As public schools across the country continue to feel the effects of state budget cuts, the importance of student to teacher ratio and class size has bubbled to the surface. Despite conflicting positions on the issue, many education policy advocates, including the center for public education, overwhelmingly indicate that a low student to teacher ratio can increase student achievement, enhance a child's test scores and provide lasting academic benefits. While this may feel like it's true because the time constraint forces you to complete the work, it. Taking good notes in your science class can mean the difference between mastering the material and not quite getting it. I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when i woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the swiss alps.

One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe polishing machine and carried it into the room there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major, most everyone else had relatives or family in banking.

I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. At cornell university it was well known that after five years on wall street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus after 10 years you could expect a million or more. Ubs apparently thought pretty highly of me, because despite my lack of a financial background, they put me onto the derivatives trading desk. This was a coveted spot the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite the baddest of the bad asses. Derivatives are financial contracts, the value of which is based on derives from something else, say the price of a stock or the price of a bushel of wheat. They were originally created to provide stability and allocate capital to industry, farmers, and the like, and, for a long time, derivatives allowed businesses to eliminate certain financial risks, say in currency, which provided stability to the business, its management, and its workers. If you were a factory worker back in the day, you benefited from your employer’s use of derivatives to smooth out their cash flows during the year, hedge against the risk of selling goods abroad.

For about a hundred years, derivatives were a sort of lubricant in the world financial machine. By the time i arrived on wall street in 19, the link between derivatives and the real world had broken down. Instead of being used to reduce risk, 95 per cent of their use was speculation a polite term for gambling.

And leveraging which means taking a large amount of risk for a small amount of money. So while derivatives, and the financial industry more broadly, had started out serving industry, by the late 1990s the situation had reversed. The market had become a near religious force in our culture industry, society, and politicians all bowed down to it. It didn’t like goods produced in first world countries or workers who made high wages, with the notable exception of financial sector employees.

An Argumentative Essay on Social Networking

I’d grown up in a working class neighborhood in baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries steel, textile, shipbuilding. My parents weren’t mill workers they were recovering hippies but we were always struggling for money and so my brother and i lived a sort of split existence. Outside the house, like all the other kids in the neighbourhood, we got into fights and caused trouble.

At 16 i dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a trauma centre before ultimately deciding to go to university. I earned high marks at various local colleges and eventually, after three tries at applying to the ivy league, i got into cornell. So when news would hit the wire about an american company closing a domestic factory, i felt a good deal of conflict as i watched the company’s stock price go up as a result. Those sorts of factory closings had ruined my neighbourhood, my city, and many of the people i’d grown up with. One of my british friends from the training programme, who later became a currency trader, once told me: i mean christ, mate, every time they close a factory in wales the goddamn market goes up. The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live.

A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped the in house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self interest, not altruism that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues love, honor, compassion do not actually exist. The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a third world country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in birmingham or philadelphia.