Essay: "The Modern Professional Class"

I saw the movie “Margin Call” recently and I thought that it was very good.  The cast was strong (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany) and the story did a good job of encapsulating the financial crisis without a) being confusing; or b) excessive exposition.  But more than that, it seemed to capture some part of the essence of the modern professional class, of which I was a humble member for a number of years. 

Let’s get the plot of Margin Call out of the way (medium level spoilers).  The film takes place during a crazy twenty-four hour period at the start of the financial crisis.  One bank manages to figure out that the ABCP on its books is pure poison.  Due to leverage, its existence is threatened.  It has two choices.  One, dump as many of the toxic securities as it can before the other, stupider banks cotton on to what is happening.  Doing so might barely save the bank, but it would destroy its reputation (and possibly bring on a criminal investigation from the SEC).  Two, well, as you may have deduced on your own, there really was no two.
A number of characters protest at the borderline illegal instructions they are given, but in the end, everyone takes the money.  Those who are fired are given generous packages.  The traders flogging the worthless assets are given enormous bonuses (something like $3 million each) which eases the pain of destroying their careers.

When a junior employee reflects on the immorality of this conduct, Paul Bettany’s character says:

People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have know idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal people.

The key phrase here is: “fuck normal people.” 

I think for everyone who ever worked downtown on Bay Street, or Wall Street, has a clear concept of what a “normal person” is. 

I think, to a downtown professional, there are really three kinds of people in life.  The first are the normal people.  They range from the working poor to the upper-middle class, auto-worker maybe, or a plumber, or a civil servant.  Someone pulling down 70-80k a year and coming home to their four bedroom home every day at 5:30.

Second are the very rich.  You might think this includes doctors, lawyers or bankers, but it doesn’t.  These are the professional class, who we’ll get to later, and aside from some bankers and certain specialized lawyers, none of them are as rich as someone who owns, say, four or five successful hotels.

The really rich are usually not as clever as professionals.  They usually inherited their money, or else they acquired it by taking enormous risks (anathema to a sensible professional).  Sometimes a professional will admire or even envy a successful entrepreneur.  But most of the time they realize that for every successful entrepreneur, there were 99 others just as hard working, driven and clever who bankrupted themselves and everyone around them.

Professionals make much more money than normal people, of course, but because they spend so much time around the very rich and so much money on their lifestyle (mortgages, car payments, private school and entertainment) they don’t feel rich.  Further, they tend to get far more heat than the very rich do.  People like Steve Jobs are seen to have earned their money, while professionals are perceived as adding very little value to society.  The rhetoric directed at them is, frankly, awfully similar to the kind of things people said about Jews a hundred years ago.

That kind of rhetoric does not engender goodwill, and if normal people don’t like professionals, well, the feeling is more mutual than you think.  Professionals live their lives in certain ways that can make it easy to kill their empathy for normal people.

They work really hard.  A professional tends to feel that he earns his money far more than a normal person, who tends to be in a union or something, or a very rich person, who has been lucky.  Further, life in a big firm is very competitive, with people getting hired and fired all of the time.  Wall Street does not tend to sympathize with normal people’s desire for “job security” because they have so little of it themselves.

But more importantly, professional dislike how “normal people” to wash their hands of the ills of society.  As mentioned, when the shit hits the fan, the regular folks blame professionals.  But professionals just do the dirty work.  They don’t make capitalism, for the most part, they just move things along.  And that gives them an interesting perspective.  After his “fuck normal people” speech, Paul Bettany’s character says:

You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow if all of this goes tits up they're gonna crucify us for being too reckless but if we're wrong, and everything gets back on track? Well then, the same people are gonna laugh till they piss their pants cause we're gonna all look like the biggest pussies God ever let through the door.

In other words, if you don’t make money, people sneer at you and fire you (through their pension funds).  To make money, you take risks.  When the risks don’t pan out, you’re a reckless criminal.  That’s the truth of Margin Call, and it’s the hard truth you learn as a professional on Bay Street.  The world is unpredictable and unforgiving.  Normal people and the very rich tend to underestimate the importance of luck in this life.  Normal people see everything in bourgeois moral terms, and rich people are fooled by their success into thinking they can control the universe.  Not the humble modern professional. 

But this knowledge cuts both ways.  On the one hand, it makes the modern professional sympathetic.  But on the other hand, it is perhaps a legitimate reason to expect a little more.  It is not fair for us to scapegoat Wall Street for all our sins, and it is tough to see what else the characters in Margin Call could have done except pass the buck.  But if not them, then who?