http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/sh...

The methods we use to calculate our GDP growth are a matter of great controversy among the world's economic analysts. Just as the accounting of Enron differs from that of General Electric, the procedures our leaders use to calculate America's economic growth are different from those used in Germany, Switzerland, or Japan. If we used the more conservative accounting methods of most other advanced nations, our growth would not look so good. American workers instinctively know this because they are acutely aware that living standards for ordinary Americans have not improved much in thirty years.

In any case, more and more of the country is becoming owned and controlled by foreign interests. Critical chokepoint industries are being taken over, and our government is ever more beholden to foreign lenders. The cumulative trade deficit (that is the extent to which total imports have exceeded exports) amounted to $4.6 trillion in current dollars over the last 20 years and this is equal to $5.4 trillion after adjusting for inflation. The average annual growth rate in real dollars for the trade deficit has been 24 percent over the past 10 years. Even if we take our government's calculations of GDP growth at face value, this means our trade deficit increased nearly seven times faster than our GDP.

Since more and more of our consumer spending goes to imported goods, the higher our GDP goes, the higher our trade deficit goes. In the ten years to 2005, for instance, the trade deficit went from just 1 percent of our GDP to more than 6 percent. This deterioration reflects in part the fact that the share of our GDP that goes to consumer spending has increased from 67 percent to 70 percent.

The US is already losing more than $700 billion a year to foreign countries through its trade deficit and the trend worsens by the year. Many people argue that even though the trade deficit is large in dollar terms, it is small compared to the overall American economy. But this is a dangerously misleading argument.

A more meaningful way to understand the trade deficit is by comparison with America's total national assets. The net worth of American households has increased from $28 trillion to $52 trillion in the last ten years, representing a gain of $24 trillion. This sounds tremendous but even so, at $3.6 trillion over that period, the trade deficits represented fully 15 percent of the gain. It should be pointed out moreover that much of the increase in household net worth came from unrealized gains in real estate and stocks. To say the least such gains are windfalls and they are unlikely to be matched in the next ten years. Indeed we may never be able to realize them.

A much more meaningful comparison is with America's rate of economic growth. The cumulative year-to-year growth in GDP in current dollars excluding foreign trade came to $5.7 trillion over the past 10 years. By comparison the trade deficits totaled $3.6 trillion - 63% of the cumulative GDP growth excluding foreign trade.

These trends show no sign of abating and are hardly even mentioned by politicians or the media. Our trade deficit last year was a record 6% percent of GDP and increased 16% over 2004. By comparison, our overall economy grew by a mere 3.5 percent in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. After taking out net gains in residential real estate and adjusting for inflation, the growth in net worth in 2005 was merely the 24th highest of the last 50 years. Moreover households lost net worth in three of the last 10 years (the three years following the "dot-com" collapse that began in 2000). In 2005, the gains in financial assets were well below median percentage gains over the past 50 years, while the increases in liabilities were well above their median. Personal savings as a percentage of disposable personal income was actually negative in 2005 for the first time since the great depression.

As suggested by our growing GDP, we continue to build net worth, but actual figures show we are not creating much of meaning. Popular media continues to publish the sanitized headlines of government statistics news without any real investigation. By contrast, the facts in this document and the concerns of a growing minority of well-informed citizens demonstrate that there is cause for tremendous alarm - and as we would say, an immediate nationwide decree calling for resolution to the present US economic crisis.

Yep. It's Friday, and we are going to DisneyLand AND DisneyWorld!

How lucky can Market Watchers get?

For purposes of not straining the brain and my rusty technological abilities, please just assume that all those registered trademarks and copyrights are in their appropriate positions...

Well, it's been a wild week here in Econoland. A lot of dirty laundry has been hung out to dry, but no dirty crooks, yet. The PPT was called back Thursday to pump it up so Friday's dump wouldn't be too catastrophic. Somebody must have some options to unload this month, that's the only reason for the latest bubbling action that makes any sense.

So, what do we know about Disneyland, besides it being the Happiest Place on Earth? (I do take issue with that designation, I have to think GS or maybe Rahm Emmanuel's office are more worthy of the designation, but I'm a cynic, dyed in the wool.)

DisneyLand and its younger sibling, DisneyWorld, were the brainchildren of one Walter Elias Disney.

"Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon and philanthropist. Disney is famous for his influence in the field of entertainment during the twentieth century. As the co-founder (with his brother Roy O. Disney) of Walt Disney Productions, Disney became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation he co-founded, now known as The Walt Disney Company, today has annual revenues of approximately U.S. $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created a number of the world's most famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse. He received fifty-nine Academy Award nominations and won twenty-six Oscars, including a record four in one year,<2> giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual. He also won seven Emmy Awards. He is the namesake for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the United States, Japan, France, and China.

Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, a few years prior to the opening of his Walt Disney World Resort dream project in Florida."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney

And even though tourist business in general may be in decline, I don't worry about the Disney corporation. Long after the United States is a legend or a myth, DisneyLand and DisneyWorld will still be there, entertaining corporate clones from all over the world.

Without regulation, without discipline, there is no virtue. There is only vice in every conceivable form.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/09/29/great.dep...

"Life expectancy during the peak years of the Great Depression increased 6.2 years -- from 57.1 years in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1933 -- according to University of Michigan researchers Jose A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase applied to men and women, whites and non-whites."

Well, consider the report that the Spanish Flu of 1918 DECRESED longevity by a decade....

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/index.html

"The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. "

I WOULD WANT SOME ACTUARIAL GENIUS TO LOOK AT THE FIGURES AND DECIDE WHETHER THE SECOND CLAIM IS BASED ON THE HEELS OF THE FIRST, OR WHETHER BOTH START FROM SOME "NEUTRAL" BASELINE.

I THINK IT'S FAR MORE LIKELY THAT IN FACT ANY GAINS MADE IN THE DEPRESSION RESULTED FROM THE SPANISH INFLUENZA PASSING THROUGH AND OUT....IF YOU WILL PARDON THE CRUDE INNUENDO.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-g... /

My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I’ve watched the show obsessively because I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert <2> and Office Space <3>. Until now, that is. Now, after four years, I’ve finally figured the show out. The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore. The theory begins with Hugh MacLeod’s well-known cartoon, Company Hierarchy <4> (below), and its cornerstone is something I will call The Gervais Principle, which supersedes both the Peter Principle and its successor, The Dilbert Principle. Outside of the comic aisle, the only major and significant works consistent with the Gervais Principle are The Organization Man <5> and Images of Organization <6>. (p.s. Slashdotters: I just posted a welcome/intro to this blog and some responses here <7>).



I’ll need to lay just a little bit of groundwork (lest you think this whole post is a riff based on cartoons) before I can get to the principle and my interpretation of The Office. I’ll be basing this entire article on the American version of the show, which is more fully developed than the original British version, though the original is perhaps more satisfyingly bleak. Keep in mind that this is an interpretation of The Office as management science; the truth in the art. Literary/artistic critics don’t really seem to get it (Slate’s Dana Stevens, for instance is content to merely to pigeonhole it as “one of the funniest, saddest, wisest TV comedy series of all time.”) I’ll have some passing comments to offer on the comedy and art of it all, but this is primarily about the truths revealed by the show, pursued with Dwight-like earnestness.

From The Whyte School to The Gervais Principle

Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop. Let a natural, if declawed, individualist Darwinism operate beyond that point. The result is the MacLeod hierarchy. It may be horrible, but like democracy, it is the best you can do.

The “sociopath” layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself. The “clueless” layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book (in the fifties). The losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks. I am not making this connection up. Consider this passage from OM (I haven’t yet gotten to this part in my ongoing series <8> about the book):

Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip… he wants to dominate, not be dominated…Many people from the great reaches of middle management can become true believers in The Organization…But the most able are not vouchsafed this solace.

Back then, Whyte was extremely pessimistic. He saw signs that in the struggle for dominance between the sociopaths (whom he admired as the ones actually making the organization effective despite itself) and the middle-management Organization Man, the latter was winning. He was wrong, but not in the way you’d think. The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.



A sociopath-entrepreneur with an idea recruits just enough losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the sociopaths and losers make their exits, and the clueless start to dominate. Eventually, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

MacLeod’s “Loser” layer had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a “loser.” While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain: they’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short. They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard <9>). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. The good news is that losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The losers destined for cluelessness do not have a choice.

Based on the MacLeod lifecycle, we can also separate the three layers based on the timing of their entry and exit into organizations. The sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. The are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.

The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.

The Clueless are the ones who lack the competence to circulate freely through the economy (unlike sociopaths and losers), and build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them. To sustain themselves, they must be capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm — the perfectly pathological entities we mentioned. Unless squeezed out by forces they cannot resist, they hang on as long as possible, long after both sociopaths and losers have left (in Douglas Adams’ vicious history of our planet, humanity was founded by a spaceship full of the Clueless, sent here by scheming Sociopaths). When cast adrift in the open ocean, they are the ones most likely to be utterly destroyed.

Which brings us to our main idea. How both the pyramid and its lifecycle are animated. The dynamics are governed by the Newton’s Law of organizations: the Gervais Principle.

The Gervais Principle and Its Consequences

ricky-geravis

The Gervais Principle is this:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the “to” level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.

Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the sociopath level.

And in case you are wondering, the unenlightened under-performers get fired.

Let me illustrate the logic and implications of the principle with examples from the show.

The Career of the Clueless

In Season Three, the Dunder-Mifflin executives decide to merge the Stamford and Scranton branches, laying off much of the latter, including Michael Scott. His counterpart, the competent-sociopath Stamford branch manager, whose promotion is the premise of the re-org, opportunistically leverages his impending promotion into an executive position at a competitor, leaving the c0mpany in disarray. The Dunder-Mifflin executives, forced to deal with the fallout, cynically play out the now-illogical reorg anyway, shutting down Stamford and leaving Michael with the merged branch instead. The executives (David Wallace and Jan Levinson-Gould) are obviously completely aware of Michael’s utter incompetence. But their calculations are obvious: giving Michael the expanded branch allows them to claim short-term success and buy time to maneuver out of having to personally suffer longer-term consequences.

Jim’s remark on the drama is revealing. Comparing Michael to his exiting sociopath peer he says: “Whatever you say about Michael, he would never have done something like this,” a testament to Michael’s determinedly deluded loyalty to the company that will never be loyal to him. We can safely assume that Michael’s previous promotion to regional manager occurred under similar circumstances of callous short-term calculations by sociopaths.

So why is this a logical principle? The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse. Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless loser. At one point, Daryl, angling for a raise, learns to his astonishment that the raise he is asking for would make his salary higher than Michael’s. Michael hasn’t negotiated a better deal in 14 years. Daryl — a minimum-effort loser with strains of sociopath — doesn’t miss a step. He convinces and coaches Michael into asking for his own raise, so he can get his.

A loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged loser will do. At the bottom, the overperformers can merely add a predictable amount of value. In the middle they can be used by the sociopaths to escape the consequences of high-risk machinations like re-orgs.

The Career of the Sociopath

The example of the “fast-track the under-performing” part of the principle is Ryan, the intern. He tests himself quickly and rapidly learns and accepts that he is incompetent as a salesman. But he is a born pragmatist-sociopath with the drive, ambition, daring and lack of principles to make it to the top. So rather than waste time trying to get good at sales, he slips into a wait-watch-grab opportunist mode. But he isn’t checked out — he is engaged, but in an experimental way, probing for his opening. The difference between him and the average checked-out loser is illustrated in one brilliant scene early in his career. He suggests, during a group stacking effort in the warehouse, that they form a bucket brigade to work more efficiently. The minimum-effort loser Stanley tells him coldly, “this here is a run-out-the-clock situation.” The line could apply to Stanley’s entire life.

Stanley’s response shows both his intelligence and clear-eyed self-awareness of his loser-bargain with the company. He therefore acts according to a mix of self-preservation and minimum-effort coasting instincts. The same is true of everybody else in the loser layer with the exception of the over-performers: Dwight and Andy (and in his earlier incarnation as a salesperson, Michael).

The future sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out — through experiments and fast failures — that the loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit. He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-loser employee anyway. He takes the calculated risk that he’ll find a way up before he is fired for incompetence.

Ryan’s character displays this path brilliantly. When Michael’s boss and dominatrix-lover Jan suffers a psychotic descent into madness, her boss, the uber-sociopath David Wallace, has no great hopes of a good outcome. Setting up yet another band-aid move, he calls up Michael for an interview to take up Jan’s spot. But when the rest of the office learns of Michael’s impending interview (during Michael’s farcical attempts at using a Survivor style contest to choose his successor, which predictably, only Dwight takes seriously), the true sociopaths act. Jim and his sociopath girlfriend Karen instantly call up David and announce their candidacies for the same position. Unknown to them, Ryan, the intern-turned-rookie has also spotted the opportunity. The outcome is spectacular: Ryan gets the job, Michael loses, Karen gets the Utica branch, and Jim — who still has not yet completely embraced his inner sociopath — returns to Scranton. We learn later — as the Gervais principle would predict — that David Wallace never seriously considered Michael more than a temporary last resort. Much later, in a deposition during Jan’s lawsuit against the company, he reveals that Michael was never a serious candidate.

The Career of the Loser

The career of the loser is the easiest to understand. Having made a bad bargain, and not marked for either clueless or sociopath trajectories, he or she must make the best of a bad situation. The most rational thing to do is slack off and do the minimum necessary. Doing more would be a clueless thing to do. Doing less would take the high-energy machinations of the sociopath, since it sets up self-imposed “up or out” time pressure. So the coasting-loser — really not a loser at all if you think about it — pays his dues, does not ask for much, and finds meaning in his life elsewhere. For Stanley it is crossword puzzles. For Angela it is a colorless Martha-Stewartish religious life. For Kevin, it is his rock band. For Kelly, it is mindless airhead pop-culture distractions. Pam has her painting ambitions. Meredith is an alcoholic slut. Oscar has his active gay lifestyle. Creed, a walking freak-show, marches to the beat of his own obscure different drum (he is the most rationally checked-out of all the losers).

If you leave out the clear marked-for-clueless characters like Dwight and Andy, you are left with the two most interesting characters in the show: the will-he-won’t-he sociopath-in-the-making, Jim, and the strange Toby. Toby is a curious case — intellectually a sociopath, but without the energy or ambition to be an active sociopath. More about these two later.

The Emergence of the MacLeod Hierarchy

Dastardly as all this sounds, it is actually pretty efficient, given the inevitability of the MacLeod hierarchy and life cycle. The sociopaths know that the only way to make an organization capable of survival is to buffer the intense chemistry between the producer-losers and the leader-sociopaths with enough clueless padding in the middle to mitigate the risks of business. Without it, the company would explode like a nuclear bomb, rather than generate power steadily like a reactor. On the other hand, the business wouldn’t survive very long without enough people actually thinking in cold, calculating ways. The average-performing , mostly-disengaged losers can create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth. You need a steady supply of sociopaths for that, and you cannot waste time moving them slowly up the ranks, especially since the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the clueless into position wherever they are needed. The sociopaths must be freed up as much as possible to actually run the business, with or without official titles.

So Ryan floats directly to the top, where he does what is expected of him — lead a bold strategic gamble by building an online sales channel operation (which Dwight competes with in a brilliantly Quixotic episode). As with any big strategic move, the operation has its risks, and fails. And here we find that Ryan is still not quite experienced enough as a sociopath. He foolishly goes the Enron route, attempting to cook the books to avoid failure, and is found out and arrested. A true master sociopath like David Wallace would instead have spotted the impending failure, promoted a Michael to take over (who would obviously be so gratified at being given a new white-elephant title that he would not have seen disaster looming), and have him take the blame for the inevitable failure. Completely legal and efficient.

But Ryan isn’t done yet. In the last season, he played himself back into the game, and as of the last episode, had started a college football gambling fund that sounds suspiciously like the LTCM trading strategies of Messrs. Black, Scholes and Mertens.

The Organization as Psychic Prison

Which brings us to the other major management book that is consistent with the Gervais Principle. Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan’s magisterial study of the metaphors through which we understand organizations. Of the eight systemic metaphors in the book, the one that is most relevant here is the metaphor of an organization as a psychic prison. The image is derived from Plato’s allegory of the cave <10>, which I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say that it divides people into those who get how the world really works (the sociopaths and the self-aware slacker losers) and those who don’t (the over-performer losers and the clueless in the middle).

This is where Gervais has broken new ground, primarily because as an artist, he is interested in the subjective experience of being clueless. For your everyday sociopath, it is sufficient to label someone clueless and work around them. What Gervais managed to create is a very compelling portrait of the clueless, a work of art with real business value.

Here is the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s (and David Brent’s) careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. It is easy to explain failure. Random success is harder. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities.

The clueless resolve this dissonance by choosing to believe in the reality of the organization. Not everybody is capable of this level of suspension of disbelief. Both Ricky Gervais (David Brent) and Steve Carrel (Michael Scott) play the brilliantly-drawn characters perfectly. The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought. They quote movie lines, lyrics and perform terrible impersonations (at one point Michael goes, “You talking to me?” a line he attributes, in a masterful display of confusion, to “Al Pacino, Raging Bull“). For much of what he needs to say, he gropes for empty business phrases, deploying them with staggering incompetence. When Michael talks, he is attempting, like a child, to copy the flawless buzzspeak spoken by sociopaths like Jan and David Wallace. He is oblivious to the fact that the sociopaths use buzzspeak as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the clueless and communicate with each other.

It is not just the sociopaths who conspire to sustain Michael’s delusions. So do the checked-out losers, sometimes out of kindness, and sometimes out of self-interest. In one particularly perfect summing up, Oscar describes the impending “Dundees” award ceremony (a veritable monument to the consensual enablement of Michael’s delusions) as “like a child’s birthday party, he is having a lot of fun, and you just have to go and play along.” (I may be misremembering the exact line)

But Michael isn’t entirely a puppet. Buried under layers of denial is a clear understanding of his own, hopeless, powerless life, which makes him marginally more clued-in than say, Dwight. His response is frenetic and desperate manipulation of the drama of false validation that has been set up for his benefit. Some of this is with the knowing consent of his enablers. Like experienced improv-comics, within limits, the rest of the Office follows the rule of agreement in the Theater of Michael (in a brilliant piece of meta-commentary, in one episode we get to see Michael at his own impossibly bad worst in his real improv class, where he ruins every single sketch).

But Michael’s grand narrative requires constant, exhausting work to keep up. He must amplify and rope in even the most minor piece of validation into the service of his script. When, in a moment of weakness, Jim shares a genuine confidence with him, Michael is so thrilled that he turns the moment into a deep imaginary friendship, practically becoming a stalker, even mimicking Jim’s hairstyle. At the other end, he over-represses even the slightest potential dent to his self-image. His is a thin-skinnedness gone crazy. Reality is sealed away with psychotic urgency, but to do so, he must first scout it out with equal urgency. And so, when Jim (in the first true sociopath move of his career) engineers a private meeting with the visiting David Wallace to carve out a promotion, Michael first tries to break into the meeting. When politely turned away, he instantly switches scripts and pretends he is too busy and that he is the one who can’t attend. And then he sneaks into the meeting room anyway, first with various excuses, and finally by hiding in a Trojan-Horse cheese cart.

This sort of ability to work hard to sustain the theater of his own delusions, half-aware that he is doing so, is what makes Michael a genuine candidate for promotion to the ranks of the Clueless. Dwight is interesting precisely because he lacks Michael’s capacity for this pathological meta-cognition, and the ability to offer semi-believable scripts that others can at least help bolster. Dwight is not talented enough at cluelessness to ever be promoted.

Is There More

You bet. We haven’t even scratched the surface. Dwight, Jim, and Toby each deserve an entire essay. Michael and Ryan probably deserve one each as well, in addition to my quick sketches here. And there are other principles, lemmas and sundry theoretical constructs. But I’ll hold off. Maybe there aren’t as many Office watchers among this blog’s readers as I imagine. You guys tell me if you want more.

I’ll conclude with one thought: Gervais deserves Nobel prizes in both literature and economics.

Buy me a coffee to sponsor more posts like this! <11>

Article printed from ribbonfarm: http://www.ribbonfarm.com

URL to article: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-g... /

URLs in this post:

<1> Twitter It!: http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading%20%...

<2> Dilbert: http://dilbert.com /

<3> Office Space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space

<4> Company Hierarchy: http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-h... /

<5> he Organization Man: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081221819...

<6> Images of Organization: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/141293979...

<7> here: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/14/hello... /

<8> ongoing series: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/11/18/the-o... /

<9> moral hazard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

<10> allegory of the cave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_t...

<11> Buy me a coffee to sponsor more posts like this!: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=...

http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/209...


"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones."

"The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists privately control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed most cases impossible for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

-- Albert Einstein wrote this in 1949 in the "Monthly Review" in explaining why he was a socialist.

The following is an excerpt from Chris Hedges' recent book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle":

Corporations are ubiquitous parts of our lives, and those that own and run them want them to remain that way. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our fuel from corporations. We borrow from, invest our retirement savings with, and take out our college loans with corporations and corporate banks. We are entertained, informed, and bombarded with advertisements by corporations. Many of us work for corporations. There are few aspects of life left that have not been taken over by corporations, from mail delivery to public utilities to our for-profit health-care system. These corporations have no loyalty to the country or workers. Our impoverishment feeds their profits. And profits, for corporations are all that count.

The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good, or the impact of the corporation's activities on the environment. Corporation bylaws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make the largest profits possible for shareholders. In the 2003 documentary film "The Corporation" by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, management guru Peter Drucker tells Bakan: "If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast." And William Niaskanen, chair of the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he would not invest in a company that promoted social responsibility.

A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefit, that protect workers' rights, that invests its profits to limit pollution, that gives consumers better deals, can actually be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, an investment manager, says in the film: "The corporation is an external machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn't any question of malevolence or will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed."

Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corporation, the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a "present-day instrument of destruction because of its compulsion to "externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public allows it to externalize.'

"The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction," Anderson says.

The film, based on Bakan's book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power" asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically defined as psychopaths. Psychologist Robert Hare recites in the film a checklist of psychopathic traits and ties them to the behavior of corporations:

Callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
In capacity to maintain enduring relationships;
Reckless disregard for the safety of others
Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;
Incapacity to experience guilt;
Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

And yet, under the American legal system corporations have the same legal rights as individuals. They make contributions to candidates. They fund 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation and defang regulatory agencies. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newspapers, and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have huge legal teams, tens of thousands of employees, and scores of elected officials who ward off public intrusion into their affairs or lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of information. A few media giants, such as AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Viacaom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch's Newsgroup, control nearly everything we read, see and hear.

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones," Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the "Monthly Review" in explaining why he was a socialist:

"The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists privately control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed most cases impossible for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

Yes, friends, we are ditching the oncoming winter chill and heading to the Sandwich Islands, or as they are known today, Hawaii.

Hawaiʻi was the home island of Pai`ea Kamehameha, called by Westerners Kamehameha the Great, who by 1795 had united most of the Hawaiian Islands under his rule after several years of warfare and conquest. He gave his kingdom the name of his native island (by which the islands now are known collectively), Hawaiʻi. Captain James Cook, who made the Western world aware of these "Sandwich isles", was killed on Hawaiʻi in Kealakekua Bay. This is the kind of Cook's tour we will NOT be undertaking, although I believe that Cook's Tour in general refers to the famous travel agency, a staple of the British Empire, and featured in Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne.

Cook's tour–noun
a guided but cursory tour of the major features of a place or area.
Origin: 1905–10; after Thomas Cook (1808–92), English travel agent

By 1872 Thomas Cook & Son was able to offer a 212 day Round the World Tour for 200 guineas. The journey included a steamship across the Atlantic, a stage coach from the east to the west coast of America, a paddle steamer to Japan, and an overland journey across China and India. (Which is, by the way, the exact reverse of Jules Verne's trek!)

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/BUcoo...

From its humble beginnings Thomas Cook steadily grew, adding more destinations and holidays and today is the second largest European travel group. It now has 33 tour operating brands, 2,400 travel agencies, 66 aircraft and employs 19,775 full time staff.

Thomas Cook was nationalised shortly after World War Two when it became part of the state-owned British Railways. It was privatised in the 1970’s with Midland Bank becoming its sole owner in 1977. It was then sold by Midland in 1992 to a German bank and charter airline.

Today the company is 50:50 owned by German retail group KarstadtQuelle and the Lufthansa airline. KarstadtQuelle is in the process of buying out Lufthansa’s half which is a precondition of the merger of MyTravel and Thomas Cook announced...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2804160...

I cannot find anyone asserting that Thomas Cook was the first organized tour guide business. In fact, I suspect it is a much older enterprise, if not as organized in the past as it is today. Nor can I find a link between Thomas and James, although I suspect they are related in some degree...but I digress.



The state of Hawaii consists of many islands, and takes its name from the largest:

The Island of Hawaiʻi, also called the Big Island or Hawaiʻi Island (pronounced /həˈwaɪ.i/ in English and or in Hawaiian), is a volcanic island in the U.S. State of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean. With an area of 4,028 square miles (10,432 km²), it is larger than all of the other Hawaiian Islands combined and is the largest island in the United States.

Hawaiʻi is said to have been named for Hawaiʻiloa, the legendary Polynesian navigator who first discovered it. However, other accounts attribute the name to the legendary land or realm of Hawaiki, a place from which the Polynesians originated (see also Manua), the place where they go in the afterlife, the realm of the gods...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_%28isl...

The Island of Hawaiʻi is built from five separate shield volcanoes that erupted somewhat sequentially, one overlapping the other. These are (from oldest to youngest):

* Kohala (extinct),
* Mauna Kea (dormant),
* Hualālai (active but not currently erupting),
* Mauna Loa (active, partly within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park), and
* Kīlauea (very active: an eruption that began in 1983 is ongoing; part of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park).

Interpretation of geological evidence from exposures of old surfaces on the south and west flanks of Mauna Loa led to the proposal that two ancient volcanic shields (named Ninole and Kulani) were all but buried by the younger Mauna Loa.<1> Geologists now consider these "outcrops" to be part of the earlier building of Mauna Loa.

In greatest dimension, the island is 93 miles (150 km) across and has a land area of 4,028.0 square miles (10,432.5 km²),<2> representing 62% of the total land area of the Hawaiian Islands. Measured from its base at the sea floor, to its highest peak, Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world, even taller than Mount Everest, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Traditionally, Hawaiʻi is known as the Big Island because it is the largest of the Hawaiian Islands and also to ease confusion between Hawaiʻi Island and Hawaiʻi State.

Because Mauna Loa and Kīlauea are active volcanoes, the island of Hawaiʻi is still growing. Between January 1983 and September 2002, 543 acres (220 ha) of land were added to the island by lava flows from Kīlauea volcano extending the coastline seaward. Several towns have been destroyed by Kīlauea lava flows in modern times: Kapoho (1960), Kalapana (1990), and Kaimū (1990). A large fresh water pool, in a deep L-shaped crack in the Kalapana area, well known on the Big Island as Queen's Bath, was flowed over by lava in 1987.
Steam plume as Kīlauea red lava enters the ocean at three Waikupanaha and one Ki lava ocean entries. Some surface lava is seen too. The image was taken 04/16/08.

Hawaiʻi is the southernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago, and contains the southernmost point in the United States, (Ka Lae). The nearest landfall to the south would be in the Line Islands. To the north is the island of Maui, where East Maui Volcano (Haleakalā is visible across the Alenuihāhā Channel.

18 miles (29 kilometers) off Hawaiʻi Island's southeast coast is the undersea volcano known as Lōʻihi. Lōʻihi is an actively erupting seamount that lies 3,200 feet (975 m) below the surface of the ocean. It is thought that continued volcanic activity from Lōʻihi will cause the volcano to eventually breach sea level and later attach at the surface onto Kīlauea, adding even more land to Hawaiʻi's surface area. This "event" is presently predicted for a date several tens of thousands of years in the future.

The Great Crack

The Great Crack is an 8-mile (13 km) long, 60 feet (18 m) wide and 60 feet (18 m) deep crack in the island, situated in the district of Kaʻū. The Great Crack is actually the "result of crustal dilation from magmatic intrusions into the rift zone and not from the seaward movement of the south flank. There is no evidence that the Great Crack is getting bigger at this time or that the island is tearing apart along this seam."<3> Furthermore, neither the 1868 nor the 1975 earthquakes caused measurable change in The Great Crack.<3>

Rifts like the Great Crack are often the sites of volcanic eruptions, and in 1823 lava welled out of the lower 10 km (6 mi) of the Great Crack.<3>
Lava enters the Pacific at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in April of 2005, increasing the size of the island.

One can find trails, rock walls, and archaeological sites from as old as the 12th century around the Great Crack. Much of these finds are on the park side of the fence. About 1,951 acres (7.90 km2) of private land beyond the fence were purchased during the Bill Clinton administration specifically to protect the various artifacts in this area as well as to protect the habitat of the turtles. However, near the end of the crack is an area of land between the fence, the crack and the ocean which is not part of the park land and does have many archaeological artifacts on it.
Punalu'u Black Sand Beach Park

The Hilina Slump

The Hilina Slump is a 4,760 cubic mile (20,000 kilometre³) chunk of the big island of Hawaii on the south slope of the Kilauea volcano which is slipping away from the island. Between 1990 and 1993, Global Positioning System measurements showed the a southward displacement of the south flank of Kilauea up to approximately 10 centimeters per year.<4> Recent undersea measurements show that an undersea "bench" has formed a buttress at the forefront of the Hilina Slump, and "this buttress may tend to reduce the likelihood of future catastrophic detachment."<5><6>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_%28isl...

A land of stunning beauty, Hawaiian sites have been featured in many movies--including the epic musical, South Pacific!

We will take frequent mental vacations in the Islands as we slog through the lava flows and Tsunamis of modern economic events world-wide.

Thank you for celebrating with us, or in the Hawaiian language: Mahalo nui loa na ho'olaule'a me la kaua!