I have recently discontinued pursuit of my Masters in Business Administration. Accounting was fine, business law is fine, management science, IS for decision-making, and quantitative methods were all fine and dandy, but when I put all of these things together into the context of the modern business world, they suddenly stopped being fine.
The business sciences as we know them have only been around for a little over a century. In that time, we have already gone through six eras, the Industrial, Entrepreneurial, Production, Marketing, Global, and Information Eras. The market viewed in this short timeline seems in a perpetual state of revolution, and, as with all revolutions, there are big winners and endless losers.
This is not to say business has only been around 100 years, people have been buying, selling, and trading goods for millenia; however, the modern mass-market consumerism we have today is a novelty and, while we pretend it has always been thus, it is actually far to mercurial to predict its future trends.
In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court defined a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law.” A corporation is an invisible avatar, meant to protect the real people standing behind it from the financial and legal repurcussions of their actions.
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The Corporation documentary asks the question: If a corporation is a legal person, then what kind of person is it? “It is required by law to put its self-interest above all else and to maximize wealth for its shareholders.”
The corporation is a psychopath.
It meets several criteria that define a psychopath: Callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness through repeated lying and conning of others for profit, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. (source)
So we have an artificial social construct filled with imaginary people who are psychopaths.
This just doesn’t grok with my rational mind.
We can see the market’s chaotic nature in the Dow Industrial Average. Ask ten different economists or stock brokers why the DOW Industrial average dropped 500 points in late February, and you will get answers like “concerns that the U.S. and Chinese economies are cooling and that equities prices have become overinflated (source).” or “that selling has begotten selling (source).” or that it was an “overdue correction (source).” or even the “Drudge Report Help Tank the Stock Market” (source).”
Many of these highly-plausible hypotheses on the matter were delivered as solid fact, but with a system as subject to chaos theory as macroeconomics, it’s all just guess work. “Past performance is not indicative of future trends.” To play the prediction game in a system so inherently chaotic is gambling.
Consider the impact the Information age has on the material goods market. People have much less need for books, CDs, DVDs, televisions, stereo sytems, and all the cabinets and shelves used to house them when all of our entertainment needs are now compiled into a single computer system. Europeans are already into a post-modern market that views owning material goods as more of a burden than a benefit. “The things you own end up owning you,” as Tyler Dirden in Fight Club said.
In one sense, it’s hard not to see the market revolutions as a meme that has infected civilizaions on a global scale. When we consider the young age of the modern market system, the incredible natural resources it consumes, and massive quantities of waste it produces, it’s hard not to look at rampant consumerism as a form of mass psychosis infecting people around the world and convincing them to buy mass quantities of things they don’t need. When my brother asked one of his European friends why she had bought a bag of cheap useless trinkets at a Dollar Store, she replied that she wanted to show her friends back home the silly things Americans waste their money on.
I am now looking into a more stable field of knowledge for my masters, something where the rules don’t change on a day to day basis because of governmental regulatory or deregulatory whims, fickle consumerism, technological breakthroughs and obsolescence, cultural progress, and corporations that lie pathologically to keep their stock prices up.
Instead, I’m thinking biostatistics, computer modeling, microbiology, or organic chemistry… some branch of human knowledge that doesn’t change unless its proven wrong, where there exists a common ideal of cooperative competition that shares knowledge and encourages coordination among peers because everyone has the ultimate honest goal of finding out their common reality.
Note: The Corporation documentary is avaiable free online.