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" premium unrelated to its usefulness, like the fund managers earning a fat fee for doing nothing, or the many talented MIT engineers and scientists hired to write software that allows stock trading at millisecond frequencies, then talented people are lost to firms that might do something more socially useful. Faster trading may be profitable because it allows the trader to react more quickly to new information, but given that the reaction time is already seconds or less, it seems implausible that it improves the allocation of resources in the economy in any meaningful way. "

Abhijit V. Banerjee , Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems


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Abhijit V. Banerjee quote : premium unrelated to its usefulness, like the fund managers earning a fat fee for doing nothing, or the many talented MIT engineers and scientists hired to write software that allows stock trading at millisecond frequencies, then talented people are lost to firms that might do something more socially useful. Faster trading may be profitable because it allows the trader to react more quickly to new information, but given that the reaction time is already seconds or less, it seems implausible that it improves the allocation of resources in the economy in any meaningful way.