← Back to context

Comment by GiorgioG

12 days ago

We can thank Jack Welch and the MBAs who aim to be like him. Loyalty is a two-way street.

We can also thank Lewis F. Powell, Milton Friedman, Paul Weyrich, and others of their ilk.

  • I'd be interested to see a clip of Milton Friedman saying that executives are the most valuable employees.

    • Friedman wasn't the least bit sympathetic to non-management workers' plight. All he cared about was the owners. And executives usually own a disproportionate number of their company's shares.

      5 replies →

A MBA program is the equivalent of installing wormable malware into the human mind.

https://youtu.be/vEWGrc0eHLw

  • Interesting video. When I got an economics degree, there was a lot of discussion about externalities. The focus was something like “here’s what we can model, here’s what we can’t. Be careful, because the stuff outside your model can really matter!”

    Then the conversation moves on to how to build better models that integrate a more complicate understanding of the world we live in and our effects on it. This is why the Carbon Tax is/was such an interesting concept. It’s an attempt to enhance the financial system with the ability to price in climate change.

    Fundamentally, Economics is about make good decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Certainly the Lords of Finance have taken it to some pathological places, but prices and markets remain extremely powerful tools.

    One great example of this is how Feeding America created a market to allocate foodstuffs among food banks:

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/09/11/565736836/epis...

    • Carbon credits are rarely audited and often do not truly offset the amount of carbon they claim to capture.

      If externalities were important to the economists, after many decades, there would be a high sense of urgency to model the most important processes and assimilating them into the theory, but after many decades all the work has been put into how to eat the pale blue dot and turn it into money, an abstract concept that won't be useful when the worldwide famines start.