The Power of Stupid.

I really do want the bulk of what I put here to be original, but I came across this today on the Dilbert blog, and just could not help but post it. It reminds me of just so, sooo many things that I saw while in Corporate America. I will have to note some of my own in the future:

A reader sent this story about his workplace.

-------------“A theme from many of your previous comics came true to life for us today. Quality in the workplace.Yesterday, a pointy-haired boss decided our meeting room needed nice motivational pictures on the wall. Twelve by eight inch, wooden frame, 1940s-style motivational tools (think 'Rosie the Riveter' in artwork, color and font). So an assistant was ordered to procure such things.The first mistake was where the artwork was obtained from. Rather than pay $15 per picture for the real thing, it was decided to take the small JPEG images of what we wanted from a website that sold these trinkets. Cheap picture frames were bought (from a dollar store, by the look of things).When the images were enlarged to fit into the 12 by 8 frames, the pixelation was terrible. In itself, this was funny. A picture that celebrates the idea of quality in the workplace looked cheap, and knowing it was a stolen image lessens the impact of the message slightly.”-------------

This story made me think about one of the great wonders of capitalism: It is driven by morons who are circling the drain, and yet. . . it works!

Think about all the people working and earning paychecks from companies that will ultimately fail. It’s a lot of people. But until those companies fail, the employees are getting paid, buying goods, and contributing to the economy. After the failure, those employees hop over to another sinking ship, and so on.

Within successful companies, a huge portion of resources are dedicated to projects and products that will ultimately fail. But in the meantime, everyone is getting paid and propping up the economy.

I once worked in a bank, making loans to small business start-ups. Our rule of thumb was that 90% of new businesses fail. The exceptions were franchisees and pizza places. But we saw no shortage of people willing to mortgage their homes to start their own sporting good stores and boutique dress shops, despite the 90% chance of failure. Without clueless optimists, the economy would grind to a halt. My own career has been a long string of failures and a few notable successes.

I understand the math of capitalism, and how the few successes are so large they pay for all the failures and then some. But at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

In the rest of the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business...