Attention Conservation notice [w. apologies to Cosma Shalizi, from whom the phrase is stolen]: What follows is what in the newspaper business used to be called a thumbsucker — in this case, yet another way to see the GOP as not just wrong, but so steeped in an error of principle, of worldview, as to be irredeemable. It’s got a nice anecdote in it, lifted from someone else, but there’s no need to read on if you don’t like such stuff. Which last is, of course, a PGO of its own. See: I’m fractally unnecessary.
______________
I don’t recall an election in which two such strikingly opposite visions not just of the United States, but of human nature, so clearly set the stakes. Let me get to part of what I see by some indirection:
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, with (thanks to the exceptional luxury of a sabbatical) much more to come. I’ve started out by trying to catch up on some of the political books I’ve missed recently — and I’ll probably have some thoughts to share about Christopher Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites before long. I just finished Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy too, though I found it perfectly interesting, but less compelling than Hayes’ book for a number f reasons. Still that’s a philosopher’s take on the same problem explored in the book that prompts this post, Virginia Sweet’s God’s Hotel.
Sweet’s work is a memoir of her doubled journey as a doctor at the last surviving American big city alms house, San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital, and as a scholar trying to understand Hildegard von Bingen’s spiritual and practical approach to her form of medicine. Sweet’s book has been enthusiastically received, and I can see why, though it didn’t move me in quite the same way it seems to have for some others. It’s Sweet’s lack of struggle that gets me, I guess; there’s no doubt in my mind she did sweat and suffer over her 20 years caring for the poor, but in recollection the life unfolds with an easy rhythm, no matter how tumultuous the world around her might be.
That said, though, the core message of the book is that there is a profound difference between health care and medicine, and that we ignore the virtues of the art and practice of medicine at our great cost. As one of her reviewers notes, this is a subversive thought: Medicine is a craft, performed one-on-one, slowly…
…while health care is a commodity, something that can be abstracted and, in a sense, mass-produced:
Sweet doesn’t romanticize much, and she never suggests that she, her patients or anyone should trade modern medicine and its quantifying tools for Hildegard’s actual practice. But she makes the point a good historian of ideas should: one studies the past not to recreate it, but to understand what its thoughts meant to its thinkers — and then what meaning those same insights may have in the radically different time and place in which the historian lives. Use Hildegard as a tool to probe what the consequences may be if we commit ourselves to life within Mitt Romney’s vision of America.
In that frame, here’s just a brief passage, in which Sweet describes her even-tempered reaction to the consequences of an infestation of her hospital by the kind of consultants that Romney’s parent firm Bain produces:
Above all, the [consultants’] report said, they’d been amazed by the anachronistic presence of a head nurse on every one of the hospital’s thirty-eight wards. As far as they could tell, this head nurse did nothing but sit most of the day in her chair in the nursing station. She answered the phone, to be sure, and kept the charts tidy; now and again she when out and inspected a patient with one of her nurses. Also, she made coffee, kept the TV room and lounge neat, organized patients’ birthed parties and in general, did whatever needed to be done. It was a pleasant job [the consultants] observed, helpful, no doubt, but one hundred years after Frederic Taylor’s description of scientific management, and in a time of tightening health-care budgets, such a use of a skilled RN was excessive. They’d even seen one head nurse whose only task was knitting. That’s right, a head nurse who, as far as they could tell, spent all day in her chair at the head of her ward, doing nothing but knitting blankets and booties for her patients.
So their main recommendation was to change the nursing structure at Laguna Honda. The job of head nurse should be eliminated. Instead, a new nose manager position should be created, where each nurse manager would be responsible for two wards instead of one. She would no longer answer the phones, tidy the charts, or help out with patient care. Rather she would manage the staff…
It was a lesson in the inefficiency of efficiency. And the best way to explain is to tell you about the head nurse who knit….[hers] was a little-old-lady-ward, with thirty-six little old ladies — white-haired, tiny and old — and sure enough almost everyone one was wrapped in or had on her bed a hand-knit blanket; white and green, white and red, white and yellow. And there was the head nurse sitting in her chair at the nursing station, answering the phone, fussing with the charts, observing her charges, and knitting one of the few blankets remaining to be done.
I’ve thought a lot about those blankets since the disappearance of the head nurses and their well – run neighborhoods of wards. About what the blankets meant and what they signified. And here’s the thing: The blankets made me sit up and take notice. Made me pay attention. Marked out that head nurse as especially attentive, especially present, especially caring. It put me and everyone else on notice.
It’s not that the ladies for whom they were knitted appreciated them or even noticed them. Who did notice was — everyone else. Visiting family noticed. Looking down the center aisle, they saw two rows of little white-haired ladies — their mothers, great-aunts, and sisters — each lady bundled up in a bright, many-colored hand -knit blanket. They also saw that each had makeup on, and her hair done and her nails polished by the nurses who knew that, down at the end of the ward, was the head nurse, knitting. The Russian ambulance drivers noticed, when they rushed onto the ward to pick up one of the ladies…Even the doctors noticed. The blankets put us all on notice that this was a head nurse who cared.
…those blankets signified even more than attention and caring. The click of that head nurse’s knitting needles was the meditative click of — nothing more to be done. Although it had seemed to [the consultants] that the head nurse did nothing except knit, that nothing was, as the Tao says, what the Superior Man does when everything that was supposed to be done has been done.
We did get used to the new system eventually. The remaining staff learned to answer the phones, tidy the charts, talk to families, help the doctors, survey the ward and support one another at the same tim they were looking on the computer or filling out the forms that the new nurse managers created. But the new system had a cost. It was stressful. After the head nurses were cut in half, there were more illnesses and more sick days among the staff; there were more injuries more disabilities, and earlier retirements. Among the patients there war emore falls, more bedsores, more fights, and more tears. And this, in the broader scheme of things — even economics — is not efficient.
…The [consultants’] report taught me not only the lesson of the inefficiency of efficiency. It also taught me the lesson of the efficiency of inefficiency.
Because it wasn’t just the tasks of the head nurse that fell by the wayside with [the] recommendations. It wasn’t even their watchful re-creation of neighborhoods within the village of the hospital. It was the time they had, the unassigned time, that not only belonged to them but spread itself to all the staff — doctors included. That unassigned time, as inefficient as it seemed to be… turned out to be one of the secret ingredients of Laguna Honda. With the elimination of the head nurses, so economical on paper, some of that extra time was also eliminated, and with it, some of the mental space to focus and care. There was, I discovered, a connection between inefficiency and good care…
I don’t want to romanticize here, any more than Sweet does through her long narrative. To channel my inner Freud, sometimes the old ways of doing stuff really are outmoded. No one who has recently spent four years in academic administration needs to be reminded of that.
But Sweet’s point is one I’ve been thinking of more and more as each Bain vulture capitalism story makes its way in and out of the Look! Shiny! media narrative. Sweet mentions that the consultants who got rid of half of the head nurses shifted $2 million in the budget. They collected $200,000 for their recommendation — an agreed 10% bounty on all “savings” their study produced. They correctly determined an individual inefficiency, and missed, in Sweet’s account, the systemic advantages of what seemed to their analytical framework, their faith, to be an obviously flawed system.
And so it goes throughout the current GOP worldview. We know that the private sector is the GOP solution to (putative) problems in the public schools [paywall] by selecting the right measurement criteria. Bobby Jindal can determine the cost of libraries, but not the cost in money or possibility of their loss. The number wins; the uncertain future weighs for nought. The usual catchphrase for all this is privatizing profit and socializing risk — which is what the GOP seeks for social capital as much as the financial kind. Hence the stakes of this coming election.
But beyond that pretty familiar notion, what came to front-of-mind as I read Sweet’s story was the reminder, if any were needed that the basic worldview of the two sides in this election are not the same, for all the overlap of interest and elite corruption and all that the circular firing squads of the left can (sometimes accurately) describe. I said this was meta, and it is, and I should probably let y’all get back to your Saturdays. But behind the consultant’s technical apparatus is a vision of a world of individual action and reaction. Cut here, save the money, Profit!
Taken to the level of politics and national elections, it’s a vision (sic!) of a country best understood as an assemblage of 300 million individuals. Hence, among the adherents of this view, the furor over the suggestion that business folk had any help building their businesses.
If you think that such a view of the lack of connection between one person’s endeavor and the next is the way to educate a population, receive health care in a timely and useful fashion, to innovate, then the GOP is for you. If you think we live in society in which individuals gain freedom of opportunity and access to experience supported by the links between the lives of all those 300 million — if you inhabit reality, that is — then we need to destroy the current GOP root and branch, now and for the forseeable future.
Put another way: we need to recall that John Cole didn’t build this blog…without the internet, without this community, without…you get the idea. ;)
And that’s enough meandering. I’ve just finished my next, post-Sweet book in this orgy of reading, Elaine Pagels, Revelations. Interesting, culminating in a very good explanation of what from my perspective I read as the reason Isaac Newton so excoriated what he saw as the theft of Christ’s church by Athanasius, his imperial patrons and his allies. Not sure what to grab next. No matter. What a joy it is to read and read and read…
Images: Jan Steen, The Sick Woman, before 1679.
Max Liebermann, The Canning Factory, 1879.
James E. Powell
I don’t recall an election in which two such strikingly opposite visions not just of the United States, but of human nature, so clearly set the stakes.
I readily recall such an election: 1980, the year Americans turned the wrong way. They are still lost. And it’s not just that they don’t seem to know how to get back on the right road. It’s more that they seem to have forgotten why they were on the road to begin with.
Villago Delenda Est
Frederic Taylor was an unrequitted ass.
I had to suffer under his sort of shit in the Army (in a fixed station communications unit, ironically, NEVER in a combat unit) and it drove me nuts.
MariedeGournay
I use ‘healthcare’ to teach my students what reify means. “Cut me off a slice of that healthcare, num, num.”
t jasper parnell
Peter D Norton, Fighting Traffic on the creation of automibile cities, which I am just beginning, seems very promising as both a cultural and technological history.
PurpleGirl
No comment right now on the content of the post, which is interesting.
However, I want to ask if that passage is scanned from the book or if you retyped it? There are number of errors and some punctuation marks which are quite wrong, especially an em-dash that should have been a simple hyphen. (I spent a number of years as a copyeditor and I can’t help seeing such things. I admit that sometimes my own proofreading isn’t as good as it should be.)
t jasper parnell
Speaking of F. Taylor slightly over 100 years ago he created the problem of un and underemployment through efficiency.
Tom Levenson
@PurpleGirl: Retyped. All errors mine. Will try to proofread, but running to play outdoors w. mah 12 y.o right now, which takes precedence.
jwb
@James E. Powell: The vast majority of presidential elections since 1960 have had this quality.
PurpleGirl
@Tom Levenson: Okay, go play with the 12 y.o. I was just hoping it wasn’t published with the errors. (I’m seeing such things in books lately and it horrifies me.)
gluon1
I liked the Sweet quotation very much but was wholly unsure where you were going with any of this until your very powerful description of the Republican view of ours as “a country best understood as an assemblage of 300 million individuals.” That really is a great way to summarize the whole of this debate. What Pierce describes as the quest for FREEDOM!!!1!! only works if you’re truly unaffected by the suffering of nameless others you’ll never meet. For those of us who do care, we’re willing to pay a bit more, with no expectation of physical return, for the important psychological peace that can come from no other source.
It also take me back to the most powerful speech of my lifetime, as far as I know: Mario Cuomo’s keynote address to the 1984 convention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQGKdD8OViQ
Raven
@Villago Delenda Est: Nobody like signal until they needed a dustoff or a fire mission.
Dave-EO
I like to ask people who aren’t sure who to vote for:
What do you think would happen – and how would you feel – if Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over the company you work for? Why, therefore, would you want him to take over the country you live in?
Raven
likes
Soonergrunt
The worst thing that ever happened to this country was the rise of the ‘business professional,’ that class of mostly men who studied “Management” at college and university. If there were ever a group of more poorly educated decision-makers produced by an economy anywhere in the world, I am unaware of it.
The very idea that one can learn some generic principles of management and then step into a role actually running an organization of people without experience in the mission, culture, organization, and personalities of that organization is an idea that persists to this day in business and academia but that has no basis in actual fact. I have never met a Business graduate who had any ‘business’ managing anything more complex than an office-supply store room. Well, those same people are the ones who wrecked the economy on Wall Street, and the same ones who blew two wars (anyone remember the disaster that was the Coalition Provisional Authority?) and blew up the federal debt?
It’s notable and not remotely coincidental that the vast majority of Business School graduates are raging Republicans. Neither discipline requires one to know anything about how the real world works, nor truly requires one to take responsibility for one’s actions or decisions. Other (lesser) people suffer for those.
wrb
Thinking back upon the years when noses went unmanaged you wonder how…
WereBear
Republicans: knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Oscar Wilde)
One overwhelming thing that creates our present mess is how so many take everything they have now for granted. Like public schools, libraries, food safety, even bridges; how many times does a Republican have to rip these things out of the social fabric before their voters realize they mean it?
Chris T.
They know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.
Davis X. Machina
All that is, can be bought, and sold. That which cannot be bought, or sold, is not.
It’s the new Prime Directive.
Soonergrunt
@wrb: But how would you pick one?
aimai
Great post, Tom, I look forward to reading the Sweet book. It reminds me of the fight I had with the emergency room doctors who took care of my husband. When they had to call and apologize for the various fall out of their horrible care they explained to me that they had done a “cost benefit analysis” and that their system should work. I said “Sure, but the costs are all born by the patient while the benefits accrue to the hospital system, so right there you are bound to have a difference of opinion on whether your cost benefit analysis means what you think it means.” The deskilling of the entire nursing force and the separation of the care of the patient into tiny taylorisms (a different nurse gives you the shot, a different one takes your temperature, still another is officially taking care of the person in the bed next to yours) means that the whole patient is no one’s business. They have even gotten rid of any notion of grand rounds or a meeting of the nurses–everyone is reduced to shift work and you pass off certain patients to certain nurses, not everyone on the ward at the same time.
aimai
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
were this a collaborative piece, and not one of spalding gray length and self-efflusion minus the wit and insight, i might suggest that you sell out individualism. by your ratchet, individualism is not only a pure gop trait, but you fail to define the vision of a bainesque america as anything else. i would suggest if anything you are appropriating the “because i said so” we commonly refer to as patriarchy when goring our neighbor’s ox. you claim that this is the collaborative spirit but absent is any evidence to suggest collaboration
Rex Everything
Excellent post indeed. Not too meta really. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm: Plato wrote about it. It’s pretty intuitive. Natural “inefficiencies” arise of necessity on every level, from the vagaries of the highest parliament (“it does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos”) down to the child who is made dull with all work and no play (and the GOP showed in the recent primaries their eagerness to put him to work).
Nutella
@Soonergrunt:
MBA = management by assholes
And I don’t mean that as a joke. Sooner’s right about the evil wrought be people who don’t know anything at all except ‘management’. Letting someone like that run a widget factory without knowing anything about widgets or a hospital without knowing anything about medicine is and has always been disastrous.
The thing is that the only thing a guy with a spreadsheet can think of to do is cut something out that workers are doing now. They are incapable of adding anything: Adding efficiency, or better products or services, or new products or services is so completely outside of their training and experience that they can’t even imagine it.
So all that can happen by adding a bunch of management school grads with spreadsheets to a business is to reduce that business. They only know how to subtract, not to add, so you are guaranteed to end up with fewer customers, products, employees, revenues.
Mike R.
I spent 35 years in manufacturing initially as a chemist, later as a supervisor / manager. Each piece of the workforce complemented another piece, some contributed more than others but those who were less productive allowed for more from the higher achievers. Of course as time went on and the McKinsey gang and other consultants had their way we were left with a workforce that was quite skilled but highly demotivated, frustrated by spending excessive time at menial tasks that they weren’t that good at with the end result being that average performance dropped. Yup, we were a leaner, smarter, organization…we’d shifted our paradigms, thought outside the box but in the end we were sort of mediocre. The quality and service our customers had come to expect was gone (this was considered an acceptable outcome by our company) and shortly so were they. And so we closed.
I think of that often because those people who didn’t measure up to our new higher standards had lost more than jobs; they had been cast out of society, for the most part, through no fault of their own, their contributions had been deemed inadequate and yet when they were excised from the group the business ultimately failed.
For a society to grow and prosper every individual needs to have a productive role that will fall along a wide range of abilities. Today’s conservatives have no place for those who don’t add “full value” and yet without them we will fail. It’s the difference between a “Personnel Department” and a “Human Resources Department”, the two are strikingly different.
divF
There is a fundamental lesson here, that in systems that provide services to human beings, excess capacity is essential. A colleague of mine, when confronted with pressure from OMB that federally-funded supercomputer facilities should show 95% utilization, replied tartly that you would not want to use public restrooms that had to meet such a requirement – both on the obvious grounds of personal comfort (you end up waiting in line for long periods), as well as for sanitary reasons (when do they get cleaned?). In fact, DoD does not have this requirement imposed on their centers: to get the best efficiency from their people, they have set the figure to be 70% utilization.
A second issue that the efficiency experts miss, specifically in health care, and especially in geriatrics, is the extent to which the strong variation in individual requirements leads to a need for excess capacity. The average time to see a patient in a routine visit may well be 20 min.; but the variance in this time is huge, with some complicated, frail, or cognitively impaired patients requiring twice that time. A doctor (Mrs. divF is a geriatrician) gets hit with three or four of those in a day’s clinic, and things can back up very quickly, leading to confusion and greater inefficiency. The story about Laguna Honda is a textbook case of this phenomenon.
Nutella
@Mike R.:
And splitting up the work allowed for more from the low achievers, too. If a McKinsey consultant recommends firing the cleaning staff because what they do is so easy the engineers could do it by just adding a little to their work day, not only have they lost productivity from the engineers who are doing less engineering but they’ve also made sure that the cleaning will be done badly. When cleaning is assigned to a cleaning staff who is trained to do it well and judged on how well it is done, it’s more likely that they’ll do a good job and be proud of doing a good job than somebody who’s stuck with doing it as an addon to what they see as their real job.
Davis X. Machina
Efficiency is not a bonum per se. It’s not a free-floating moral good. It’s instrumental.
‘Towards what end is this increased efficiency going to be directed?’ is the necessary question.
The answer often is, there isn’t an answer.
cckids
@gluon1:
Yes. Also reminds me of J.Kozol’s book “Savage Inequalities” re the differences in public schools depending on the income level of the neighborhood. He made a statement to the effect that, whether you think it is cruel & morally wrong, or just economically inefficient; a system of education that in effect “throws away” close to 25% of the kids it serves is not a system our country can sustain.
So many today on the right just think, “eh, its not my kids” and go on their merry way.
JaneE
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is another example of how some inefficiency (specifically less than 100% utilization of production equipment) actually is better for a manufacturing company. Easy read. Unfortunately, as a country we no longer seem to be able to agree on what the goal is. For healthcare or anything else.
cckids
@aimai:
This. Back when we were still going to the hospital, I couldn’t believe that their system was to give different patients to different nurses (if you were there multiple days). They never gave me a rationale for it, but if you had a complicated condition, like my son does, it was so trying for me and for the nurses to always be educating them.
IE, my son has a trach & is on a vent part-time. He was the first patient with the vent that the hospital tried putting into IMC rather than ICU (IMC = intermediate care). It was kind of a nightmare; I had to teach each nurse, each day, how to care for a trach, to a degree that was frightening. (no, you cannot use talc on a person with a trach, no, you don’t clean it by sticking a brush with hydrogen peroxide down it, etc) I really didn’t dare leave him after some of the things I saw them start to try. Most of the nurses told me they hadn’t had to take care of a patient with a trach since school, if then.
Mike G
@Davis X. Machina:
For example, toward paying six figures for a ‘CEO’ who rarely shows up because he’s running the Olympics for the benefit of his cronies.
Managers will lavish useless expenditures on themselves in the name of ‘necessity’ (yeah, you really need that golf resort ‘management retreat’ in Scottsdale every February) while penny-pinching down to the bone on the frontline staff.
Every “efficiency drive” coincidentally concludes that staff need to be paid less, and managers paid more. Ruthless efficiency for thee, but not for me.
mai naem
@cckids: I am amazed at how few after school educational programs are offered and the ones which are offered are not cheap. There’s athletic stuff but even athletic stuff can get quite expensive. It just blows my mind that this country doesn’t invest a substantial amount of funds into after school programs.
Katharsis
George Lakoff spoke about this. Conservative mentality avoids systemic solutions at all costs. At least publicly, you know: approved for the lessors. Everything has to be about direct individual interactions. Keep it simple, or so they would say.
This why I think that libertarians tend to side with the Right when it comes to the ballot box, no matter what they claim about civil liberties and mary jane. Social responsibility is anathema. I would say even more so for the libertarians than the Right. The Right at least exercises collective responsibility (in their way) via church, military, and rule books for the bedroom. Libertarians will tell you they hate that stuff.
Ceremet
@cckids: What a nightmare for you! I hope all came out well.
Jewish Steel
I studied Hildegard Von Bingen as an undergrad too.
NancyDarling
Apropos of nothing, you look much like I had imagined you based on your podcast voice and your written “stuff”, Tom. I had conjured a bit less gray hair for you though. (picture available at Amazon)
“Revelations” just got moved to the top of my stack.
JohnMcC
@aimai: Ms Aimai and Ms CCKIDS, I’m an RN. 32years into my career. The situation you describe from the Pt’s side, let me explain from the nurse’s side.
Got a call from the ER giving report on the cardiac Pt we were admitting to our CCU. ER Nurse says ‘we gave him a nitro for the chest pain.’ I asked ‘did the nitro relieve the pain?’ In an exasperated, frustrated voice, she says ‘I don’t know, I’M ONLY GIVING YOU REPORT!’
That has always seemed to me to be the best short version of how our health-care-system is seriously off the track. I could spend many hours giving longer versions of the same sort of event.
cckids
@Ceremet: As well as possible, thank you. He has outlived all estimates by over 15 years, and has become increasingly medically fragile. We made the decision 3 years ago to stop hospitalizing him & just treat him at home; essentially hospice, though they won’t take him due to the vent. He is much happier & has had less overall illness. So we just live day by day.
cckids
@JohnMcC: Yes, I’ve got several nurses in the family & they tell the same story. It has become mainly about the system, not the patient.
WereBear
That’s half the problem with American business. The other is the pernicious statement: “We’re not making enough profit.”
If something is only making a penny of profit: so what? It’s giving people jobs, contributing to the economy, stabilizing civilization… what more can you want? While it’s up and operating and not costing you anything, it has the potential to do better.
But now, something has to skyrocket; or it’s killed. And what we have is very few skyrockets, and a lot of dead bodies lying around.
Tokyokie
Way back when, my father was a civil engineer with an oil company. The engineers would work on complicated capital projects that had several moving parts, such that if a change were to be made in one place, it would affect another part of the project. Each engineer would calculate how a proposed change would affect his portion of the project — this was back before computers could do that — then the engineers would meet and discuss the results they’d reached and do more fine-tuning until they determined the best way to proceed.
At some point, the company brought in a group of so-called efficiency experts to analyze operations in my father’s department. These “experts” judged the work of the draftsmen who drew up the plans the engineers conceived to be highly efficient, because they produced a lot of tangible work product. And the work of my father and his civil-engineering colleagues was judged to be inefficient because they produced so little tangible work product. Never mind that the work of the draftsmen was only costing the company hundreds of dollars and the work of the engineers was preliminary to the company making literally millions of dollars in capital expenditures, the engineers were inefficient, and several of them were laid off.
Most of those let go wound up finding work with engineering consulting firms. And, of course, the company quickly figured out it still needed their input and wound up reacquiring their services for double the rate it had been paying them when they were on the payroll.
mainmati
@WereBear: Yes, that’s the main problem, especially with the low-information voter and right-leaning Indies. I am convinced that true Goopers are so ignorant and prejudiced as to be unconvinceable until the destruction commences after which it is too late.
WereBear
@mainmati: Did you see this week’s comments about how the Obama campaign focus grouped the Ryan plan, and once it was explained, voters refused to believe it?
They think it’s literally inconceivable that a major political party would move to destroy Medicare. And they are right; they cannot conceive it.
mainmati
Taylorism was responsible for the assembly line and then was extended via “management consultants” like McKinsey and similar to organizational management. The key here is, in fact, the fee structure. The more “savings” made the higher the fee. Bain just combined this structure with LBO and piling debt on to the victim companies. The whole thing was structured to be a huge money generating vehicle rather than being primarily a thoughtful, careful way to approach struggling companies, which is why Mittens called it “the golden goose”. He gets elected and the Congress goes red, this country is finished.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
If something is only making a penny of profit: so what? It’s giving people jobs, contributing to the economy, stabilizing civilization… what more can you want? While it’s up and operating and not costing you anything, it has the potential to do better.
Opportunity cost of capital – and that’s not just a business weasel-word. All resources are limited; resources should be invested where they give the BEST return, not just ANY return.
To give an example, in dealing with prioritising road safety projects, you should probably give priority to those saving lives at the cheapest cost per life. Some projects may save lives but are not worth the cost of implementation given alternatives.
The problem here, of course, is that American-style capitalism is all about capturing the best return for the owner-class regardless of the costs to others or total returns.
WereBear
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: I have to disagree: the business bringing in a penny is already there. The employees are already there.
Even stopping it cold costs money. Closing it loses a penny. I understand your point; I just don’t think it applies with something that is revenue producing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
The answer of course, is more profit for the stockholders and more hookers and blow for the executives. Not necessarily in that order.
Summer
This was a great post. Thank you.
Gretchen
@Dave-EO: Good one. I’ll be using that. All we workers know the fear of new management.
PanurgeATL
@jwb:
Well, obviously not ’64 or ’76. Nixon was elected in ’68 on A Secret Plan To End The War, and was re-elected in ’72 on the heels of his admission that “we are all Keynesians now”. 1980 was plainly something different–as someone else pointed out (I think on this site), the USA wanted Jimmy Carter to give them a reason to re-elect him, but he just wouldn’t give them one. And then Reagan seemed so much more likable than we expected him to be, and there was this big batch of late-Boomer conservative voters who’d come up in the ’70s thinking they were Boldly Bucking the DFH Trend when they were really just foot-soldiers in a counter-revolution. By ’84, everything seemed to be working out–at least for a majority.
Foregone Conclusion
On the subject of management consultancy,
I am a recent graduate from a quite prestigious European university. A lot of my fellow graduates are going into prestigious professions – banking, law, accountancy, PR, and so on – but the most popular at the moment is in fact management consultancy, possibly because it requires less study than law, less attention to detail than accountancy, doesn’t have as long hours as banking, but still pays quite well (around the $60-80k bracket for starting salary). I have to say that I find it frightening that so many of my cohort, who have absolutely no other experience of the working world other than perhaps a summer’s work experience (which in all likelihood was at a management consultancy), have such power over the fate of individual workers, and for that matter the long term prospects of whichever company they’ve been invited into.
The common explanation of why people want to become management consultants is the variety in terms of the work. This is is, in fact, even more terrifying – these 20somethings not only pretend that they understand an individual business they’ve done a few visits to better than people who’ve worked their all their lives but that they can gain, in a few months, an intimate knowledge of (say) the pharmaceutical industry. And, even worse, when I gently suggest that perhaps they might want to take their awesome skills of foresight into the public sector, they dismiss this (for reasons which have nothing to do with the $30k difference in salary of course), and say that they can be put on secondment to some part of government during their careers – telling the government how to ‘improve’ their operations by firing more people while taking fat salaries at public expense.
I am convinced that, even more that our supremely fucked up banking system, management consultancy is the most pernicious business of our times. Its focus is, precisely because of the way that incentives are structured, is always on cutting costs, i.e. personnel. Who ever heard of a management consultancy report which said they should hire more people (except, of course, for more management consultants or senior management)? More than that, it encourages a completely bogus ideology, which is that the traditional corporate unit is flabby and weak and needs saving by well-educated, well-spoken financial elites, and that workers are all potential burdens, rather than assets.