Young Money – Kevin Roose

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Kevin Roose brilliantly dissects the Wall Street recruiting machine. He exposes the process that leads directionless overachievers down a well-travelled road to material riches. The road serves as a sort of “cashing-in” on their abundance of talent, ambition, and fear. Many start out having drunken the Kool-Aid that they are somehow serving the wider good of society, rather than fueling a financial engine that allows the vast corporate empires they work for to amass more wealth and enrich those at the highest rungs of the corporate ladder. Others admit full well the moral compromises their work involves, but they crave the money to pay off their student loans quickly and the chance to learn skills they might transfer to the work they want to do later. Sometimes that works out, but for many later never quite arrives.

Probably the best part about this book is the sympathetic portraits Roose writes about his young up-and-coming subjects. He’s both sensitive to and objective about their efforts to reconcile the inclination to achieve with the yearning for purposeful work. Having entered the workforce post-recession, this generation of recruits clings to the security of an established foothold of economic power, while at the same time acutely aware of both its moral precariousness and vulnerability to hubristic collapse. Even as the harried young financial footsoldiers pull themselves back and forth to the office (when they do indeed leave it), this awareness induces a chronic psychological strain. It’s a tough thing to watch the best and the brightest mortgage their souls like that. It makes you wonder about those on the other side of the trade. And it reminds you of the peace we all have to make with how we choose to spend our time on this earth.