A review by shaunariane
Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

2.0

Wall Street banks had made themselves the obvious destinations for students at top-tier colleges who are confused about their careers, don’t want to lock themselves in to a narrow preprofessional track by going to law or medical school, and are looking to put off the big decisions for two years while they figure things out.

I’ll start it off by saying if this book wasn’t only 285 pages, I would’ve given up around 200 pages in. Kevin Roose was a journalist for the Times and after the market crash in 2008 he decided to investigate “the hidden world of Wall Street’s post-crash recruits.” What Kevin really meant to say is he was going to cherry pick a few twenty-somethings who didn’t even want to pursue finance to follow around for a few years so that he could word vomit his feelings about the ethicality and moral-rightness of Wall Street all over the pages of this book.

At the crux of everything is the quote above. There are young adults in every corporate job who are there only because they don’t know what else to do or they feel pressured. For this author to then make blanket statements about the finance industry as a whole based on these experiences makes no sense. If you threw me in the health care system and wrote a book about my experience it probably would come off as cynical and negative as this book, because it’s not what I want to do with my life.

The Epilogue undermines the entire book by showing a “where are they now” of each of the main financiers. Every single one of them, once they had a couple years to figure out where they wanted to be and what they wanted to do, was happy (even if it meant long hours and Excel models).

P.S. I’m not saying that there isn’t something worth writing about buried under all the biases in this book. Toxic workplaces, fraternity-like hazing of first-years, and so much more are worth digging into.