There was a good reason for this. Economics satisfied the two most basic needs of investment bankers. First investment bankers wanted practical people, willing to subordinate their educations to their careers. Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treatises with no obvious use, seemed almost designed as a sifting device. The way it was taught did not exactly fire the imagination. I mean, few people would claim they actually liked studying economics; there was not a trace off self-indulgence in the act. Studying economics was more a ritual sacrifice. I can't prove this, of course. It is bald assertion, based on what economists call casual empiricism. I watched. I saw friends steadily drained of life. I often asked otherwise intelligent members of the prebanking set why they studied economics, and they explained that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs. They were right, of course, and that was even more maddening. Economics was practical. It got people jobs. And it did this because it demonstrated that they were among the most fervent believers in the primacy of economic life.

[...] Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman's New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see whether your inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.

making my first mistake by neglecting to seize the chance to praise investment bankers and heap ridicule on the short work hours and Lilliputian ambition of commercial bankers