1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein often tells his middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father worked for the city’s Parks Department, mother a housewife. The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years. Without a college degree, an unsolved mystery , he got a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had become of him.) Dalton fathers perhaps sensed in him a young man on the make. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his faux wood paneled station wagon to the family’s country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front.) Another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stearn’s chief Ace Greenberg. Hence, Epstein, like many in the late ‘70s, arrived on Wall Street. Ifon one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to embrace a level of acute abstraction. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a ‘50s mentality. But in the mid ‘70s stock options started to be traded. In essence, the first version of