Actually, quants aren't a waste of talent

You see, in the general case, profitable trading means that one makes a market more efficient in exchange for a reward. And a stock market is a distributed capital allocation machine. Quants make sure that the biggest receivers of capital are those that can best exploit it and maximize returns. If we assume that the maximization of returns would have been almost equivalent to good brought utilitarianistically, then it would easily follow that quants are by far not a waste of talent and bring a decent good to the world.

This essay however does not care about quants in the particular sense, instead I would like to argue for the point I just assumed, and in fact generalized to capitalism as a whole.

I am a capitalist and economy-wise a center/right leaning individual. Twitter discourse around capitalism has many thought tribes, in particular there are two quite popular that I consider deeply unserious. Those are the anti-capitalists with the basis of ethics and the BeffJezos effective accelerationists. With the former I wholeheartedly disagree and find a discussion with them unproductive akin to arguing against communism; the latter believes that technological advance solves everything and argues for free markets as a consequence since those maximize it.

Beff's core arguments are limited through conservatism and ignore moral foundations as discourse around those will seem counter productive towards their political affiliation. See footnote (1) to understand what I mean.

Andressen's framing of techno optimism is quite closer to what I actually believe. Free markets indirectly make people care for strangers. A cure for cancer is incentivized in capitalism by the prospect of becoming unfathomably rich and undercutting the previous best cure follows a similar principle, generating economic surplus when maximizing utility and good.

But techno optimism breaks quite easily globally. Yarvin describes it in detail in A techno pessimist manifesto - no amount of western techno optimism will fix Johannesburg.

My personal solution to the dilemma is simply reducing my care-for territory.

If I were to formulate a thesis of my argument it would be that capitalism and free markets are incredible machines to maximize wealth-weighted utilitarianism within a western society if we assume the conditions of a highly capitalistic western society: the government owns a monopoly in violence, everybody has non zero purchasing power, some degree of competitive contestability and other general basic assumptions of free markets.

I would like to point out what follows from this reformulation:

Capitalism will very efficiently maximize utilitarianism by a western society WITHIN a western society. The discourse paralleling my argument for the cure of cancer has been done ad nauseam and I don't even find it worth regurgitating in this essay.

The west has no obligation to maximize utility and good outside of it. Although they supererogatorily are still the main contributors towards it. The abundance generated by free markets is so great that economically-speaking wasting it on external causes still beats any other system.

I would also like to point out my use of "wealth-weighted utilitarianism". I credit claude for pointing this out to me (and claude attributing it to Negishi). You see markets maximize welfare through weights, and that weight is wealth - those in greater possession of wealth have a greater voice in their desires. Which breaks the typical equally-weighted utilitarianism.

By making the utilitarianism wealth-weighted it may seem that I am committing a fallacy, at the end of the day markets maximize this almost by construction. But I see no issue in the consequence, under the assumption that wealth is generated through providing utility, those who provided the most utility in the past will have greater purchasing power. And I, ideologically, am not opposed to this. Even then those with lower purchasing power, so long as it is non-zero (by our initial conditions) will still receive efficient utility.

As a final disclaimer I would like to show my stance against the potential corner cases. Almost every point will have a counter example that is either refuted by the initial conditions or will still be utilitaristic in average:

• Lobbying: the system assumes the government enforcing boundary conditions, yet money can also change those. This is an unfortunate corner case. I do not believe that lobbying should exist, yet I understand why the trade off should be made for public reporting. I argue that on average, utility will still be maximized despite this.
• Traders of any sort may do front-running/market manipulation/fraud: this is excluded by our initial conditions of western regulations. And even assuming the existence of minority situations where laws are ignored, capitalism will still maximize utility on average.
• Wealth can be inherited: the great majority of billionaires are self made (and you will be lying if you say that those who pose this argument focus on millionaires). Here the axiom of the average also applies.

The realest final rebuttal will be towards the axiom of average:

"But now the burden of proof lies on me"

Thankfully, the burden of caring does not. If you live in the west just look outside your window and then look at pictures of the rest of the world, if you don't then consider how much you would pay for a green card + plane ticket combo to the west.

Footnotes

1. Beff like any other big account on this platform only survives by mimicking the political stance of Musk. And Musk has notably used as a strategy pushing out right leaning content. Given the large amount of discourses such as the moral circle as a rebuttal to democrats, Beff may ironically or unironically consider discourse around ethics or morality as a taboo, while Andreessen notably does not.