by
Keith Gessen
[...] Anybody who worked in sectors where there was a tremendous amount of activity where there shouldn’t have been. So we’re talking about housing. It means the Mexican guy who hammered together the house. It means the logger who cut down the wood that was used in the structural lumber. The guy who worked at the sawmill. It means the steel company that created the steel for the nails. It means the mortgage broker who sold the mortgage. It means the physicists who decided instead of doing physics they should work on Wall Street to create the asset-backed security that helped to fund the mortgages that the mortgage broker was originating. All of these people were doing things that turned out not to be productive.
this is the dumbest take i've ever heard. (it follows a dialogue where he first tries to blame it on the "Mexican", or "billions of Mexicans", for spending beyond their means.) the implication that these are somehow equivalent in terms of waste, when really, consider the income deltas between the groups??? and also "turned out not to be productive" is a hell of a sentence, with so much heavy lifting hidden between the words. can something be deemed unproductive after the fact? what the hell is productivity supposed to mean anyway, and why is it being elevated to worship-like levels?