Fascinating stuff. It's a high-flying crew you got there. You should ask for seed money to fund your latest idea for a documentary film or some such. They'd probably peel off 100K without thinking twice.
I should note that cousin Z himself is quite smart and surely has some fancy degrees, but basically he's a chet. also, do any of you even know what paddle tennis is? I think it is the WASPiest sport of all.
I'm worried that my younger brother is turning into a Chet. He wears boat shoes, is talking about getting an MBA, has an excessive fondness for expensive sports, and so on. It's all a bit much.
does seem like I should be richer. well, if I'd wanted that, god knows I could have married a chet.
also, do any of you even know what paddle tennis is?
Heh. My very middle-middle class Manhattan project had paddletennis courts behind the buildings. I hadn't realized it was Waspy at all. (If it's the same game -- halfsize court, deflated tennis ball, solid wooden racquets rather than strings?)
I think that paddle tennis is the same thing as platform tennis, which is played with paddle-like rackets (duh) on a relatively small fenced-in platform (duh again), the main advantage of which seems to be that you can heat it in the winter. I don't know how waspy it is: it's very popular in my rather generic middle/upper-middle class suburb, but that may be just a local peculiarity.
It is a signaling device. One used to be able to assume alot about a person by the little hints like where they "summer". Otherwise alot of due diligence energy has to be expended in figuring out whether to give Chet a boatload of your cash.
middle-middle class Manhattan project
This made me laugh, because I thought for an instant that you were talking about developing a respectable, polite atomic bomb.
you know, TLL, that makes a lot of sense. if you know lots of members of some guys family, you at least know he's not some total fly-by-night financed by the russian mob. probably.
5: Gosh, I always thought paddle tennis was just another word for ping pong. Clearly I have been out-WASPed.
(Although I have self-identified as a WASP here and elsewhere, my actual pedigree is as much viking as anything else. Perhaps I should think of IDP and DominEditrix as my kin, rather than Alameida.)
I'm with 10. I assumed it was ping-pong / table tennis.
And I'm self-confident. Can I make boat-loads of cash?
Ficke! is our true viking, I merely look like one to a certain variety of delusional woman. To the amusement of two of my colleagues, a woman set upon me in a reception area of the CNE complex in Toronto a few years ago, wanting to have her picture taken with me and everything. I'm a Canadian Mayflower descendant whose mother's side is mostly Highlanders. Most of what's called "WASP" is utterly foreign and deeply strange to me.
US WASPs are a wierd alien culture (to a Scot from a Catholic family).
Chet-types are near universal though -- the specific signifiers change, but they exist everywhere. Gordonstoun, rugby, and St. Andrews or Edinburgh University would be the Scottish equivalents of paddle-tennis and boat clubs.
What Eleuthera is like now that the club there is closed.
What I'm more interested in, is it still a good place to buy sugar for shipment to Nevis?
Isn't "sugar to Nevis" the Caribbean equivalent of "coal to Newcastle"?
And to answer the post question - and second ttaM - these days, the hypothetical Deutche or CS guy used to work with the Chets five years ago, and may have gone to school with them at Yale.
The job is "hedge fund marketer". And yes, all this stuff is vastly important (the equivalent over this side would be the kind of chap who goes to the right parties at Klosters etc).
The point is that if your hedge fund was raising money from Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, you wouldn't need a marketer. You hire a marketer if you are a smaller, start-up hedge fund that needs to attract a smallish (say USD50-60m) stake in order to establish a track record before you can start pitching to the bigger investors (fund-of-funds, banks, pension funds, university endowments etc). The only real source for this kind of money is rich individuals. So your startup hedge fund is financed by:
a) you and the other principals, maybe USD2m a head
b) your rich mates from the job you did before
c) maybe a bit of seedcorn from your last employer.
If this adds up to
Assuming the young kid isn't also a Chet, then he's just a bag-carrier, number-cruncher and producer of Powerpoint presentations, same as he would be in investment banking. He has no hope in hell of becoming a proper marketer himself as he doesn't have the connections, but he might get hired to do some job at a hedge fund if he is any good.
I think that what a lot of people mean by WASPS is Manhattan WASPS, who are very atypical either of Manhattan or of WASPS.
14. True Chets also know the signifiers of Chets from other cultures, esp. from across the pond. But in rebuttle to 16, having gone to St. Grottlesex and Old Ivy (Rip, Rip, Rip that Chimpmunk off the field..) is not as big a signifier as it used to be, witness how unfogged commenters attended those august institutions.
19: you say this as if it's a bad thing....
Not all Ivies are Chets, but all Chets are Ivies, is what I'm saying. Especially Chets of Cousin Z's level.
Buttle me once, shame on you.
Tuttle's going to get you guys.
paddle tennis video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qqx_EMj_oA
Perhaps it's not the specifics but the diamond-hard, unassailable self-confidence?
I think that is a big part of it. I've managed to rub elbows with a relatively large number of Chets, from most US regions and from more than a few foreign countries, and the effortless confidence/sense of entitlement seems to be the defining characteristic.
Huh. I assumed it was ping pong as well. Mouse over the pictures.
Also, just thought I'd add, you would never bring an MBA along to say the smart stuff. Especially not a Harvard MBA. MBAs are only good for connections and saying very stupid versions of the smart stuff.
But wow, I never suspected there was that much WASPiness left in hedge funds. Everyone I know who got into trading was pretty middle-class, but I guess that's because I really only know the math nerds. Sales guys must be a completely different breed.
MBAs are only good for connections and saying very stupid versions of the smart stuff.
But you might have to be smart yourself in order to tell that what they're saying is just the stupid version of the smart thing.
Ben, I like holding on to the thin sliver of misplaced hope that the plutocratic bastards investing in hedge funds might have gotten unbelievably wealthy through some inherent talent. Please let me do that.
MBAs are only good for connections and saying very stupid versions of the smart stuff.
this simply isn't true. It is possible to learn a hell of a lot of very useful things on a good MBA program. It is also possible to drift and just rote-learn, shmooze and make connections, but this is also true of every other Masters program.
31: I suppose if you add it all up, there are a couple cool things you learn, but all the actual impressive material still seems to be taught in the PhD courses.
I'm just bitter. Even though U of C is supposed to be one of the couple most rigorous and finance-concentrated MBAs out there, getting graded on a curve against MBA students feels like entering a fifth-grade bareknuckle boxing tourney.