anyone who knew why businesses operated the way they did were replaced with Business School Graduates in 1990-2005 especially, who learned that businesses were inefficient because [overwhelmingly the professors were not in business, just consulting, and so vastly misunderstood the reasons for this 'waste']
every single step of the managerial ladder rn just has no idea how businesses run, unless they manage to learn on their own.
if it keeps up, no one will know what they're doing.
Millenials already largely don't, and are only learning in adulthood, as far as I can tell. ESPECIALLY the ones who went to university.
The schools all shifted to pegging success after graduation as 'university' and not 'able to live a life without being misled'. Because that's what those they learned from, and the metrics, said. Universities, squeezed from the top, specialized too. Well-rounded curricula costs money to keep professors paid, and students were only here for credentials anyway, right? That's what the conferences all said.
businesses expected university graduates to know more than their workers who were there 20 years but didn't go to university. why? University sold them on it, and higher ups believed it.
every single side is being squeezed by people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about, but think they do. There's a power in that, though I'm not sure how to use it yet. but it's pretty fucked. It does, however, mean that there's opportunity to anyone who manages to get up the ladder covertly while like, caring how the hell anything runs. We see this with the new FTC chair destroying non-competes, and if you look at her birthday, she's born 1988, a millenial. I just don't know how many else survived that long.
tangentially related reading, I guess, on how MBAs lead to wage suppression: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/06/fortress-mentality/#mbas
Some specifics from the paper's conclusions:
Five years after the appointment of a business manager [ed: that is, a manager who's gone to business school], wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark (relative to firms operated by non-business managers);
Business managers are not more productive: firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher sales, productivity, investment, or employment growth following their accession;
Non-business managers share greater sales and profits with their workers (in fact with fairly high elasticities), business managers do not;
Our estimates correspond to causal effects of practices and values acquired in business education—rather than the selection of individuals averse to rent-sharing into business education.
My grandparents live in a clear-cut rual wasteland named for the man who brought the lumber mills to them. My grandpa, a man who left school as a child to travel across America with his many siblings to pick crops for money, once ran the saws and the presses in the mill. He even flew to Canada once, long ago, for an exchange of information in the business of running lumber mills. It was his first time on a plane. He's still proud of that trip. Even in poor health, recently asked me if I remembered that he'd been to canada. "Oh boy, them was some biiiig trees up there." He's been to canada, but he'll never visit me here, he's too weak to travel now. Anyway.
He worked at that mill, that industrial structure that looms over a half empty town, smoke stacks so high and so active you can orient yourself by them, until, one day, leaning against the press while eating a sandwich my grandmother made him—likely liverwurst and mustard, or pinto beans and american cheese—the press powered on and crushed his arm.
They managed to save the arm, somehow, but from then on it was his Bad Arm, the arm that can't lift his grandchildren onto his lap. He had to retire. Thank god he had his union behind him.
I think I was in college, visiting, probably Thanksgiving or Christmas, when he told us that the sawmill asked him and some of the other old timers come by to teach the young men how to sharpen the enormous, toothy blades.
"Hoo, it's fixin' to be bad news when none of us is left."
But he was proud, happy even, to be recognized. A keeper of old, forgotten knowledge. Still useful. But even then I wondered, how could it be that no one left in the sawmill knew how it was done? How could something so essential to the core conceit of a mill go neglected? You need massive saws to process all those proud Arkansas pines, and those saws need to be sharp. All a dull saw gets you is a whole lot of sawdust, and that won't sell for nearly as much as nice straight planks. You can't satisfy the demand for all those suburban McMansions up north with nothing but dusty hunks of splinters.
The floor of my grandparents home has needed to be replaced for years. "We'll get around to it," they say.
My grandpa loves trees. He loves the forests, the ones the mills couldn't chew on. Every fall when we visited him, or he visited us, he'd pay us kids a handful of quarters to roam around gathering plastic grocery bags full of acorns, walnuts, and pecans. Of course some of those pecans made it into my grandma's pecan pies, but the rest he planted. He has planted so many trees.
When he was in the hospital last year, that's all I could think about. And I wanted to ask him, when you plant all those trees, do you do it for the tons of lumber you processed during the prime years of your health? Or do you do it because you hope there are still forests full of food, in the future? Forests that feed the deer you love to watch, forests you used to hunt them in. You'd string the bucks up over a sturdy branch and clean them all by yourself, right then and there. You didn't trust anyone else to do a good job of it, much less care to pay someone to do a lesser job. You were always proud of your hard work. The world around you changed so fast, and it forgot how to see the cleverness in your rough hands. Fourth grade education be damned.
I still haven't asked him why or when he started planting trees. But I want to, I will. He's a keeper of forgotten knowledge, after all.
