Some of my best friends are...

I've just read John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No On Can Pay; his diagnosis of the global financial crisis.  Lucid, funny and intelligently constructed for the interested non-expert, it is further evidence in favour of the argument that a good writer should be read regardless of his choice of topic.

He makes a distinction between 'industry' and 'business' at a cultural level: -

An industry is an entity which as its primary purpose makes or does something, and makes money as a byproduct.  The car industry makes cars, the television makes TV programmes, the publishing industry makes books, and with a bit of luck they all make money too, but for the most part the people engaged in them don't regard money as the ultimate purpose and justification of what they do...  Most human enterprises, especially the most meaningful and worthwhile ones, are in that sense industries, focused primarily on doing what they do: healthcare and education are both, from this anthropological perspective, industries.

Or at least that's what they are from the point of view of the people who work in them.  But many of these enterprises are increasingly owned by people who view them not as industries but as businesses: and the purpose of a business is, purely and simply, to make money.

p169-170

The sense of personal definition is hard to overstate as anyone who has watched a merchant banker try and explain what he does for a living to a six year old can attest.

The expensive boarding school where I studied was founded in the early years of the last century by Sydney's merchant class.  Corporate law, banking, stockbroking and commodities trading were promoted as desirable, laudable careers and some of my oldest friends have achieved immense success in these fields. My first degree was a Bachelor of Business and my high school essentially programmed me for some sort of financial career yet for some hitherto inarticulated reason I've always shied away.  Lanchester nails a social phenomenon under which I have long suffered that acts as an explanation of sorts: -

I have people I count as friends who work in the City.  We get on in all the ways in which people get on, but there is sometimes a moment in talking to them when you hit a kind of wall.  It's usually to do with fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money, and the non-reality of other schemes of value.

p174

I work in two 'industries' (entertainment and pharmaceuticals) that I believe make the world a better place, albeit in vastly different ways.  I have always considered myself to be an unashamed capitalist so I expect to be paid well for my efforts.

But I am wary of a life where achievements are best expressed in dollar terms.