Time To Junk Economics

Africa, that well known collection of basket-cases, has long been a net exporter of money even after aid is taken into account.  This is known as capital flight.  These externally held assets are held by a small minority and the countries’ public debt is paid for by everyone else.  A number of university studies have shown this and the sums are in hundreds of billions.

The majority of the world’s wealth is held by very few people and we now regularly hear of the ‘one percent’, but I meet few people who understand much, if anything about how this wealth is amassed inn so few hands and what this form of capital actually does, other than making a few incredibly rich.

I think we can safely assume the wealth of the one percent has little good effect on raising living standards for the many.  It’s been around and getting worse for centuries.  It may be possible to argue that all improvement in this sense may be done to massive improvements in productivity due to increased knowledge and technological innovation, though these may have some link to the focus of wealth (we wouldn’t have science without people otherwise idle enough to do it).

As a scientist, rather than someone who teaches low-level university economics to make a crust, I find economics an intolerable discipline in that it fails to address itself as a history of mistakes and is predicated on ‘world-views’ rather than more modest research programmes.  It is not possible, as a scientist, to think that such issues as capital flight, offshore tax-dodging and other obvious cheating, or such matters as a small number of people needing the motivation of great riches while others starve, can form the core of a research programme.

Sociologists generally don’t like explanations of capitalism as only existing because people are incredibly dumb, but frankly, when one looks at what we are expected to swallow on the needs for mass austerity and to let the rich get even richer, the levels most people can achieve in universal education, widespread scientific illiteracy and global competition really being about depressing wages and conditions of employment, and getting people who aren’t smart to worker smarter (as we import smarter people because this doesn’t work), along with what passes as mass entertainment and research on just how dumb human communities have been in various ecocides and wars … then evading questions about how human dumbness comes about hardly seems scientific.

My thesis is that we are almost chronically dumb and can’t face up to this (none of us is exempt).  In one of my favourite Voyager episodes, Janeway not only refuses to drop her pants to get technology that would get her crew home, but tries to trade the sum total of human literature for it – essentially trying to trade what you’d be stuck with on a desert  island (of the radio show) for technology that shrinks space.  We live with fantasy like this in a world in which women and children are traded to much worse fates and in which we are all traded in an economic system beyond democratic sanction.

My guess is we could know about economics if we studied the issues from a fractal perspective.  I don’t mean the creation of a new set of mathematical wangles that mean ‘there’s nowt down for you Son, ‘cos you can’t do this kind of counting’.  There are structures that seem to repeat themselves in human affairs, including repeated numbskull behaviour by majorities and minorities.

My start is in the non-human and the way bacteria, plants and animals behave.  Much we see as human can be found in this.  Ants ‘take slaves’ by stealing the eggs of other ants, many insects are involved in ‘complex gardening’ using anti-biotics and there is much ‘chemical warfare’ practised – none presumably needing the kind of rational mind we attribute to ourselves.  Chimpanzees act to ‘police’ their societies (so no change there then!).  Many species are now extinct and it’s clear our own almost was.  We need some understanding in economics of how we are borne in evolution and are not in mastery of it.

Human history as it is taught around the world has structures in it.  My guess on these is that the first is that it is taught everywhere inaccurately.  What’s the difference between Jihad and Crusade or the various empires that have hardly graced the Earth?  What’s the difference between the ancient tribe in Peru who ‘mastered’ water supply and died horribly when their claims to deal with ‘water-gods’ was exposed in drought and the current Mob of banksters and their claim we can’t do without them?

Some way into an examination of such structures, come questions on whether competitive advantage is actually ever used in any way we can consider moral?  What other structures might be similar and/or at work – one can think of the bee hive, termite mound and social mice (where Bossmouse keeps his order through the enforced poverty of others).

There is much more to say on structures we might expect to find at different scales in our society.  The fraud we are encouraging in capital flight and investment banking may well just be a structure as surely as that of a set of genes turning on encouraged by the environment (exercise immediately causes gene activity).

Competitions really only work through rules and refereeing.  What one can compete on is restricted or we might say, structured.  We could choose to structure such matters as salary caps across work places from sport to banking.  It’s also possible to see much of the notion of motivation to great wealth as giving up to libidinal structures.

In longer term looks at structures we get laughable stuff like Elliot Waves (his other book was on running a tea-shop), but we rarely look at what has always been promised to society as a whole by putting up with economics and what has actually been delivered (a lot – not much?).  My own country (UK) has failed to produce even all its own medical doctors and steals them from countries that cannot  afford to lose them.  What does this say about working smarter and the role of training and education?    Surely if we could do so much better by getting higher skills we’d not only be producing all our own doctors but also making money hand over fist training those of other countries in our splendid and efficient medical education?  We ain’t.  And now we have kids taking on huge debts to get the “advantage” of a degree to work in a coffee shop.

If education is about employability (it ain’t – but no matter) why do we divorce it so much from the world of work?  Some dork brandishing a business degree from the places I’ve taught in, is no more employable or knowledgeable on business for real than anyone else with a non-numerate degree in anything else, and less employable than someone who sensibly left school at 16 and went to work for Sainsburys (where I know management juniors get a better education than I can offer).  So where are the economists saying we should junk much of higher education and get on with a job-based expansion because you’re only going to learn about work at work and only learn work-skills by using tools and machines?

The economics we have is such junk we have a Chancellor telling us his coming budget will be for growth and work – when it will offer more money to the rich and continue to cut the public sector.  Osbourne is crap – yet if economics is so bad we can’t even see through his jive it needs to be junked.

Advertisement

Don’t Believe an ACPO Word On Modernisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/04/chance-to-modernise-police-force – a link to the Lesser Odious Blair – this one the dork who ran the Met.

I spent some time doing organisational restructuring.  It isn’t pleasant and the major “tool” is sacking people.  People are usually the major business cost.  If you can get rid of them you can buy more advanced machines and this usually lets you get – er – rid of more people.  Terms like rationalisation, modernisation, squeezing costs and all kinds of kwality initiatives cover the basic function.

The idea is supposed to be about producing an overall economy that is high productivity, low unit cost.  We all benefit because we end up in smarter jobs, earning more as UK plc vanquishes external competition.  Obvious bolloxs – but most people seem suckered by this drivel – it has a compelling logic but more or less no corroborating data.

Various countries have been stacked up as being better than this than the UK.  The USA, Germany, Japan have all been the lands of milk and honey in the myth.  They never were.  In other countries Thatcher is lauded for curing the British disease, but in fact “Thatcherism” pre-dates the Iron Lady by a couple of decades.

What smashed our working-class economy was international competition – largely a combination of cheap labour putting up with poor working conditions, huge improvements in logistics (particularly shipping), new production engineering requiring greenfield sites, the ability to embody skills in machines and greedy top managers and utterly hapless politicians.

Many sectors of our current economy are uncompetitive, but find ways to look as though they aren’t.  We seem OK with notions like textile workers having to compete with  South Asian sweat shops and child labour, but somehow OK with our cops being paid vast differentials over such distant counterparts – and judges, lawyers, professionals and managers.  There is no evidence they are more productive than their distant counterparts.

So now the cops are putting some of their work out to tender.  In any company doctoring I did, ‘modernisation’ largely involved finding out who was getting paid a lot and could be delayered.  This means cuts to the overall budget – and it does not mean, as Blair glibly states, that this saving will be spent on more vital activities.  It might mean this in a private company where redeploying the savings could increase productivity and sales; but it just will not mean this in the public sector where the spend is being cut.  It means jobs will go through ‘natural wastage’, redundancies and potentially a big axe on promoted jobs through promotion freezes, new forms of ‘area management’ (with fewer managers) and getting management done at lower levels without extra pay.  These are the rules of the game – Blair and other ACPOs hope to manage the process and keep their own fat pay.  If I was doing the job the outcome would be similar, except I’d delayer the lot of them too.

The obvious and rarely addressed problem with all this efficiency is that it only makes sense in an economy with employers hungry for labour and capital hungry to invest in productive economy.  In previous times it has taken the Black Death and world wars to bring this about.  Sent to Japan to see their miracle first-hand, I found low unemployment but also people doing all kinds of non-jobs in banks and government that made our Post Office look like it was running on a skeleton staff (1980s).  There were great conditions in key factories, but also many employed part-time (48 hours a week) on low pay.  It was clear even then they had no answer to maintaining full employment other than government spending.  Though their executives take more responsible pay, my liver is still recovering from expense account spending!

The essential analysis is called business process analysis.  In policing this reveals that much work done is clerical and can thus be done at a cheaper rate.  I would expect much of the management could also be driven down the ranks and senior jobs eliminated under a form of area management,  You don’t hire extra staff, but cheaper new  staff and although you want the management done, you want this to be part of the lower order jobs, not a LOMBARD class (lots of money but are right dicks).

I could knock out a spreadsheet on what changes produce what savings.  As a clue, you cost the average PC with her on costs (pension, redundancy entitlements etc.), get rid of 100 and cost the new staff (say 50 clerks) and their on costs.  You then cash-flow the savings to show break even points.  You bring in a new rank of ‘supervising constable’ (some are currently called area beat managers) and see how many sergeants and inspectors can go.  Keep doing this until you have rid the world of half of ACPO.

The upfront redundancy costs are laid off against future savings and reduced cash-flow.  You might create a new management level with all current ranks from chief inspector of chief super rolled into one and put out to interview.

Alongside this you would look to reduce the number of steps and any duplication in identified business processes – say getting some bastard to court.  Summons, for instance, beats arrest, custody and charge hands down in business terms.

I admit it is complex, but it always means fewer and less well paid jobs with lower pensions.  No one has ever worked out how to do any of this and produce new job opportunities with comparable pay and conditions.  Why would the private sector produce such when it can invest elsewhere at cheaper rates that bring it more profit?  The private sector cavalry is as mythical as Custer  is as a hero (basically he was a money-grubber who led his men on a cavalry charge into a volcano after an act of genocide).

Not only will the jobs that go never return, the ‘savings’ won’t help the economy either.  Wages have flat-lined since 1980 and cash in the hands of our bottom 50% (most cops) has shrunk from 14% to 1 %.  This is why our pubs, shops and so on have disappeared and why much small business can’t make its way – no one can spend unless they borrow and that bubble has burst,  The redundant cop with any sense will pay down her mortgage debt, not go on a spending rampage.  Most won’t get a sinecure in Bahrain to make sure nothing changes there!

I think most would agree our legal system needs modernisation and to be much cheaper.  We would like to see our economy more productive.  The way to do this is through full employment as a right and democratic-approved earnings caps in all sectors and a more equal society which retains (or improves) innovation motivation and getting the work we need done done.  I’ve always wondered why we are so scared of this and why, with chronic examples like the Soviet Union, we are so tamely on the road to serfdom under banking tyranny’s unseen politburo.

Any money saved in police modernisation (I think ACPO so dire it will end up as a cost) will just be sucked into the swamp of money making money a long way from our shores. And our cops will end up demoralised, just as the communities based around mines still are.  The shining economic miracle of the Rising Sun is now the dead donkey of leading government debt.  If they couldn’t do the jobs business why should we think we can using the ideology that failed them?  Sound, capitalist Japanese will tell you cutting government spending actually made their earlier collapse much worse.

Why Do Our Kids Leave School So Helpless?

When I was at school kids of my grandson’s age would be leaving about this time next year and going into work of some kind.  He has at least two years to go.  I know the economy has changed under the charge of international banksterism, but when I was young kids like my grandson went into real work.  Now, with far more of them equipped with academic qualifications, vast numbers are unemployed or on schemes of some sort we know are mostly rot.

My lad has some disability and though he isn’t thick, struggles with work around the house – from hoovering to wiring a plug.  We’re getting him a new computer table tomorrow and he will struggle to put the flat-pack together – indeed he will try and avoid the task completely.  He is, in fact, work-shy, though the disability is connected with this.  All this makes him like his mates rather than unlike  them.

If dealing with unemployment was genuinely about giving people the right training we would surely have identified the skills and be producing people with them.  The identification of training needs and training evaluation is one of my skills.  I’d say we have made a complete mess of it.  The essential mistake is assuming that most people can learn work skills other than through doing the work.  Indeed, I believe education barely works at all except as child-minding and this has expanded into the universities.

The answer is to stop all the scheme nonsense and pretending education can or should produce the skills employers want.  We need instead to guarantee and provide jobs.  We are failed in this entirely by the employers and our economic thinking.  We need to fit the jobs to the unemployed not try the silk purses from sows’ ears approach.  And we need to admit all we’ve been doing is importing better workers from abroad.

I’d go for an international service programme for all our kids from 14 – 21 and all unemployed across the EU (as far across the developed world as possible).  This would include time-release to colleges and all concerned would be affiliated to a university from 16 whether they attended as students or not.  I’d like to see this programme be a safety beyond which no one could fall without making that a choice, and welfare would not be a standard alternative.

Our economies can’t recover without doing something about flat-lined and decreasing wages – we have made the bottom half of our societies so illiquid we have begun to destroy our markets in the real economy.  We need to make our employers compete for the workers they want – they always claim to be smart, innovative and the rest afterall.  Currently, the discrimination against our dafter and less skilled is worse than anything we managed on race and colour.

 

A moral economics?

When given a budget as a chief constable or a department head across all services we know that is pretty much what we have to manage – sure we may be able to press for our own corner over exigencies or make cases that other departments should cough up if they can be shown to be using ‘our’ resources.  We might even float a body across a river to leave those on the other side with the expenses of the enquiry,  We sometimes end up in dumb situations like keeping old people in hospital to ‘save’ the care budget.

We understand in doing the above that we are controlling costs and we know the system isn’t perfect.  We generally know that the money left in the month before year end needs spending or we’ll lose it – or else some central authority will steal it twice – the money itself and by reduction of next year’s allocation.  We know the dodges.

Economics is really not much more than the stuff we do routinely in work places, yet it’s largely a disaster,  What we’re being told is that our policing, hospitals and education systems all rely on very clever people with amazing skills making the money that allow us to enjoy such expenses,  I no longer believe a word of this.  We have the priorities wrong.  All we need is to be free (something structured under law and as much to do with decent police and army people as anything else) to organise work and make sure it gets done.  We are good, if imperfect, at this, it ain’t rocket science and can be done with reasonably equitable rewards,  The rest is pathological fiction and white collar crime.

What’s gone wrong is broadly moral in form.  The moralities we’ve learned are ancient in form and don’t suit a modern world.  This is obvious when we look at religious stuff that allows discrimination against women and non/other believers – indeed encourages the rot. What we need is some basic dialogue on what our own morality should now be and how we can get that embedded in our economic practices.  With modern levels of technology and productivity, the first place to look is our attitudes towards work.

In short, I would not want to be the sort of prat motivated so much by money that I spent my time developing a career portfolio or spinning the invisible cloth of financial mega-riches for me.  And I don’t want to live in a world dominated by such sick people.  I’m sure we can do without their ‘creativity’ and make a better fist of things with our own.

What we have to realise is not a ‘general relativity of economics’ but the value of the work we all do in a new way,  Our pensions aren’t disappearing because we didn’t put the work in or because there is a need to do so much more work.  The ‘cake’ is vastly bigger than it was and there is a planet of plenty – what’s wrong is our organisation of it.  This is a moral issue, held back by economics and a lack of faith in our abilities to live decently and police this.

Bullying in the police

http://www.bullying999.co.uk/culture.htm

Anyone who wants to see what a mess academe can make in writing about basic issues could do worse than having a read of the paper produced at the above link.  It’s not without merit, yet seems to me to have a certain bullying tone of its own.

Some of the roughest, toughest, most profane people I’ve worked with never bullied anyone.  Some of the worst bullying I’ve seen was perpetrated by girls and women, and at work it often came in hideous, politically correct form.  Bullying is sophisticated and networked in ways the author of this paper shows no sign of understanding.

A start on understanding police culture would be to find out who gets the worst jobs and how that comes about.  Who is under stress and why.  How is ‘loyalty’ enforced and why is it so difficult for officers to speak out against unfair treatment and corrupt colleagues?  And a whole lot more before being convinced it’s down to hairy-arsed coppers’ drinking clubs and swearing! And in examining cases where cops bully victims.

Work Ethic

Bankside has just babbled a bit on work ethic.  Dave’s sort of right, but my critical eye is disturbed easily on stuff like this.  I always wonder how any system can be good when it actually produces dross, and further than this, why we never seem to face up properly to real criticism.  You could perhaps imagine Dave and I arguing about this as we shared a spade job, say, digging footings or the like.  We’d just do it and the work would be about 50-50 from either of us.  Expand this to 6 random people and you soon find the slacker instinct.  If you put 6 undergraduates together in a group, 2 to 4 of them will slack.  I’v e run piecework and bonus schemes and have some amazing tales of slacking and favouritism in such schemes.

Monkeys work for peanuts, but not once they see other monkeys getting grapes.  Human work is bound to be constrained in some degree by the vast unfairness of Rooney and bwanker wages.  Not just this, but more locally someone always seems to get the easier work.  And then the boss bollocks you because he doesn’t see you working your socks off, but does see the idle sod who carries paper up and down corridors in pretence of work.

I know Dave would know this and more – but at the root of work ethic is religion and that usually means ‘bad’.  Animals don’t work hard and this includes the ‘busy bee’ – bees really spend most of their time incumbent.

Most animals try to be efficient, almost in order to have ‘time off’.  I see no reason to have any faith in a system that doles out money in shed loads to the likes of Rooney or bwankers.  I’ll swindle that system at the drop of a hat – which is because I’m honest and have values.  Digging footings with a mate and I wouldn’t more than dream of slacking – and even more, if I saw him flagging, I’d probably try to put extra in to help out.

What the Rooney and bwanker money-grabbing tells us (as should just how much richer the rich have got since WW2 – or should that be in and after?) is that economics doesn’t work and we should change it.  This either means something global or new forms of local economic transfer (which now could easily be global) that leave Rooney and bwankers outside of what we do.  This would be in order to have meaningful ethics that don’t leave you looking like a gullible prat.

The vast majority of ‘work done‘ is meaningless and does not contribute to lives worth living.  People liver in grim crap all over (literally in India etc.) under all kinds of ethics (caste systems) – so why should we be so much different.  We are trapped in notions of what we think is right as surely as ‘rat people’ (India’s lowest caste) or the arses who see themselves as superior.  If we ‘make things fair’ (decent pay for a decent day’s work), what do we do next as humans strive for … and that’s why I’m interested.  What might we be if we weren’t wrapped up in current fantasies?

We need to shift world-views – but remember these are in individuals.  People aren’t happy as a result of winning lotteries, yet most of us dream we would be.  Marx wasn’t the first to notice that we end up alienated from our work and what’s more alienating than that pain in the back just as you realise Rooney gets more than you are all year for one misplaced pass?  Still (fact), we can get more satisfaction and happiness from joining a gardening club or such, than he ever will.

Big questions:

1. How much ‘work’ does the world need from each of us in order that we all eat, have water, shelter and whatever should replace ejukation?

2. How do we share this out?

3. What extra can be done?

4.How do we have a means of exchange that no one can cheat?

5. What else other than ‘work’ might come about?  What might disappear (try to imagine prostitution without poverty etc.)?

6. What ethics arise in such a system and against what ‘base’?

We aren’t doing much of the above, but there is some going on.  Mostly we are moving to war.  I suspect there will be a grab for middle eastern oil and African land and minerals.  We may almost be back to 1900 with US, EU, Japan and Russia at China’s door (WW1) and with the inflation that led to WW2.  The new wars will likely be genocides and colonisations.  Money wants them, whatever money is; and we are in wars.  In the last century the bullies eventually turned on each other, but not until after many meetings to carve up the rest of the world (Berlin 1861 was a classic).

I mention war because what happens to work ethic in it?  One might as well ask what is happening now to out pensions and savings and who is stealing them – because they are being stolen.  I only end up in a question, which is what is ‘work ethic’?  I know what it is when I’m turning over a spade with a mate.  I have less clue once I’m being paid because I need money to live, with Rooney and the work-shy on my back.

People have trouble with argument that challenges values – but this is what we need more of.  There are snags – and one of these is that human beings in general are unbelievably stupid and facts actually backfire in them, making them believe what they held before receiving the facts more strongly than before.  This is called the ‘backfire effect’.  Any ethic based in a networking of such dolts seems unlikely to be right or even for this to matter!

Police, Public Sector and Banking – Cases Of The Same Excesses?

I can remember times when working-class wages were high in the UK, though we never got up to German or Swedish standards.  The UK is now listed as one of the worst places in the world to live, and though I’ve met many ex-pats abroad who agree, it isn’t entirely true.  We might think of ourselves as up to our knees in alligators and only just seeing the swamp as the problem.  Working-class wages have dropped very badly here, and in a lot of our country there is no decent work for people to get hold of.  My father once earned less as a secondary school headmaster than supervisors in the steel and wire factories, and when I was a cop, people with PhDs queued to become binmen and there really were plenty of jobs around, though it was obvious industries were taking big hits.  Key ways of getting jobs by turning up on word of mouth and so on have all gone as far as I can see, few of the old working-class ways of my youth are now in operation.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s all about to get much, much worse.  ConDem may have noticed the swamp conditions, but they seem set to make things worse.  We won’t known until after October 20th and the spending review.  What I keep seeing in the press looks like more of the denial this country has been in since we competed and cuntilitioned with the Dutch in imperialist trade from around 1300.  We never were as good at this as the Dutch, but hid this behind grandiose history-myth.  Russian-European imperialism generally has been vile and continues.  The US has been no better, though it cornered the market for a while.  The Germans would have won through by fabulous industrial science, but fortunately had the most barking aristocracy of all working as government.  The Russians, Brits and French meant to get around to hacking up the US between them in 1861, but couldn’t agree the money.

As all business underwonkers know, the SWOT analysis is the answer for every occasion.  I knew so little of the marvellous technique when I started management teaching on the basis of substantial experience, I thought SWOT was a misspelling of swat.  I’ve actually been at quite senior meetings of our best and bold doing SWOT on UK plc (ltd actually – I’m ancient).  We need to do this, but the problems in management are usually nothing to do with baldly obvious solutions like this.  You can do all this kind of work and then find yourself presenting the report to Herr Hitler or some prat who pretends to listen for five minutes and then nips off to his private office to screw his new secretary.

We’ve been paying our bankers, cops and public sector workers far too much for two decades, just as we used to pay people in whatever industries that seemed successful too much in the past – people on 8 – 18K excepted.  A key weakness in the UK is we never keep enough back for investment, and have never got round to fair pay systems or realistic industrial relations as in Germany and Sweden.  We end up with a right versus left thuggery.  We build empires rather than trade or manufacturing capacity.  We build bureaucratic structures to deal with other bureaucratic structures

History repeats itself so pathetically, that our cops may end up being sacked in droves (good riddance to the idle, under-qualified, rude bastards?) and find themselves armed only with the industrial relations tools of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.  Strikes are no answer to much, though we should all remember those who fell and suffered more often than we do, as should our biased media with its war lies focus.  Cops might think the current threats to their sinecures are just to get them into a malleable state to do the governments dirty work as others strike.  Maybe not this time?

The issue that interests me is why “we” have so little clue as a public about what is going on.  We have banks because we didn’t use  North Sea Oil and Gas to ‘refit’ the country, we have excess cops who were bound to be useless because of everything Gadget says on the rest of the clown and bottleneck system, and our public sector and benefits problems are bloated because we have banks, not other places to work.  We don’t need banks now we have the Internet and I suspect competition in financial services is contrived and generally not needed.

We haven’t done the SWOT, they keep us too uneducated to do it (in principle very easy) and do their own in secret to maintain their interests.  The general rule is to remain a chocolate-dipped strawberry eater yourself and develop that ‘confidence’ management developers insist on and means ‘let them eat cake, but send them shit not flour to bake it with – by the time they realise what the ovens are for they will be too weak to protest).

When I left school (Shijuro tosses Hovis onto table and plays air-violin), oil was involved in only 5% of our chemicals industry and by the time I’d studied chemistry at university it was up to 98%.  We knew then that we needed to move into other industries, new energies and so on.  Forty years on we still just know, and have had people waste lives doing non-jobs, or like me for twenty years, selling our real educational technologies like whiskey to the Indians.  There is not a social problem in the UK that is not tainted with our lack of factories, growing technology, energy harnessing and other lacks.  Deep analysis might well show our benefits’ bill is 30 times what we think and has been going to rich people and a massive number of jobsworth clerks.  We are lacklustre.

I went to school near a big petro-chemical plant, and was a cop in the town built round it for a while.  The plant only lasted 10 years – it was easy to copy and was replaced by a much bigger one in Saudi.  I used to think new management might save us, but the truth is the UK has long had a dependency culture, one that prevents us changing.  The key is the dire fear of losing your job because we are worthless without one.  I’m not sure how we got back to this condition or who wants us in it.

SWOT and other management crap I taught and wrote on for 20 years is available in all major languages.  It works in some degree, but as your competitors have it it ain’t, like strategic management techniques ain’t, competitive advantage.  What we have done is given all thius lnaguage to turkeys and clowns who can soun d sensible using it, even intelligent and knowledgeable to the majority who read Harry Potter as adults and think arithmetic is maths.

Image via Wikipedia

There is a lot of new work, not idiot-commie in origin, that could take us into new ventures and practices.  It ain’t about business schools – they produce goons who can’t come up with ideas ans will lie for any master.  For now, I would just suggest a revolution of laughter.

It’s not that business and management models are somehow new saviours – the problem lies in them being very much not in common sense, even though they aren’t intellectually hard.  Idle academics may make them hard to evade teaching more difficult thinking and creativity.  Everyone by now has met the vapid, half-taught, half-assed Managerios who couldn’t lead us out of a wet paper bag, but get staff busy writing mission statements, personnel development planning plans, equal opportunities policies, empowerment policies and other crap in our newly committed organisation that feels so strangely shit to work in.

It shouldn’t be rocket science to work out financial services are Sooty’s Magic Wand products and that 20 to 1000 transactions over every vanilla one can’t make sense.  It can’t make sense to hire more expensive of cheap cops to sort out crime if the cops are already prevented from sorting chummy out by an idiot court system now designed to help chummies and frustrate and criminalise decent people.  It can’t make sense to give people jobs in job centre plus when there are no other jobs.  It doesn’t make sense to start paying managers and professionals more and more, or soccer players and the rest – there are salary cap models – and it makes no sense to pay more and more when there is no link at all with success, other than in a form that can be manipulated by those who get the bonuses.  I can fiddle most accounts I see for at least three years, and if I get the auditor in on the deal, potentially forever.  We fall over and over again for the Emperor’s cast off invisible threads.

There is another way forward, but it’s not in my interests to give it away free.  I would, in principle, and in principle Cameron and his boys have some of it in taking away middle class benefits, a bit like HRM Duke of Edinburgh did on MIRAS.  This is only at the extracting the piss from the bucket of water stage though.  We have yet to establish the extent of middle class benefits or what they really are.

I’m off to a finance meeting at my local Council soon.  Their plan is to cut services and poorly paid staff.  Sooty’s Magic Wand again.  I won’t ask for suggestions on where to shove this implement of middle class benefit thieves, but will no doubt be accused of diversity crime when I add the push to the shove.  Sooty was yellow, so I’m probably offending the Chinese.

Related Articles

• Excessive wages in the state sector . Name and shame thread. (politics.ie)