Saturday 2 January 2010

Weak and shit

A thought occurs to me about the expenses scandal:

From a lecture about the economics of crack-cocaine dealing as revealed by talking to the crime-lords during the American Crack-Wars (at about 20:30):

One thing we observed in the data is that it looked like [...] the gang leader always got paid [...] — no matter how bad it was economically he always got himself paid — so we had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that, but then we asked the gang [leader]: "why is it you always get paid, and your workers don't always get payed"; and his response is: "you got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you [as] weak and shit.". [...] And I thought about it, and I said: "CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses even when companies are losing a lot of money, and it never really occurred to economists that this idea of 'weak and shit' could be important, but maybe 'weak and shit' is an important hypothesis?".


Maybe it is: the expenses scandal — along with bank CEOs giving themselves million-pound bonuses — came at a time when the economy, the banking system, and the Labour Party were weak. Nothing, really, happened to any of them — a few MPs stepped down, there were some apologies, and allegedly there's going to have to be some money paid back — but not what you'd expect for gross embezzlement: no-one got fired, impeached, or imprisoned, and Gordon Brown and the Labour Party are still in charge.

Maybe they didn't want to appear 'weak and shit', so they gave us a demonstration that they are still strong enough to take the piss and, at worst, suffer only minor repercussions, to stop us niggers going after their jobs, you dig?

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