I've previously suggested that you don't need to be too technical, as long as you focus on the reward systems (the cui bono?). Here, Michael Panzner quotes and discusses an article by Nat Worden on the failure of ratings agencies in the subprime debacle.
I think it's in "Jane Eyre": a teacher who wishes to instil piety into a little boy, asks him whether he'd rather have a biscuit or a blessing. When he answers, a blessing, he gets two biscuits.
When recession empties the the biscuit barrel, maybe we'll get authentic leadership.
UPDATE
My beloved recalled it better, and so I've found the quote on the Net:
...I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart; and when you ask him which he would rather have, a ginger-bread nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: "Oh, the verse of a Psalm! Angels sing Psalms," says he. "I wish to be an angel here below." He then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.’
4 comments:
Yes, I agree with you on that.
Strangely, I was talking roughly about the same line as you yesterday in Confusion between precision & accuracy:
What if we are confused between precision and accuracy? When that happens, it is very easy to assume that highly precise numbers are highly accurate as well. As the above-mentioned analogy shows, precisely wrong numbers are useless. If we use them, then the quality of our investing decision will degrade considerably.
For this reason, it is better to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong.
...the failure of ratings agencies in the subprime debacle...
What we have here are the essential seeds of the disaster. Money men can't think of fiscal responsibility or even of viability or sustainability. They can only quote jargon at you and give financial solutions for financial woes.
There is another world out there as well though, a non-financial worl of social responsibility which says sub-primes hsould never, ever have had anything lent to them.
Now if you could put your future into the hands of money men or in the hands of the clergy, which would you choose?
Henry VIII decided that, and all because he couldn't manage finances like his father. And the Dissolution of the monasteries didn't liberate as much money as he'd hoped - much of it went on paying pensions to the clergy thet'd turfed out. The Cistercians were and are much better at business. What did Henry spend it on? Foreign wars, a prestige flagship that sank immediately, a bunch of get-rich-quick types... how very modern.
Do fans call themselves Eyre-heads?
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