How does this shifting of mood and meaning affect our work now? I spoke to a man, now in his eighties, who was one of the pioneers of the hedge fund industry. He told me that in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, the great majority of the best and the brightest did not want to go into financial services—they wanted to go into education and science. They wanted to teach the young, put people on the moon, and solve world hunger. And the leading voices of the day told them they could do it. At some point by the late 1980s he sensed a change in society. There was far less optimism about social
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