"Every yuppie I knew in New York worked as either a Wall Street guy, a lawyer, or an agent of some sort. Basically, there were all subtly screwing someone else for a living."
This is exactly how I feel about London. It feels like the city takes much more from the world than it produces.
I have a little bit of experience with London, and I can second this. London actually gives me the willies after meeting the business culture there. If you ever want to make an argument for the actual existence of shape shifting reptiles (ala nutjob David Icke) then just hang around London's business scene for a while.
America is superficially conservative and deeply liberal. Europe is superficially liberal and deeply conservative.
I guess it depends on how you define conservative. I define it partly as "hierarchical, aristocratic, exploitative" while liberal is "self-made, innovative, meritocratic."
Those are not the pop definitions though, especially in America. They're closer to the classical definitions.
Predatory is the right word. It feels like everyone in London is an "independent consultant" trying to schmooze their way into things to play some mysterious sleazy angle.
The independent consultant thing is a bit of a joke in London. Even London's ex-mayors become independent global consultants:
I don't think you're working with applicable terms, really. I'd just say there are markets and business cultures where trust and the sense of fair play is prevalent, and those where that is not the case, and leave it at that.
Touchy subject, but I'd point at the "personal background" of the participants before I started using political terms. Some cultures/ethnicities, have, um, different ideas of fair play.
Point taken... and you have to take anything like what I wrote (or what anyone else in any of this thread writes) with some degree of salt. All human experiences are small samples, and cities are big places.
But my personal experience in London was... well... in the right light sometimes they shift back to their natural form... hisssssss!
It's easy to characterize lawyers as "subtly screwing someone", but it's an unfair generalization.
A lawyer's job is to advise and speak for their client. Basically, they would say what their client would say, if they had the appropriate legal knowledge.
I know that if I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I wouldn't consider my defense attorney to be subtly screwing me.
Yes. It's only when you get principal-agent problems --- like the legal department of a company advising litigation when settling or ignoring would be best, for reasons of their job-security.
But that's just exploitative unprofessionalism. You can get from any profession; from the mechanic who says you really need the new transmission right now to the programmer who writes code that looks like it has been put through an obfuscator.
The thing is, at least in the US, 'yuppie' has been a derogatory term for those kind of guys for at least twenty years. That this guy self-identifies as a yuppie, and complains that the other yuppies are scumbags, is one of the many reasons it's hard to take the article seriously.
This is exactly how I feel about London. It feels like the city takes much more from the world than it produces.