers, assessing their effect on life from a 10,000-foot perspective.

This gut-punch comes early, but sets the stage for the milieu in which this review operates:

There are other ways of getting rich, and in our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it. But for an ordinary citizen who wants to become rich through working at a salaried job, finance is by an enormous margin the most likely path. And yet, the thing they’re doing in finance is useless. I mean that in a strong sense: this activity produces nothing and creates no benefit for society in aggregate, because every gain is matched by an identical loss. It all sums to zero. The only benefit to wider society is the tax paid by the winners; though we need to remember that the losers will have their losses offset against tax, so the net tax benefit is not as clear as it might at first seem.

Grab a hot beverage and enjoy. Then weep, I guess.