Ask not what you can do for your country

Defining altruism down.

I want the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira to write my book-jacket blurb—or, at least, my epitaph. In a puff piece on Chelsea Clinton, he writes

Maybe Chelsea reached this workplace ideal of neatly combining altruism with affluence at her first job at McKinsey, an elite consulting firm, where she specialized in health care, or possibly now, at her hedge fund.

Possibly. “I was all, maybe the Peace Corps? But I really feel that I could, like, make more of a difference in exploiting arbitrage opportunities in synthetic collateralised debt obligations. Because I totally want to help people.”