Iowa meltdown another example of "big-idea" BS

As we still are awaiting the final numbers from Iowa, I wanted to forward a great article from David Dayen at the American Prospect on what he calls The Bullshit Economy.

We have endured the more comprehensive bullshit of the financial industry marking corporate progress by manipulated stock prices and air rather than productive advances for society. We had a financial crisis based on bullshitters telling us housing prices would endlessly rise. We have the bullshit of the private equity industry extracting value from companies through the skillful use of debt and other financial engineering, without regard for whether the companies succeed or fail.

The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullshit economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.

Somehow, the Iowa Democratic Party got sold that they needed to improve upon this, to “disrupt” the caucus reporting. Already, the party had to increase what they would keep track of and tabulate, reporting the first set of results before the 15 percent viability threshold, the second set afterwards, and how that translated into delegate counts. It wasn’t clear why anyone needed to adding another layer of complexity into this with the app. But the app’s backers must have been persistent, getting $60,000—really nothing for the purposes of app development—to design a tool to forward the results to a central repository.

Which is a common thing in consultant-driven corporate culture these days – have the appearance of DOING SOMETHING that seems progressive and advanced, even if it doesn’t help to get the job done or speed the process along. The consultants get their cut, and the promise of some kind of future improvement is all that is needed.

Our president knows this con(fidence) game well.

Dayen notes that this mentality pervades in our 2020 economy, where hustling and grifting seem to be more important than the actual product itself. This is the case in the Bubbly stock market, where coked-up hedge funders and VC types keep using low interest rates to plow cheap money into companies based on hopes rather than earnings (leading the market to go up nearly 500 points today because...China says it'll pump out even more money to combat the economic damage from coronavirus?) And it's the case with a well-connected DNC vendor in Iowa who promises a NEW AND IMPROVED app to speed along reporting of caucus results. Results that we're still waiting on 2 days later.

So there we have it: an unnecessary app that narrows the supply chain of votes to the central tabulator, and when the supply chain fails it creates chaos. We see this all over our economy; useless services, narrow supply chains, magnified fiascos. As long as confidence men lie to the right people, they can gain entry and take on enormous responsibility, until it all falls apart. We live in a country where you can spout New Age consultant speak, charm a large foreign investor, and make off to your guitar-shaped living room with over a billion dollars, paid effectively to go away. That’s WeWork guru Adam Neumann’s story, and increasingly it’s our story.

The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.

And as long as the con artists don’t face consequences, both in business and in politics, then we will continue with these superficial and sub-optimal outcomes in our BS economy.