(Corporate) Purposelessness

February 25, 2019 6:14 AM

The entire economy is Fyre Festival - "Unlike the bullshit jobs of the past (which focused on over-defining roles in a bid to compete on status rather than pay, or to justify the roles in terms of social importance and purpose), the relatively new phenomenon of mystic jobs is about something else. These jobs do have purpose: they disguise (according to the column's admittedly hugely generalised hypothesis) the lack of social value associated with the corporations and start-ups they're affiliated to, while justifying their expansionist empire-building agendas."

The sort of companies that entertain mystics are the sort that want to accumulate power and popularity for their own sake -- rather than in exchange for services or products that add to the wealth of society. They are in that sense extractive, not productive. If real services or products are offered they are zero sum in nature (for everyone who benefits, an equal and opposite number of people are disadvantaged).

The corporate strategies deployed hence resemble a type of land grab conducted via psychological warfare rather than traditional warfare. The objective as ever is transferring yield-generating resources from one group of beneficiaries to another, at the cost of the former.

Critical thinking that challenges the rise of executives who normalise or celebrate such practices (or the flawed data metrics that justify them) is understandably a threat to such business models. These models only work if the power-grabbing is presented as a force for good that will eventually enable a larger-than-life utopia to come forth in some way. Hence the importance of the influencers and the thought leaders: they're enablers.

-Damn, it feels good to be a white-collar worker
-Office Space turns 20: How the film changed the way we work
-Follow the Path of Least Resistance: An Oral History of 'Office Space'
-The oral history of Office Space: Behind the scenes of the cult classic

Why wordcrime has destroyed the economy

Giving some people more nice things by taking them away from other people has become analogous with economic activity. But it is not. It is a false economy which depends on convincing the majority of people -- through clever marketing and newspeak -- that going without the sort of things previous generations took for granted (houses, holidays, police forces, job security, gardens, pensions, healthcare) is edgy, progressive and cool. All the more so if you get to eat lots of avocado on toast in substitution.

And it depends on convincing everyone that the mystic jobs and mystic corporates which enable it all are desirable, meaningful and authentic in and of themselves.

In a true growing economy we experience more output with the same input and in a contracting economy we experience less output (or slowing output) with the same input.

The phenomenon of the modern economic crisis, however, consists of the world abruptly discovering that the surpluses we thought we had -- and in many cases pre-emptively consumed -- don't really exist. And the reason they don't exist is because the new modes of industry or technology we deployed (and convinced ourselves were economic) were in fact not economic after all.

But rather than learning from these mistakes and shifting gears towards more economic organisation, our collective trance-like response is usually to double up on the false economies in hand.

And so we find ourselves funnelling more money into business models that transfer wealth from one sector of society to another, rather than those that create economies. And we glamorise and celebrate rent-seeking and pyramidal enterprises that focus on parting the gullible from their money, rather than calling them out.

And that, dare we say it, is the hallmark of the digital economy in particular.

-California leads the way on data regulation
-California wants Silicon Valley to pay you a data dividend
-California's governor wants to pay residents a data dividend
-Your data is worth billions. Can Newsom make tech giants like Facebook and Google pay up?

also btw...

• When does one of the central ideas in economics work? - "The concept of equilibrium is one of the most central ideas in economics. It is one of the core assumptions in the vast majority of economic models, including models used by policymakers on issues ranging from monetary policy to climate change, trade policy and the minimum wage. But is it a good assumption? In a forthcoming Science Advances paper, Marco Pangallo, Torsten Heinrich and Doyne Farmer investigate this question in the simple framework of games, and show that when the game gets complicated this assumption is problematic."
• Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers - "When everything is quantified, power accrues to whoever is keeping score."
• Framing Crashed - "The basic insight of the Frankfurt school legal theorist – that there is no natural harmony between developed capitalism and legal, political and social order; that modern capitalism is a fundamentally disruptive force that constantly challenges the rule of law as such – could hardly be more germane today."
• Communiqué from an Absent Future - "If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal."
• The Spiritual Case for Socialism - "He shares the liberal conviction that people have to determine the meaning of their lives by individual reckoning. But he contends that a liberal who fully understood the meaning of this commitment would become a socialist. This is because the market economy dictates answers to the most important question—what is our time worth?"
• Spirit of revolt - "There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the constitution of the State, of the laws of social equilibrium, of the political and economic interrelations of citizens, can hold out no longer against the implacable criticism which is daily undermining them whenever occasion arises, — in drawing room as in cabaret, in the writings of philosophers as in daily conversation. Political, economic, and social institutions are crumbling; the social structure, having become uninhabitable, is hindering, even preventing the development of the seeds which are being propagated within its damaged walls and being brought forth around them. The need for a new life becomes apparent."
• a tao of (de)centralization - "Virtuous social systems marble together centralized and decentralized elements, paradoxically charging centralized components with the task and responsibility of sustaining the decentralization that otherwise would decay. 'Decentralization' is not an answer, not a solution to any problem in itself, but a challenging question of 'how?'"

posted by kliuless (42 comments total)

We are Golgafrinchans on Ark "B".
posted by at by at 6:44 AM on February 25, 2019 [15 favorites]

I just read the Bullshit Jobs book and he even mentions the whole telephone sanitizing thing there.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:32 AM on February 25, 2019

"Chief Joy Officer" and the like are the white-collar equivalent of "Sandwich Artist."
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:55 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think the difference is that a sandwich artist or a barista is still engaged in a straightforward productive activity in a way that a 'mystical' job with no well-defined duties like a "chief joy officer" is not.
posted by Pyry at 8:09 AM on February 25, 2019 [14 favorites]

"When everything is quantified, power accrues to whoever is keeping score."

And the corollary is that whatever you measure is what you will get more of -- so be careful when selecting your metrics!

Recently my new boss said that his boss wants us to select our own Key Performance Indicators and then track them monthly. I replied that we have tons of numbers around and that I can count a lot of things, but what business does Boss want us to be in, and what work does he want us to be doing? Because whatever we measure will start to dominate our activity, like a plant growing toward the sunlight.

We're going to think about it and regroup.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:33 AM on February 25, 2019 [18 favorites]

The "mystic jobs" link is broken. It looks like the leading "h" of "http" was dropped, but even putting that back in, it still 404s for me.

And I'd like more examples of these jobs and associated companies; the lead article seems long on theory but short on examples. 44 people touting "chief joy officer" on LinkedIn seems a bit thin to make sweeping generalizations about the direction of the economy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:05 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

chief joy officer
I don't get why 'chief joy officer' is mystic or purposeless. It's about time Sandra in accounting (or is it Renae, the boss' secretary - oh wait she already has a unique job title -administrative assistant) got a job title befitting of organizing three office parties a year in her spare time.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:19 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Chief joy officer is perhaps not the best example compared to "futurologist", where a corporation having one on retainer is not so different from employing a court mage to read the omens and portents.
posted by Pyry at 9:26 AM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

Ark"B"? We are all on Ark "D".
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:36 AM on February 25, 2019 [6 favorites]

Chief joy officer is perhaps not the best example compared to "futurologist", where a corporation having one on retainer is not so different from employing a court mage to read the omens and portents.

Maybe, but we've had a quite a few posts here about entire industries shrinking and or disappearing, so someone on retainer to explain to upper mgmt, that no matter how well your teams design their products or how much you cost cut, that your industry is going away and that you should maybe consider to pivot - well I get it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:55 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Consultant
posted by Damienmce at 9:59 AM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

Perhaps what some of these companies need are anthropologists, social workers, and librarians.
posted by idiopath at 10:54 AM on February 25, 2019 [14 favorites]

..."futurologist", where a corporation having one on retainer is not so different from employing a court mage to read the omens and portents.

Except when you have a professional field of futures and forecasting, backed up by decades of research.
posted by doctornemo at 11:00 AM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm still wincing about all the folks who had "ninja" in their job title a few years ago...
posted by PhineasGage at 11:22 AM on February 25, 2019 [8 favorites]

One thing I suspect we'll see, once the capitalist grind of demanding every increasing profits over last quarter's profits has cut every other department to the bone, is a massive cut in basically useless management.

For a while there's been what I've always assumed was a sort of class solidarity between upper management and middle management. They'll cut the number of peons to the bone, and then demand those peons work ever more hours for the same pay to make up for their lost co-workers, but largely middle management and it's assorted hangers on stays intact unless an entire operation or division is shut down.

Once there's no more possibility of cutting labor to increase this quarter's profits by enough over last quarter's the executive types will turn on the lower management types. They won't cut their own jobs of course, nor any of the hangers on they like to decorate their corner of the office with, but they'll start realizing that you can cut most middle management positions, tell a few peons that they're "supervisors" (with no real power, and certainly no wage increase) and have them start meeting with the tiny handful of middle managers you retain to do the filthy work of actually talking to the peons like they were people.

Crap like "joy officer" is the sort of thing an origination heavy with middle managers each trying to carve out their own fief accumulates. It's the primate part of our brain telling us that important people have lots of other people waiting on them and serving them. So middle management needs its joy officers and the like to reassure itself that it matters.

But ultimately they don't matter to the real bosses and the instant the C level types realize they can squeeze even more profits out of the company by firing most of middle management and its retinue of parasites they'll do it in a heartbeat.

Personally I've got nothing against the Joy Officers of the world. Being a parasite leeching a few more bucks out of the bloated corporate AI that rule the world seems like as good an occupation as any other. Maybe we can encumber them with so many bullshit jobs that they collapse and we can build something worthwhile from the wreckage.
posted by sotonohito at 11:38 AM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

I remember a dotcom job I had ages ago that let us write our own job titles, so myself and the couple of buddies that worked on the same thing became officially branded as 'Audio Technomancers'. To be fair, we were like 17 years old at the time.
posted by FatherDagon at 11:50 AM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

sotonohito: For a while there's been what I've always assumed was a sort of class solidarity between upper management and middle management.

I noticed (or though I noticed) a different pattern: As women became more common in middle management positions over the last couple of decades, middle management became a target of cost-cutting concern and ridicule in the business press, while heroic CEOs (mostly men) were lauded. Middle management was fat; CEOs were visionary.

The most ridiculous extent of this that I remember was a study quoted in The Economist or somewhere like that which quantified the importance of Napoleon's generalship in the battle record of his armies, with some pontificating (and maybe some additional quoted studies) about how important it was to have a great CEO.
posted by clawsoon at 12:10 PM on February 25, 2019 [7 favorites]

PhineasGage: I'm still wincing about all the folks who had "ninja" in their job title a few years ago...

The real ninjas with their black pajamas and stealthy ways....as opposed to the current crop of Work From Home types who wear pajamas all day but are hardly stealthy at all.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:00 PM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

One thing I suspect we'll see, once the capitalist grind of demanding every increasing profits over last quarter's profits has cut every other department to the bone, is a massive cut in basically useless management.

It's here. My friend is a manger at [giant famous old company you're heard of that's been purchased/merged a couple time in the past ten years but component names are all familiar] and in the past couple years they had [giant a-hole consultancy] come in and espouse this theory:

- You should only have X managers, directors, VP and other execs per billion$ revenue. Regardless of industry.

They literally had a number not tied to their industry. Alas the leadership bought into it and the carnage began. Lots of leadership, management, etc was tossed overboard. I mean, lots. One Sr VP that had been in IT for ages went from 18 VP and Sr Dir to five, and he only got to name one of them. Everyone else was free to interview for one of the four spots.

No happy ending here, other than my buddy still having a job I guess. It's madness.
posted by Cris E at 1:06 PM on February 25, 2019 [6 favorites]

...the current crop of Work From Home types who wear pajamas all day but are hardly stealthy at all.

They are real ninjas, just like Chris Farley (Beverly Hills Ninja) and Jack Black (Kung Fu Panda). OK, gimme a minute...
posted by Cris E at 1:09 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oh, like this dude [SLYT]?
posted by wenestvedt at 1:14 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm still wincing about all the folks who had "ninja" in their job title a few years ago

"Oh so you're . . . an assassin?"

"No man, like I ninja'd that codebase."

"So you, like, snuck up on it under the cover of night and poisoned its tea, then upon discovery left a monkey dressed as yourself behind you so your enemies would believe you had shapeshifting abilities?"

"No, like, I'm just a super-good coder."

"Huh. No, we need someone killed. Next!"
posted by aspersioncast at 1:19 PM on February 25, 2019 [11 favorites]

Every time I hear someone opine how X thing should be run more like a business I always try to get them to explain in as simple terms as possible how a "business" isn't inherently the least efficient way to organize something, since it's predicated on the idea of turning a profit. No takers so far.

I've even taken basic econ - you could probably use words of more than two syllables.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:24 PM on February 25, 2019 [9 favorites]

how a "business" isn't inherently the least efficient way to organize something, since it's predicated on the idea of turning a profit. No takers so far.
Business can be more efficient if you you let the business control 2 of 3 factors -market, budget, or tiered marketing. If you expect a business to reach every single customer the way a government agency must without exclusions or differential price points, then of course you are correct they can't.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:30 PM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Once there's no more possibility of cutting labor to increase this quarter's profits by enough over last quarter's the executive types will turn on the lower management types.

Oh, this happens periodically. It's a cyclic thing, like most everything in business. The buzzword you're looking for is "flat organization". As in, "oh, we don't have middle managers, we're a flat organization".

The counterargument is that flat organizations don't scale well, and of course you want to scale, right? Gotta scale up, gotta be web scale! Global scale! Can't get fuck-you money if you don't scale!

Even the most sociopathic CEOs, if they're remotely successful, have a sort of instinctive knowledge that money and power come from having employees. If they didn't have employees, then they'd be just stuck selling their labor like any other prole chump. But they don't really want to deal with a shitload of employees and their grubby little personal problems; they want to deal in ideas and breathe the cool rarefied air of high-level corporate strategy. And so, eventually, they reinvent middle management.

Everything old is new again, especially in business.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:48 PM on February 25, 2019 [7 favorites]

"Chief Joy Officer" and the like are the white-collar equivalent of "Sandwich Artist."

Yep. The difference being, I would be glad to have a professional business transaction with a Sandwich Artist, because I would know what I was getting.

A professional business transaction with a Chief Joy Officer could result in anything. What are the KPIs? How do we measure "joy"? Do I come back to my desk and find that I now have a beanbag instead of a chair, or my desk is a beanbag, and all my stuff is beanbags? Compulsory table tennis afternoons? Laughter therapy, where we all get together and force ourselves to laugh and laugh until we are all sick into a big bucket, the Laughter Bucket? Non-alcoholic jelly shots off the $200,000 boardroom table? Paintball skirmish? Purge Night? Pegging? Do I literally need to put "pegging" in my annual performance agreement?
posted by turbid dahlia at 1:53 PM on February 25, 2019 [12 favorites]

I went looking for Chief Joy Officers, and found that - surprise - the trend was inspired by a book:

Garnett: In the Epilogue, you talk about the positive organization and how important being positive is. What habits are you doing right now to ensure you’re always more positive than negative, and how do you monitor this with your organization?

Sheridan: A diligent workout routine three mornings a week, get a good night’s sleep and avoid negative sources (people, Facebook and local TV news shows) are some of the things I do. For the team at large we work together (pairing) in our wide open space, and you can hear the noise and energy of work. We laugh a lot. We have dogs and babies. We celebrate small victories by shouting out, “Hey, Menlo!” and reporting the good news. Our work management systems allow our team to get meaningful things done each day. We avoid traditional meetings.

The author runs a software company.
posted by clawsoon at 2:12 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: Do I literally need to put "pegging" in my annual performance agreement?
posted by aspersioncast at 2:58 PM on February 25, 2019 [7 favorites]

It was then that we decided the Joy Officer was overwhelmed with work, so we established the Joy Division to carry out our mystic ambitions.
posted by hexaflexagon at 7:45 PM on February 25, 2019 [13 favorites]

You should only have X managers, directors, VP and other execs per billion$ revenue. Regardless of industry.

Truly, MBA's are the source of 97.63% of all Human Misery!
posted by monotreme at 8:37 PM on February 25, 2019 [6 favorites]

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable - "For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver."

The Future of Work: America's Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable - "The upper echelon is hoarding money and privilege to a degree not seen in decades. But that doesn’t make them happy at work."
posted by kliuless at 6:46 AM on February 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

MBA's are the source of 97.63% of all Human Misery!

I always retain the audible sneer with which Jello Biafra snarled the line "major in business" in Terminal Preppie.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:20 AM on February 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Every time I hear someone opine how X thing should be run more like a business I always try to get them to explain in as simple terms as possible how a "business" isn't inherently the least efficient way to organize something, since it's predicated on the idea of turning a profit.

A business is an extremely efficient tool for exploiting a pool of available resources and converting it into fungible capital for whoever is working the controls. They're really not good at doing anything else, but if all you have is a hammer...
posted by contraption at 8:04 AM on February 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oh please. Looking across the world's many societies and economies, businesses that don't provide something of value to their customers don't survive. There are MANY problems with unregulated capitalism, but what, ahem, value is added to this conversation by grandiose, unsupportable statements like 'businesses don't have any purpose' or 'businesses are the least efficient way to do something'? To go back to the start of this thread, yes, bullshit jobs are laughable as well as a warning sign, but good jobs, real jobs are not. To adapt Churchill's quote about democracy, "Capitalism is the worst form of organizing human commerce, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time."

We are all eager for a President and Senate and House that enacts even some modest additional controls on unfettered corporate sociopathy. And the tension between DSA and Democratic plans is healthy and wonderful. But even in the meantime, real live human beings fed themselves and their families on the wages they earned by designing (know any overpaid techies, anyone?), manufacturing (yup, lots of problems here, but still: jobs), and delivering (UPS is unionized!) the magical hardware and software we are all using to pontificate here at Metafilter.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:34 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I think the perception that many companies don't create value is driven, in large part, by the rise of companies that many people deal with, where they are not the customer. That's fairly unique, at least it seems to me.

Prior to a few decades ago at least, if you were dealing with a company, it was probably as a customer (or a supplier/vendor); if you weren't buying something from them, they probably didn't care about you—why would they? There was advertising, of course, designed to make people into customers, but it wasn't especially closely targeted or anything. It was hardly an 'interaction' in the sense that most people think of it.

But today, people spend a lot of time dealing with companies to whom they aren't actually customers. Being a user is a much more vague relationship, and it's often unclear, just looking within the bounds of that interaction, what the company actually does. E.g. it's not obvious, if you woke up from a 30-year coma today and got yourself a Facebook account, how exactly Facebook, Inc. creates value. It's not really obvious; at no point do they come right out and say "hey, fuckos, we're giving you this service in exchange for putting ads in front of your eyeballs". It's implied, sure, but it's not explicit nor necessarily obvious.

Perhaps there's something intrinsically alienating about being a user instead of a customer; the indirectness of the business model creates the appearance of vapidity, when in reality the companies are quite brutally efficient at what they do, and have climbed up a metaphorical hill of corpses to get where they are.

Note that none of this applies to companies operating in non-competitive/failed markets or where they have achieved regulatory capture. They really are the inefficient jobsworths that they appear.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:57 AM on February 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don't think it's unsupportable to state that for-profit business is efficient at generating profit first and foremost, and that any ancillary benefits are byproducts.
posted by contraption at 8:57 AM on February 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

But where does that profit come from? From charging, yes, at least a penny more than it cost to provide a good or a service that some customer values and pays for. Airlines, for example, have lost money for more years than they have been net profitable. Meanwhile millions of people have been zipping all over the globe at 30,000 ft...
posted by PhineasGage at 9:12 AM on February 26, 2019

Even if we agree that the specific firms we have today are in fact "creating value" in some abstract sense (not everyone is convinced that they are, myself included), it's still valid to ask the question "OK, but are they creating the kinds of value that we actually want, and for the people that we want to have the value?" Obviously the answer is no.

We want security, and a sense of belonging, and some assurance that we're not disposable labor machines for the rich. These things wouldn't cost much money and in fact may cost less (see: US vs European healthcare prices) than what the current system costs. Still, we don't have them. The only rational thing to do is conclude that, as currently constituted, the production system ("economy") is different from the one we desire, and therefore we should change it.

This is a socialist idea: using political power to seize and operate private capital, but it isn't ideologically-driven socialism, just practically-driven socialism. If Henry Ford were in charge of making a better economy instead of a better tin lizzy, he would design a socialist economy, since that's the one people want.
posted by LiteOpera at 9:17 AM on February 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Oh please. Looking across the world's many societies and economies, businesses that don't provide something of value to their customers don't survive.

Since this seems partly directed at me, I'd like to point out that I didn't mention anything about value or customers. I wrote that I always try to get people to explain how "run it like a business" isn't the least efficient way to organize something;" [other than a business] seemed pretty implicit to me.

Which The_Vegetables and contraption actually took a stab at, instead of strawmanning.

I don't think it's unsupportable to state that for-profit business is efficient at generating profit first and foremost, and that any ancillary benefits are byproducts.
QFT, in the US at least. We're all still wrestling with the ghost of Milton Friedman.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:40 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

But where does that profit come from?

From convincing people that they should buy your product over others available in the marketplace. It's true that one way to do this is to make a product that is higher in quality and/or lower in price than your competition by trimming unnecessary inefficiencies, but that's far from the only way. There are myriad other ways that are not so beneficial or efficient, including:

- Using regulatory capture or sheer capital power to drive competitors out of the market so you can degrade the quality or jack up the price.
- Getting rid of costs by pushing them into "externalities" as much as possible.
- Spending money on marketing and R&D to make your product more desirable/addictive in order to sell it to people who would not otherwise need or want it.
- Cadging money from taxpayers in the form of bailouts, subsidies and tax incentives, socializing the risks while privatizing the profits.
- Using planned obsolescence/non-repairability as a lever to ensure repeat sales of products that could easily be designed to last longer.
- Exploiting your work force, wringing more and more value out of their labor while reducing their compensation.

To take the airline example: they're marginally profitable for shareholders, but if things go really badly for them the government will bail them out, and in the meantime they benefit from artificially low oil prices (thanks to carbon externalities and petroleum subsidies) and their executives keep raking it in. Is that efficient? Depends on what you want to maximize.
posted by contraption at 11:49 AM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Why Americans Are Obsessed With Theranos, Fyre Festival, And Other Scams
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:48 AM on March 2, 2019

Exploiting your work force, wringing more and more value out of their labor while reducing their compensation.

The race for shareholder profits has left workers in the dust, according to new research - "A relentless focus on maximizing shareholder value has contributed to stagnant middle-class wages in the United States and fueled the rise of a society increasingly divided between haves and have-nots, according to a new working paper published by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive economic think tank."*

Maximizing shareholder profits is a great way to destroy humanity - "This isn't just a problem for companies: Governments struggle with this notion, too. The nature of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is to focus on exponential growth and productivity. This is why governments and businesses don't prioritize the environment or social issues. It's because they don't need to in order to boost their perceived GDP—whatever isn't reflected in those numbers-based metrics in essence doesn't exist for the GDP."
posted by kliuless at 9:18 PM on March 3, 2019 [1 favorite]