Bailout

Chart of the day, hedonic treadmill edition

By Felix Salmon

Here’s my favorite pair of charts from David Kochanek’s latest hedge fund compensation report. The first shows how much people get paid, by job title:

and the next shows how happy they are, also by job title.

Quite the inverse relationship, it seems! The accounting types get paid less than anyone else, but are also much happier with how much they’re paid than anyone else. Meanwhile, the portfolio managers and COOs, who get paid more than anyone else, are generally pretty unhappy people. Indeed, overall, a whopping 61% of the people in the hedge-fund industry are unhappy with their jobs.

Of course, it comes as no surprise to see the lowly analysts at the bottom end of both charts. But maybe people might (or should) be much less keen to become hedgies if they knew that only one in three hedge fund managing directors is actually happy with their lot.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on December 10, 2009 (boomark / email).