Your comment has little basis in reality. The actual measurements of Wall Street productivity are that hedge fund managers, etc. add zero value at all; there is no correlation between performance one year and performance the next year (cite: Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow). The "best" hedge fund manager in the world has the same chance of ultra-poor performance next year as the "worst" hedge fund manager in the world.
In actuality Wall Street is well paid simply because the job involves truly gigantic streams of money passing by, and it is trivial to get very very rich by siphoning off a bit from each stream.
In a similar way, companies like Facebook et al. are "rich" in data, because it's just passing by and all they have to do is siphon it off as it goes by. This doesn't mean that e.g. Facebook's head developer is any more skilled at making data than anyone else is; it just means that due to the nature of the business he has easy access to as much of it as he wants.
If you want easy access to money, work for Wall Street, if you want easy access to personal data, work for social media, if you want easy access to food, work in a kitchen, and so on. Working in a kitchen and getting fat doesn't mean you're a better food-gatherer than anyone else; it means you work in a kitchen.
> The actual measurements of Wall Street productivity are that hedge fund managers, etc. add zero value at all;
There is of course a distinction between revenue and wealth. The folks at investment banks surely were bringing in a lot of revenue, on a consistent basis, over the last few decades. The traditional investment banking functions in M&A brought in consistent fees regardless of how well the new company ultimately did. Traders also brought in a lot of revenue without creating any wealth (trading is not quite zero sum, but the value-add case is much weaker than for traditional banking functions), by transferring wealth from people on the losing sides of bets. As someone notes in the article, the explosion of public (401k, pension) money in the system meant there were a lot of less-sophisticated people willing to take the other side on these bets.
In actuality Wall Street is well paid simply because the job involves truly gigantic streams of money passing by, and it is trivial to get very very rich by siphoning off a bit from each stream.
In a similar way, companies like Facebook et al. are "rich" in data, because it's just passing by and all they have to do is siphon it off as it goes by. This doesn't mean that e.g. Facebook's head developer is any more skilled at making data than anyone else is; it just means that due to the nature of the business he has easy access to as much of it as he wants.
If you want easy access to money, work for Wall Street, if you want easy access to personal data, work for social media, if you want easy access to food, work in a kitchen, and so on. Working in a kitchen and getting fat doesn't mean you're a better food-gatherer than anyone else; it means you work in a kitchen.