Morons

From the blog of Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame :

"... one of the great wonders of capitalism: It is driven by morons who are circling the drain, and yet. . . it works!
Think about all the people working and earning paychecks from companies that will ultimately fail. It’s a lot of people. But until those companies fail, the employees are getting paid, buying goods, and contributing to the economy. After the failure, those employees hop over to another sinking ship, and so on.
Within successful companies, a huge portion of resources are dedicated to projects and products that will ultimately fail. But in the meantime, everyone is getting paid and propping up the economy.
I once worked in a bank, making loans to small business start-ups. Our rule of thumb was that 90% of new businesses fail. The exceptions were franchisees and pizza places. But we saw no shortage of people willing to mortgage their homes to start their own sporting good stores and boutique dress shops, despite the 90% chance of failure. Without clueless optimists, the economy would grind to a halt. My own career has been a long string of failures and a few notable successes.
I understand the math of capitalism, and how the few successes are so large they pay for all the failures and then some. But at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.
In the rest of the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business.
My point is that I hope the monkeys that already know how to use sticks for tools don’t start using leaves for money. If that happens, we’re screwed."

I do not particularly like Scott and his opinions, which are abundantly exposed on his very successful blog, but for once, I agree ...

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