Re: Ceaucescu and Romanian transition

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol:

> No one said anything about "more competent." I
> myself am suspicious of almost all comparative
> judgments of competence, ...

You are right! Yours was not a comparative statement.
It was my mistake. You said "most of them ... are
pretty damn competent."

I am sure there are a few among them who are competent
but I find it difficult to accept that most of them
are, if for nothing, for what I have observed when I
was out there. Of course, my sample set is not very
large so you can discount my "inference" as you like
but I assure you that my distaste of what I
experienced is quite large.

I strongly suggest everyone on this list to spend a
few years as an employee at a money management firm or
an insurance company to better understand why I feel
the way I feel.

They are among the most Kafkaesque places to be.
Putting aside the issue of the meaningfulness of what
they are doing, what they are doing can be done by
less than ten percent of the people that are currently
employed in that "industry". You don't need a "ticket
writer", whose sole jobs is to write a ticket which
gets written when there is a trade, for every
portfolio manager who trades once or twice every two
weeks.

And they are talking about productivity!

These Romans are crazy!

Forget about this "white-collar jobs flying to India"
thing.

Even if they stayed, most of the white-collar
"workers" are not needed.

Sabri