The 1% are not value for money

I mentioned a few posts back that I couldn't see how the majority of the capitalist elite were worth their pay differential relative to, say, a nurse. I mentioned how I thought that for the most part they commanded their wealth by virtue of luck and positioning. Well it looks like George Monbiot has come to the same conclusion: The 1% are the very best destroyers of�wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian And it's full of great quotes, for example:

Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes

Reading it, I realised that for the last 30 years we've been in thrall to, or at least silenced by, the myth that we need to reward the talented entrepreneurs, risk takers and financiers in order to create wealth. Well, George has some interesting research to bring to our attention which pretty much busts that mythology. This piece of research takes down the notion that financial success is down to skill.

the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill."

And then there is the issue of transferability of the findings; cue a nice sight-bite from Mr Monbiot:

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In fact, the evidence would suggest that not only does this 'class' not really manage to beat the better than chance threshold, but in fact it seems that the wealth they have 'created' is more properly seen to have been expropriated.

Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%

Then there's a study that disturbingly personalises one of the findings shown in the film The Corporation.

They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

In fact the way that corporate structures and 'rules' are put together actually creates a self-reinforcing situation:

Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

And worst of all we have allowed them to get away with it; there was an ideology propping it all up with an infrastructure to keep it in place in the collective imagination:

acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

Quite so: time to pull the curtain from this Oz wizardry.