The Guardian’s view on Britain’s new class divide: The professional community is being hollowed out | Editorial

IIn the United States, the brightest people are said to join Artificial intelligence companies. In Britain, they register to be quantitative analysts. The Financial Times reported that the city had become one of the world’s leading “quantitative” centres. The University of Oxford is responsible for sports funding He said Its correspondents reported that almost all of his students ended up working in quantitative trading firms, with salaries ranging from £250,000 to £800,000. “If you’re offered a salary of less than £250,000, you’re kind of a sad guy,” he said, adding that “no one I know has interviewed at JP Morgan, or Goldman Sachs… and not once have I heard anyone enjoy any of those traditional investment banking jobs.”

The temptation is clear: a 45-year-old billionaire trader Alex Jericho He secured £682m from City-based quantitative analysis firm XTX Markets last year. Even more difficult, modest salaries in once-respected professions now deter people from the higher careers they once identified with. On the front page of the Financial Times, employers warned against this Expatriate graduates Owners of major companies in the city earn an average annual salary of £33,000, which is not much more than the new minimum wage of £26,400. Executives warn that college debt no longer produces a pay premium. To maintain profits, companies said they would look to use more artificial intelligence or external roles.

This should serve as a warning to the professions that formed the backbone of the British middle class. What is emerging now is a world in which a small slice at the top captures the rents from financial capital, and where a large number of certified professionals earn just above the legal minimum salaries. While London lags behind New York as the quantitative capital of global finance, the US economy is larger and more diversified, with other industries – especially artificial intelligence – attracting top graduates. The war for “talent” across the pond is so ridiculous that Mr. Jericho’s XTX office in New York is offering interns $35,000 per month In compensation.

Both artificial intelligence and Quantitative investing You need huge amounts of cash to build data centers. It seems intuitive that machine learning is likely to add something to society, even though few people can pinpoint exactly what that is. finance Comparison is useless. Its quantitative version doesn’t add any real value: it’s smart people betting against other smart people, and exchanging wealth between them a little faster. The theory is that the best mathematical models put investors on the right side of trades.

After the 2008 crash, the financial sector was blamed for the UK’s inequality rising faster than its counterparts in the rich world. But this knowledge has done little to redirect the British economy and direct talent towards socially useful sectors. Today in the United Kingdom Exchange rate and interest rate Regimes still favor financial assets over productive investment. The result is a misallocation of human capital: with excess funding and scarcity almost everywhere else.

Economics is no longer financial Translate Innovation in productivity. Gains in concentrated ownership and shareholder payouts end. The appeal of financing in the UK is so strong that it is taking shape Cultural aspirationspayment standards and even justifications for tuition. Meanwhile, minimum-wage workers are approaching the wages of young auditors, while quantitative traders are approaching the wages of CEOs. The professional class in Britain is quietly turning into a proletariat. White-collar workers, who are culturally privileged but economically unstable, risk becoming dissatisfied with the system they have been trained to serve. This should worry politicians.

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