So finally, Your Career in Finance, and this will be the last section of this course. Once again, I don't think that you want it to necessarily be a primarily finance person. But ultimately, understand what I sought to do in this course is to help you understand finance. So some young people are very idealistic, And might consider eschewing any connection with finance, Immediately right now as they're young. But on my thought on that is, if you want a perfect career morally, do you really stay out of business? You could give away 90% of your income now, as a teenager, and not take the course of improving your human capital. Giving it all away now, but the problem with that is, you won't be very contributing to society because your income at this stage isn't very high. So you want instead, I think to accumulate while you're young and give it away when you're older. This make sense. Bill Gates is an example with the Gates Foundation, the largest transparently operated charitable foundation. That is, as far as we know, a real charitable foundation and not some religious group or government crony. It recently had an endowment of almost 40 billion. Warren Buffet gave to them as well. Now, both Gates and Buffet have been going around with a giving pledge. Saying that anyone who signs the pledge would promise to give away half of their wealth before they are old. You don't want to wait until you're 90 to give it away. The whole idea of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth is that the system rewards with wealth the people who have the talent for affairs. But that talent is limited. As you age, you'll have cognitive decline, you'll have energy decline. So you are morally obligated to use that talent to give it away constructively. Don't give it to your kids, [LAUGH] don't give it to your spouse, that's the idea. Here's an example of someone who you might have heard of, Muhammad Yunus who has led an exemplary financial life. He got his PhD in economics at Vanderbilt University in 1969. He took a job as Assistant Professor of Economics at Middle Tennessee State University. But then he had the idea of founding a bank in his home country of Bangladesh. He had an idea, sorry, democratizing finance, and the idea was to make small loans to individuals that could be done in such a way that is profitable. The problem with lending to poor people is that, they're more of a nuisance than a source of profit. They want a small amount of money. We're talking about lending a small amount of money to a woman, and with a poorer family that's living on the edge, so that she can buy a little push cart that keeps food warm. And she can go somewhere where people are, Poor people congregate and sell lunches. But she doesn't have the money to get the push cart and to buy the food to start with, so he found a way of making that work. And for that, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, not the economics prize, the Peace Prize in 2006. Now, he has lots of critics who question whether it really worked, but apparently it did, the bank grew and prospered. So that is an example of applying finance creatively. So I think that your financial life will be concentrated in the next five or seven decades, I'll say optimistically for, and this will be a world of financial capitalism. Financial markets will be everywhere. But financial booms and crashes will be even bigger than before. Despite all this talk of that FSB, Dodd-Frank, etc. >> [SOUND] The FSB stands for the Financial Stability Board which is an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system. >> Curing these problems, they won't get cured because they're endemic that when you have opportunities for people to act inform organization and finance them is going to be excesses. And we shouldn't be too afraid of them. The excesses will be offset by the greater economic growth that happens. So, we'll see dramatic changes in finance in coming decades and in our economy, in particularly with the growth of information technology. And that will create opportunities and challenges. So, let me cap this with just some thoughts, I've said this already. But your outlook is at least a century. That is, you might live another hundred years, but even if you don't, your children will, or people you care about will. And just think about the upheavals and changes in the last century. Remember, this what you see is all there is fallacy is probably affecting your thinking, and you're not thinking creatively enough. About how things will be really different in 50 years or 100 years. We have an illusion of invulnerability, but things surprise us. So this is a quote from the Bible, from Ecclesiastes IX II, famous quote. About randomness in our lives, and so the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Nor yet riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all. I gave a talk once at Yeshiva University, which is an Orthodox Jewish University in New York. And there were some Talmudic scholars there, and they questioned my, it wasn't my translation, the word chance. One of them there said, in ancient Hebrew, they didn't have a word for chance. They didn't even understand that there could be something like probability effecting our lives. Everything was God's will or something like that. But then another scholar stood up and said, it could have been correctly translated as accident. And then I said, well what's the difference between chance and accident? And then anyway, this is a lively quote, it is still being debated. But to me, it means something that it is true that our lives are driven by chance. And finance is a theory of risk management. But it's not going to control all of the risks. The book, Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, have you heard that book? I recommend that, I should have maybe put it on the reading list, but it's about life and chance. If we blame ourselves too much for failures, we let our successes go to our heads, it's largely just randomness. So the question is, what do you do? Well, first of all, you want to study risk management and finance. But more importantly, you have to think about your human capital, your positioning in history. One of the most important talents I think that some people have over others is that they're thinking about how I fit in to historical events right now. Rather than thinking about where I am in my own personal life cycle? [MUSIC] The world changes and most people don't really anticipate the changes. [MUSIC] And I think another really important thing for young people to do is to maintain human capital. That is, keep thinking about what skills you have will be important and needed by others under maybe different conditions. And finally, maintain humanity in a unforgiving business world. And that's my last slide. [MUSIC] All right, so I hope you find purpose in life and in finance. And I think that wraps up this course. Okay, thank you. >> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]
