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This is a useful distinction from Noam Scheiber:
At the very least, it's important to distinguish between two classes of people who often get lumped together under the heading "Wall Street." The first are people who mostly work at hedge funds and private equity firms. These people tend to be a little younger on average, a little more heterodox in their thinking, maybe a little more liberal in their politics. The second group frequently resides at larger corporate entities like big commercial banks--often big investment banks, too (though the distinction is disappearing these days). These people tend to be a little stodgier in their thinking and a little more conservative in their politics. (These characterizations aren't universally true, of course--my two-category classification is still pretty crude. But it's a decent place to start.)My sense of the situation is that this is the artifact of a fairly odd wrinkle in the Wall Street recruitment process: In recent years, the most constant talent pipeline has come from Ivy League schools where students had generally liberal politics and a background social conscience. They didn't, of course, have so much in the way of liberal politics that they decided to do turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars the very year they graduated college in order to do something that wasn't working at a hedge fund, but they have enough in the way of liberal politics that they wanted to find a way to quiet that gnawing sense that their life choices are increasingly defined by greed and materialism. As such, they often become very enthusiastic fundraisers for liberal politicians -- like Obama -- which in turn gave them some access and contacts in the eventual administration and assured some level of continuing communication when their industry became politically salient. These are, in general, the folks Obama's staffers are talking to, and they are sympathetic to them: A Democratic-leaning high-achieving Ivy League economics major who decided to seek political success relates more intuitively to a Democratic-leaning high-achieving Ivy League economics major who decided to become very rich than he is to someone who isn't a high achieving Ivy League economics major with the ambition to excel in a high profile industry. I'm not sure how to correct for it or what the precise impact is, but there's a class sympathy that's been evident in the response to this crisis -- oh, don't take their bonuses, they did nothing wrong -- and will continue to affect the federal response.On a related note, William Cohan had a nice rant on how the extreme incomes offered to college graduates perverted workforce incentives, and why we should look forward to that ending.
