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Wall Street Monoculture

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by Felix Salmon
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Jan 27 2009 4:23pm EDT

Wall Street Monoculture

There were many causes of the financial crisis, but Anil Dash brings up a new one:

There's a related question here which no one is asking, which is whether the economic catastrophe facing the global marketplace is a result of a failure of white culture in America. The media is always quick to ask whether problems like violence plaguing minority communities are symptoms of a toxic culture in that community, but I haven't seen any questions to that effect in regard to this financial meltdown.
I've written a good deal about monoculture on this site over the years; The correlation between diversity and success has been repeatedly demonstrated.

My gut feeling is that greed is pretty universal. What's more, investment bank trading floors and management tend to be pretty multi-ethnic, if not multicultural, places. Yes, monoculture might be a problem. But it wasn't white monculture. Just Wall Street monoculture.

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