The computerisation since the late 1990's has been fundamentally different. The huge SAP implementations I was involved in then completely globalised business processes throughout global businesses. Thus there is one procurement process for procuring everything from paper clips to power stations anywhere in the world. One supplier file. One processes for approving purchases. One process for approving new suppliers. ALL pre-existing paper and computer purchasing processes are replaced. There is no need for local procurement managers or system administrators in local markets. A purchasing manager in HQ can control ALL purchases. We reduced our supplier file in one market from 11,000 suppliers to 3,000 globally.
Multiply this for every business process from finance to production, to logistics, to sales, to customer management, to marketing, to business intelligence, to product innovation and design. Local in market managerial staffs are almost not required for many business functions. A global function controls all these activities and has direct access to all the data available to the organisation to faciliate decision making. We are talking 1,000's of redundencies amongst managerial and professional staff, never mind production line, clerical or admin staff.
University departments are tiny admin units by comparison. The complexity of their business processes - lecturing, producing research, accessing funding for research, monitoring student performance - are almost trivial and very small scale by comparison. Perhaps if you had one global department teaching economics to millions of students worldwide in multiple locations in most countries in the world you might have a comparable organisation or computerisation project. You would have one syllabus, one exam process, one list of acceptable approaches to the subject, one set of lecture notes, one system for monitoring students etc... .please don't give THEM any ideas! notes from no w here
Perhaps if you had one global department teaching economics to millions of students worldwide in multiple locations in most countries in the world you might have a comparable organisation or computerisation project. You would have one syllabus, one exam process, one list of acceptable approaches to the subject, one set of lecture notes, one system for monitoring students etc... .please don't give THEM any ideas!
Um, I'm afraid this may be where we are heading with online education already . . . Sure, there will remain the Harvard boutiques for the fortunate few and a small number of brilliant students every year, but everyone else will get their degrees from their local branch of "Bain" university easily accessed through the facebook ad on their desktop at home, from "instructors" making minimum wage, "course designers" making a little more, "deans" whipping everyone into shape, keeping the gravy train running on time for the "vice presidents," "chancellors," who will be taking home their HUGE profits, er "salaries." Outsource the "library" to Google books, and the "tutoring" to 24/7 hotline operation in Bangalore (or whereever), and you've pretty much covered everything. No need to keep the bathrooms clean or the lawns mowed. You could even keep a virtual campus center or quad where students could gather electronically under the watchful eye of management. In case of radical ideas or rebelliousness, students could be locked out at any time. Same goes for the instructors. Meanwhile, the Olde Time Professors will be hanging out behind the shrubs, should anyone care . . .
annotated Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
students but knowledge capitalists in training.
i see them as greyhound whippets being trained for the track, where their trainers will bet on them...
...or money-making machines, shiny, glossy, active info-bank-ATM's, geared to unquestioningly feed the profits from their labour 'upstairs', while their own doubts about the process are rendered silent under a barrage of tantalising carrot-images, winning the lottery, 'making it big', philippe patek watches, the sailing channel, celebrity-obsession and the like.
consumer coma, in the sunset flare of a passing era. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
"the sailing channel" . . . help . . .
"tantalising carrot-images" . . . <keels over>
and, "the sunset flare of a passing era" is just too timely for words today . . . farewell Michael Jackson, icon of an age and true genius
But that is precisely my point: The outrageous CEO power grabs began a full decade before the electronic automation you mention. Almost all the faults in corporate culture that we bemoan today were already present during the Savings and Loan crisis. So they are clearly antecedent to the technical revolution at the heart of your experience.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Interests in preserving structural relationships between (actual) people prevents deep IT penetration of FIN and COMMOD sectors. Asymetrical market knowledge (and adverse selection) is a feature not a bug. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
enron was the smoke coming out of the financial engine, now bits are falling off by the mile and the day... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'll also note that this has coincided with the European institutions turning from French-speaking and French-inspired to English-speaking and English-inspired, because of the arrival of the Scandinavian countries, the replacement of fundamentally pro-European Mitterrand by euro-skeptic Chirac, in addition to overall trends. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
the real, massive increases in CEO pay mainly happened in two phases: in the dotcom bullrun of the late 90s, and in the more recent Bush years.
and this to show that most of the increase in incomes have come in the form of higher wages rather than in the form of capital gains:
Wage increases are associated with the managerial class, ofcourse. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
So it's not just about the dot-com starting in the 1990's as you claim. A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds; a man of deeds and not of words is like a garden full of turds — Anonymous
After that, the smash-and-grab was on, and the CEO class never looked back.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8010445.html
and here is a link to some document related to the FDIC investigation a decade later which mentions his base pay and bonuses in 1987 adding up to over $2million. I can't remember what eventually happened to Baldini, but he got into some trouble after the bank/mortgage company failed. It was an 80s thing.
http://www.qui-tam.net/USga1121.htm
In 1987, Jim Baldini, the president of Comfed mortgage made over 2 million dollars. Less than $400,000 was salary; the rest was "bonus." As I recall at the time, it was shocking to think that anyone could possibly "earn" that much money in one year.
Was poor performance punished before the 80ies? Was there too powerful countervailing forces (and how did they decline)? Was there a fear of a workers revolution? A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
IT has also had the effect of making drive-by trading possible. It also meant that share prices could be monitored minute by minute, which has an obvious short-term influence.
Previously share dealing was a more leisurely affair, and there wasn't such an obsessive interest in talking up prices with bullshit - or reorienting towards a growth maximising corporate performance landscape, if you prefer.
It's an equilibrium, of sorts: If the norm is that executives have long tenures, it becomes hard to get a slot, so a short-termist rape-and-run executive will hit a brick wall because he'll have a hard time getting new positions when he runs from the company he looted. Not because he'll have a problem being accepted into a new slot (he'll still be hired by his golfing buddies, after all) but because there are much fewer vacancies. This pressure to do a proper job while you are in the business will naturally tend to promote a long-term outlook that will in turn make it valuable to retain the executives over the long term.
On the other hand, you can get a new equilibrium in which the CEO can expect only a short tenure - in which case asset stripping becomes much more attractive as a strategy relative to real work, because the guy who benefits from his work will be the next CEO. At the same time, rape-and-run becomes more viable because there is a greater CEO turnover (so there will, at any given time, be more open slots when he has to run from the crashing company into a new top job). Obviously, this further reinforces the culture of short CEO tenures, which makes long term vision increasingly precarious.
It's entirely possible (but I won't claim to have evidence for it) that corporate culture can jump between these two states given the right (wrong?) external shocks. The Raygun Revolt may have been one such shock.
And once it started it amassed power in the hands of a few who could finance people who promoted its spread. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
What I'd like to do is read through the diary and comment thread in one sitting and synthesise the suggestions into a single reasonably coherent explanation (or, if that is impossible, at least make it clear which models are being proposed).
