The men work with their hands, and the masters work with their brains. What a dreadful calamity it would be for the world and for mankind if all these brain workers were to go on strike.

I’m clearly less charitable towards the human race than are you, as I firmly believe there are thousands of willingly detached borderline sociopaths in the wings, ready to take the place of any i-banker who flees London for the hypothetical tax-havens-with-a-shortage-of-bankers.

Obviously there’s no way to actually quantify this though, so we may as well be discussing the choreography of angels on the head of a pin. But that’s the kind of thing that accounts for roughly 70% of all blogging, of course.

When the truth is that there’s a mass of similar people more than willing to do the same job for 50% of the cash

Is that really true though? To be a successful investment banker, you need to not only be intelligent, personable and numerate, and not only willing to sacrifice everything about your personal life to get rich, and to play some of the most horrible office-and-industry politics around, but also to not care about the fact that – instead of building a business, or creating and popularising an invention, or creating cool things, or all the other ‘changing the world’ reasons that intelligent, personable and numerate people go through life-sacrifice and infinite sucking-up to build businesses – there’s nothing to your job other than the money.

I reckon that requires a degree of disattachment-bordering-on-sociopathy that most people smart enough to achieve the other job components would struggle with (note that the bright and non-sociopathic people in the industry I know – the Chris Dillows and Dsquareds – tend to be analysts and economists and quants who get paid well but not even the same order of magnitude as the traders and salesmen, in exchange for doing a much more interesting and less soul-destroying job). After all, i-banking jobs these days are applied for and won on a largely fair basis: in the sense of having batteries of tests and interviews, rather than old-school ties and Daddy’s friends, to narrow down the enormous numbers of applicants.

(none of that suggests they morally deserve the money, of course – but I’m not sure you can make the case on a straight supply-and-demand level)