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JPMorgan Chase & Co, for example, the largest bank in America, reported in 2006 that roughly 2/3 of its profits were derived from "fees and penalties," and "finance" in general really refers to trading on other people's debts—debts which, of course, are enforceable in courts of law.

If all of this very much resembles the inner workings of a large corporation, I would suggest that this is no coincidence: such corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing, and allocating money and resources.

(continued) rewarding faithful allies (goons), or creating an elaborate hierarchy of honors and titles for lower ranking nobles to squabble over.

"the whole point is to grab a pot of loot, either by stealing it from one's enemies or extracting it from commoners by means of fees, tolls, rents, and levies, and then redistributing it. In the process, one creates an entourage of followers that is both the visible measure of one's pomp and magnificence, and at the same time, a means of distributing political favor: for instance, by buying off political malcontents

"Because in every case, fixing these problems would have resulted in people losing their jobs, as those jobs served no purpose other than giving the executive they reported to a sense of power."

"It's not as if they enjoyed it; it was tedious work, monotonous and boring. The cost of my program was five percent of what they were paying those twenty-five people. But they were adamant.

I found many similar problems and came up with solutions. But in all my time, not one of my recommendations was ever actioned."

"In one instance, I created a program that solved a critical security program. I went to present it to an executive, who included all his consultants in the meeting. There were twenty-five of them in the boardroom. The hostility I faced during and after the meeting was severe, as I slowly realized that my program automated everything they were currently being paid to do by hand."

"At [Big Bank A] I had five bosses in two years. At [Big Bank B], I had three. The vast majority were installed, cherry-picked by higher-ups, and 'gifted' these castles of shit."

"There was an even higher caste of bullshit, propped atop the metrics bullshit, which were the data scientists. Their job was to collect the fail metrics and apply complex software to make pretty pictures out of the data. The bosses would then take these pretty pictures to their bosses, which helped ease the awkwardness inherent in the fact that they had no idea what they were talking about or what their teams did."

"The last time, I was actually worried about losing my job over holding out."

"They put out a 'target' of, say, ninety percent participation—all 'voluntary'— and then for two months, they try to get people to sign up. If you don't sign up, they note your name, and then people come and ask you why you haven't signed up. In the last two weeks before the end of it, we get automated mails that look like they come from the CEO 'encouraging' you to sign up."

"they have some big drive to do charity for a week. I refuse to participate as though I give to charity, I will not give through my bank, as for them it's just a big advertising drive in an attempt to shore up morale internally and make it look like banking isn't appropriating labor through usury."

"There are many people who have read [the essay] and know of the reality of our industry, yet they (including myself) are consumed by fear of losing our jobs, so we don't talk about or discuss these issues openly. We lie to ourselves, our colleagues, and our families."

The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.

As long ago as 1852, Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, was already making fun of the legal profession with the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—in which two teams of barristers keep the battle over a huge estate alive for more than a lifetime, until they've devoured the whole thing, whereupon they simply declare the matter moot and move on.

During the thirty year in question, a time during which tuition skyrocketed, the overall number of teachers per student remained largely constant (in fact, the period ended with slightly fewer teachers per student than before). At the same time, the number of administrators and, above all, administrative staff ballooned to an unprecedented degree.

It's easy enough to insist that any results one likes (say, high levels of overall wealth) are the result of the workings of the market, and that any features one doesn't like (say, high levels of overall poverty) are really due to government interference in the workings of the market—and then insist that the burden of proof is on anyone who would argue otherwise.

Anyone who truly believes in the magic of the marketplace will always insist that any problem, any injustice, any absurdity that might seem to be produced by the market is really caused by government interference with same. This must be true because the market is freedom, and freecom is always good.

(Objection 2) private sector bullshit jobs must necessarily be a product of government interference.

(Objection 1) Since competing firms would never pay workers to do nothing, their jobs must be useful in some way that they simply do not understand.

That a political culture where "job creation" is everything might produce such results should not be shocking.

But he's also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely it inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.

What is the president saying here? He acknowledge that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms.

Quoting Obama: "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs."

since WWII, all economic policy has been premised on an ideal of full employment... most policy makers don't actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much "upward pressure on wages." Marx appears to have been right when he argued that "a reserve army of the unemployed" has to exist for capitalism to work the way it's supposed to.

I remember the first time I discussed the phenomenon of homelessness in America with friends in Madagascar. They were flabbergasted to discover that in the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, there were people sleeping on the streets. "But aren't Americans ashamed?" one friend asked me. "They're so rich! Doesn't it bother them to know everyone else in the world will see it as a national embarrassment?"

A child born to parents of modest means in Sweden is much more likely to become wealthy than a similar child is in the United States Must one conclude that Swedes overall have more grit and entrepreneurial spirit than Americans?

Clearly, then, the poor remain poor because they didn't make an effort they could have made. This sounds convincing if you look just at individuals; it becomes much less so when one examines comparative statistics and realizes that rates of upward class mobility fluctuate dramatically over time. Did poor Americans just have less get-up-and-go during the 1930s than during previous decades?

"Financiers had managed to convince the public... they had, like modern alchemists, learned ways to whisk value out of nothing by means that others dared not even try to understand. Then, of course, came the crash, and it turned out that most of the instruments were scams."

"The vast majority of those others included in the service sector were really administrators, consultants, clerical and accounting staff, IT professionals, and the like. This was also the part of the service sector that was actually increasing—and increasing quite dramatically from the 1950s onward."