Originally Posted by roachboy

first off, it's fine to disagree. geez: most of the reason i put things here is that it's a space for trying to work things out on the fly.
and the "big words" are mostly shorthand--i write this things pretty quickly and it's just the terminology i think in that let's me say things directly. that's all--everyone has a shorthand. this is the one i use.

anyway, what i think the article--not so much the summary from the ny times--points to are several intertwined problems.
one is a version of what cyn said above. in my shorthand, i referred to the same thing as bounded rationality. what this means is that bureaucratic organizations--and a corporation of any size is one--generate internal cultures ("norms") that discourage critical thinking and action--this work through hierarchy, through job definitions, through internal or informal censorship etc. one thing this results in is that a corporation can undertake a sequence of actions that are entirely insane from an external viewpoint and generate consent internally for it as part of it's normal operations. this explains, in general terms, how it might be possible for a bank to move into derivatives, skimming off immediate returns, knowing (if anyone thought about it) that this trade was setting up a wall of problems and moving the bank at high speed toward it. if the notion of "enlightened self-interest" and "rational actor" theory central to market ideology held, this type of action--which is suicidal institutionally--would be excluded up front. the explanation the article offers is that the wall of debt problems that playing in derivatives necessarily created was rationalized away--the phrase for it is that it was "treated as though it were someone else's problem."

the article (and summary) claim that this "someone else" was the state, but i'm not convinced that this was the case--i think it was someone else's problem in an abstract sense, just something no-one particularly thought about--because of the emphasis on immediate profits, the relation of that to salary structures, professional advancement, etc.

one outcome of this is to see in corporations not rational actors but bureaucracies capable of radical compartmentalization such that entirely nutty actions can be made to seem normal--which means that either you radically rethink organization--or you hedge them round with regulation.

of the two, the former is probably the way to go really, but it's unlikely, particularly not now. too much inertia, too much ideological horseshit. so the latter.

the problem with that is there's little, if anything, the average joe can do.
with the former, there's alot that can be done with thinking about and experimenting with different types of organization of businesses--but that'd take time, require work, the latitude to fuck up, etc.

there's more, but i have stuff i have to do, so maybe later.

Originally Posted by roachboy

uh---i didn't praise warren buffet. i just used him as an example of the few individuals who might operate in a financial context comparable with that of a corporation. that's it. and if you read the rest of the sentences i wrote, you'll find that i think buffet is kind of a menace.