"more than usually intelligent sales guy" - the fact that some of the bozos I've worked with (fellow ex-equity researcher here) got very very wealthy doing equity sales never fails to astonish/dismay
About 50% through The Unaccountability Machine (with a detour to read Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries--great rec). Your book does a very impressive job breaking down the concepts for those of us who don't spend a lot of time thinking about management systems and economics, and is helping me think about how the 1970's and later turn to deregulated markets with Reagan and Thatcher connects up with the shrinking of political possibility that is encapsulated by the 1973 Chile coup. What was it that made the Cold Warriors decide to fight their battle for capitalism and the market rather than for democracy, which would objectively seem a more important and attractive cause, and get to the point of seeing democracy as a threat if it didn't conform to their economic ideas? The chapters explaining what economic modeling shows and what it leaves out, and how a mental leap was made from the market being the most efficient and effective way to convey economic information to a dogmatic idea of the market being always *right* in its societal impacts, illuminated some of how this happened ideologically for me.
In a way, free market ideology has served as an accountability sink for political policymakers, or at least something they can blame for the decisions they aren't making. A limit there is that dissatisfied people can't yell at abstract economic ideas the way they can at a customer service rep... Have looked ahead a bit and the points you make about current right-wing "populism" as a distress signal rather than a fix make a lot of sense.
The same phenomenon occurs with managers in the Premier League. Getting the Manager of the Month award is seen as a curse for many teams because they soon regress to the mean.
"more than usually intelligent sales guy" - the fact that some of the bozos I've worked with (fellow ex-equity researcher here) got very very wealthy doing equity sales never fails to astonish/dismay
About 50% through The Unaccountability Machine (with a detour to read Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries--great rec). Your book does a very impressive job breaking down the concepts for those of us who don't spend a lot of time thinking about management systems and economics, and is helping me think about how the 1970's and later turn to deregulated markets with Reagan and Thatcher connects up with the shrinking of political possibility that is encapsulated by the 1973 Chile coup. What was it that made the Cold Warriors decide to fight their battle for capitalism and the market rather than for democracy, which would objectively seem a more important and attractive cause, and get to the point of seeing democracy as a threat if it didn't conform to their economic ideas? The chapters explaining what economic modeling shows and what it leaves out, and how a mental leap was made from the market being the most efficient and effective way to convey economic information to a dogmatic idea of the market being always *right* in its societal impacts, illuminated some of how this happened ideologically for me.
In a way, free market ideology has served as an accountability sink for political policymakers, or at least something they can blame for the decisions they aren't making. A limit there is that dissatisfied people can't yell at abstract economic ideas the way they can at a customer service rep... Have looked ahead a bit and the points you make about current right-wing "populism" as a distress signal rather than a fix make a lot of sense.
The same phenomenon occurs with managers in the Premier League. Getting the Manager of the Month award is seen as a curse for many teams because they soon regress to the mean.