The basic reason to work in finance is that, traditionally, it was the industry where you could get the most leverage on being smart. If you’re a brilliant kindergarten teacher, you can make somewhat more money and have somewhat more pleasant working conditions than an average kindergarten teacher. If you’re a brilliant engineer, you can build a brilliant new machine that sells for a lot of money, but you will need to work with a lot of other people and a lot of capital goods and it will take a long time and you will have to share the money with the other people. If you’re brilliant at picking stocks that will go up—or down, or finding weird tricks in credit-default-swap documents—you can become very rich in very short order without much else.
And so finance has for a long time attracted sort of miscellaneous smart people. Not always, and people often argue that this is a relatively recent development, that before the rise of financialization in the 1980s or 2000s or whatever, smart scientists became cancer doctors but now they become investment-bank quants. But at least for some number of recent decades the financial industry attracted some people who were deeply interested in finance, but also a lot of people who were just good at school or math or problem-solving and who had been told that finance was where the money is. If you are good at solving puzzles and you’re passionately interested in one puzzle, you devote your life to solving it. If you are good at solving puzzles but mostly indifferent about what puzzles you solve, you might as well solve some lucrative ones.
