I think a lot of people would be happy if they could, just for once, pick a non-GE alum. Someone who also knows something about how planes fly through the air would also be great. A bonus.

I've seen three small companies bought by Boeing. All three were ruined. Two of them were destroyed completely, with all their customers (aside from Boeing internal) cast to the four winds. The third is puckering along, beset by spiralling fines, overhead costs imposed by Boeing processes, and a revolving door of four month executives on tour from other subs. It's not unlikely it'll get sold, but it might be destroyed like the others, with a token staff moved to Alabamistan or somewhere with minimal CoL. So far as I can tell, a Boeing buyout represents a destruction of value on the same scale as a minor military occupation.

I used to think - long ago - something along the lines of "oh these little startups are so disorganized, it'll be good to see the grownups from Boeing sort things out". Over time I slowly - oh so slowly, so painfully - started to realize: all the poison was coming from upstairs. It wasn't Boeing trying to sort out a chaotic situation, it was a profitable company being poisoned by this . . thing . . that produced . . oh God . . I'm still not sure what. I haven't actually witnessed Boeing successfully designing anything, even after a very long time in the business. It's baffling, like watching a car accident as it happens. Just turn the wheel, Ethel!

End-stage financialized capitalism and end-stage Russian communism has this sort of rhyme to it that I find fascinating. In the SU, it was more or less assumed that virtually everything could be managed through the lens of socialist economics. This led to all sorts of weird managerial gimmicks, immortalized in the "I ran a shoe factory" scene from HBO's Chernobyl[1].

In our neck of the woods, the same thing happened (and continues to happen) with finance, resulting in occasionally identical situations; I worked in a sub whose "crisis" CEO had spent the previous fourteen years working for a shoe manufacturer. When that failed, they thought to themselves, "We need someone who knows how to save money", rather than, "Our products are at an increasing risk of killing a deck officer". So then they hired a WalMart executive. Things didn't improve, because, honestly, how could they? The situation was completely beyond the abilities of a few "heroes" hacking together a solution, which up to that point had been the tactic of choice.

Financialism and Socialism have a shared problem. Joseph Schumpeter wrote about “The Ricardian Fallacy”: something like the economist's version of the Reification Fallacy. It's not particular to economists, but it does mean that anything not related to money doesn't make it into the models.

Per Schumpeter, what is particular to our FinSocs is that they work the model . . but . . they also curate the data. If they were doing science like this, the professor would fail them. You can't tweak the model while you're working on your collection methods.

The other perverse incentive is that the units in the model are also the units of value for human compensation. Units of measure don't normally do that.

Combined with the "we own the model and the data" problem, this creates a really tricky double bind for a system with human animals in it.

[1] I know, it's not a documentary, but it does a good job capturing the rhythm of the events. And yeah, management was picked according to wholly theoretical economic models[a] . . which, huh, sounds familiar.

[1.a] At best. As always, arcane esoteric models are a very easy on-ramp to corruption because, well, who can interpret your magic thingy?