“In the UK, the Financial Reporting Council has just opted against including ESG requirements in the UK Corporate Governance Code — these were to have increased the role of audit committees in overseeing ESG and expanding diversity and inclusion. BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink rarely mentions ESG any more. Elon Musk reckons that “DEI must DIE.” Bill Ackman (whose money matters) has called DEI the “root cause” of the sharp rise in anti-semitism at US universities. Donald Trump has promised to cancel all DEI initiatives across the federal government. The courts have already called a halt to race-based affirmative action at US universities, and last year the Attorney Generals of 13 US states wrote to Fortune 100 CEOs to let them know they would face serious legal consequences if they were to treat people `differently because of the color of their skin.'”
– Merryn Somerset Webb. She argues that much of the driving force is not just the absurdities of much environmental and “diversity” policies, but the brute fact of rising interest rates. Companies’ balance sheets and cost control issues are taking more urgency. ESG/DEI or whatever other piece of fashionable stuff is a lot harder to justify when capital is no longer “free”.
I trust and hope that interest rates remain around current levels for many more months to come, so as to force firms to compete harder for capital, to put it to genuinely profitable uses, reward long-term saving and habits of thrift and competence, and other generally good things.
As an aside, I can recommend The Price of Time, by Edward Chancellor, which demonstrated the great harms caused by artificially low interest rates over the centuries.
Horrendous! It’s Attorneys General. When you pluralise a noun, you pluralise the, well, the noun.
The Mises-Hayek theory of business cycles says that easy credit encourages businesses to be overoptimistic in their choice of projects to invest in, but I don’t think either Mises or Hayek ever envisioned that corporate management would invest in actively harmful and destructive policies as businesses have been doing in our century. Having interest rates go up is painful, but it’s the cure for a lot of malinvestment; if that’s happening now I can only welcome it.
– And the ultimate sin of ESG/DEI, which is actionable if you can find a judge who’ll take the case in these Left-dominated times, is the happy shunning of one of the businesses’ primary legal obligations – the fiduciary responsibility of maximizing their shareholders’ return on investment.
“Oh well, incorporating DEI/ESG into the decision-making behind your portfolio is FAR more important than mere tawdry grubbing for filthy lucre!”
” – WHAT??? WHO SAYS?!”
“… umm, the government?” ‘Tis a fact that governments have been foisting-off DEI/ESG onto all licensees, and threatening companies which don’t toe-the-line therein.
One of the items that delighted me was a greeeen-weeeeny’s strongly-worded condemnation of insurance companies that weren’t moving their investments into anti-global-warming renewable energy investments. Several replies pointed-out that the insurance companies’ one-and-only priority was maximising return on their invested premiums – nothing else mattered. And with the number of spectacular EV fires of late, it’s no surprise that EV premiums are through the roof and several insurers refuse to cover them at all.
I can never quite understand why the diversity nonsense wasn’t immediately nipped in the bud due to it being quite obviously illegal. Once racial discrimination was outlawed, couldn’t it simply be pointed out that the law didn’t say that you could still discriminate on the grounds of race but only in the approved direction?
I’m not an expert in either business practices or economics, but I need more convincing evidence of a causal link between the (mild?) decline in corporate advocacy for ESG/DEI and interest rates. Strikes me as a correlation that does not involve causation.
For example, it’s also correlated with a massive political pushback against these woke policies, the resignation of Ivy League leaders, etc. Which of these correlated events are more likely to be causative?
Some good news.
And, yes, it is the “Cheap Money” money-created-from-nothing that allows this madness – money created from nothing that, via the Cantillon Effect, concentrates the economy in the hands of the Credit Bubble banks and entities such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard – who control shares in each other so the Corporate economy is really one big blog rather than real competition.
If the people in charge of BlackRock bothered to study the city they are based in, New York, they would notice that it falling apart – ditto the people in charge of State Street, they might bother to consider how Progressive Boston and Massachusetts are not really working any more (in some ways Massachusetts went Progressive quite recently – for example it only adopted a Graduated [Progressive] State Income Tax in 2023).
I can not really say this about Vanguard – as they are based in a little town in Pennsylvania – so their attitude is “the cities can burn – it will not hurt us”, I suspect they are mistaken, but we shall see.
The British economy? It is has been very gradually losing competitive edge, compared to the American economy, since way back in 1875 when Disraeli both heaped functions on local government (compelling local taxpayers to pay for them – regardless of how they voted) and put Trade Unions above the law (allowing, for example, the obstruction of the entrances to factories and other places of business – the military term is “picket line” – relative industrial decline and structural unemployment were the consequences of this and other measures).
American industry over took British industry as long ago as 1890 – although American industry is now in decline.
My father could remember when the British way of business was very different to the American way of business – although not always honest (he was a victim of the massive Slater Walker fraud) generally less Corporate, but these days British business tends to follow American fashions just as the British government does.
Although such things as the Equality Act of 2010 carry things to an extreme in Britain not yet seen in some parts of the United States.
Basically the United Kingdom is like California without the weather, or like New York State – similar taxation, similar levels of government spending, and similar levels of regulation.
With the election of a Labour Party government later this year what limited restraints there still are here on such things as DEI and ESG will go – and it will run riot, beyond even what has been seen in California.
“But Paul, the British authorities have just ruled against forcing ESG and DEI on business” – yes and that is good news, but that will change with the new government.
Elected politicians have very limited powers, but they (or we – I am one) do have some power – and the new Labour Party government will give “the nod” or “the green light” to both public and private bodies (such as the Financial Reporting Council) to press ahead.
Ironically this may be a the very time that President Trump (if he is not murdered or thrown into prison on false charges) is rolling back such things in United States.
Various American friends are considering self termination – but I would suggest they wait, it is possible that things will be saved yet.
“Saved by someone you mocked in 2016” – well yes, I admit that.
And if American industry rejects both ESG and DEI – “Prime Minister Starmer” will look very silly pressing ahead with it, and his plans may get reversed.
“Copy American fashions” goes both ways – if the Americans start doing good things, we may well copy them.
There are very hard times coming, with the collapse of the Credit Money economy, but the young may see better days in the future.
Horrendous! It’s Attorneys General. When you pluralise a noun, you pluralise the, well, the noun.
Get out more.
…when the British way of business was very different to the American way of business… – American colleagues have generally appreciated the quip I encountered in the first year of my working life that ISO-9000 (nee British Standard BS-5750) was a nefarious British plot to reduce every other country’s businesses to the state of bureaucratic inertia that comes naturally to the English.
I think the belief that DEI is on the decline is more wishful thinking than anything. Paused, perhaps, but, like the socialism it is born from, it is relentless. After all, most of our companies’ middle managers were raised on it from their mothers’ milk.
@Y. Knott
is the happy shunning of one of the businesses’ primary legal obligations – the fiduciary responsibility of maximizing their shareholders’ return on investment.
But what is the ROI their shareholders are seeking? It isn’t always cold hard cash. Many of the shareholders such as Black Rock and CalPERS are in fact seeking some of these woke goals as their ROI. Perhaps that Anaheim teacher or that Sacramento policeman are more interested in increasing their pension payouts, but they have abdicated their decision making influence to political actors who have an entirely different agenda. So from that point of view the Corporate board may well be following the instructions of their primary shareholders.
It might well be written in the corporate charter than long term financial advantage is the purpose of the corporation — I don’t know, I haven’t read them — but insofar as I have read corporate formation documents or public exchange prospectuses they are usually written in such a way that the board of directors has a pretty free hand.
Because DEI is “one way”, this in itself creates a disparity that cannot logically be overcome.
For example, the “caring” industry; healthcare, social care, childcare, and primary school education, are dominated by females, and for good measure as they’re way better on average at the job, additionally, non-white females are even more disproportionately in these sectors.
Overall females drop out of, or reduce participation in. the workforce due to raising families, far more than males.
Consequently you’ll always have a surplus of males in other industries, and any company will only be depriving others if they achieve DEI targets, there is no net gain.
The other way of achieving targets is to simply reduce the “unwanted” part of your workforce, by engaging a foreign outsourcing company located in a country with much less consideration of DEi.
@Runcie Balspune
The other way of achieving targets is to simply reduce the “unwanted” part of your workforce, by engaging a foreign outsourcing company located in a country with much less consideration of DEi.
This is an important point Runcie. All these employment regulations and mandates load up the cost of American workers. TBH, I think anyone who hires an American (or Brit) to a job that can be successfully outsourced had better have a real good reason why. And that encompasses a LOT of jobs in the so called “information economy”.
Covid Zoom showed that it could work very well, and when you can get a team of people for the cost of one person, that one person had better be a rockstar. One of the things I do for money is interview programmers, and I assure you “rockstar” is about 1% of that population, “barely competent or better” is about 33% of that population. And I also interview outsourced programmers, and the proportion of rockstars there is about the same.
But it is good government policy because when your job gets outsourced it isn’t obviously because of the massive government regulations that made your position uneconomical, it is that damn capitalist corporation exploiting the little guy.
Fraser: The employers are screaming that there is a shortage of workers to fill vacancies, but in any market economy when there’s a shortage of supply you take whatever the hell you can get and make do. There’s no brown bread, I’ll make do with white. Employers are *NOT* taking whatever the hell they can get, so that to me is stating that there is *not* a shortage of supply, so shut the **** up. But at the same time they are refusing to employ people, so it’s the employer *chosing* to ignore the supply, so shut the **** up. They can’t have it both ways.
Times of plenty encourage people to entertain luxury beliefs – UBI, ESG, DIE. These are all essentially Affirmative Action beliefs.
These luxury beliefs are brittle. As soon as conditions deteriorate, they become unsupportable.
In good times, if I have three guys watching this one important gauge, I can afford to hire another two who don’t understand the gauge.
But if times worsen and I need to downsize, I’d best get rid of those last hires first.
bobby b said:
From observation, it rarely works out that way. Generally, they fire the most experienced, most senior guys because they’re getting paid the most, and what are left watching the gauge are the ones they just hired at the lowest salary, and then they’ll cut those positions to the bone…
Which is happening all over, right now. Particularly in the railroad industry, here in the US. Mostly because the people running everything are lateral hires with no real background in their industries, and while they can tell you what everything costs, they’ve no idea at all about what is of value in their organization.
I have a proposition to present to the world, which is that the MBA programs that infest our higher education system and the corporate world? They’re the reason we’ve got such abysmal performance everywhere. The decisions these people make are rarely ones that produce positive results; nearly every “bad decision” I’ve seen since leaving the military came from someone with an MBA. I do not like the mentality that these programs produce, which seems to be summed up as “Shut up; I have an MBA, I know better than anyone in the room with thirty years experience in this industry…”
They say “Get woke; go broke” is a truism. I think another might be “Hire an MBA to run your company, and watch it self-destruct…”
“BBC staff told not to hire candidates who are ‘dismissive’ of diversity”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/29/bbc-staff-hire-candidates-dismissive-diversity-inclusion/
@jgh
Fraser: The employers are screaming that there is a shortage of workers to fill vacancies, but in any market economy when there’s a shortage of supply you take whatever the hell you can get and make do.
That’s not true. If you hire someone unqualified for the job you are worse off than not hiring them at all. I see this all the time where companies hire butts in seats to do difficult technical things that they can’t do, and their presence doesn’t help, in fact, it makes things worse — you’d be better off without them. Many, many times I have told a client that they’d be better off paying “that guy” to stay home than letting him come in and screw everything up.
When you can’t hire people there are lots of other options. You can buy a solution from someone, you can outsource it to a service, you can downgrade your requirements, you can automate it or you can simply just stop doing the thing. And of course you can usually, though not always, hire someone if you are willing to make it attractive enough — though there are limits to this, since the deal has to be profitable at the end of the day.
There’s no brown bread, I’ll make do with white. Employers are *NOT* taking whatever the hell they can get, so that to me is stating that there is *not* a shortage of supply
There is ALWAYS A shortage of supply of highly qualified workers in useful industries. Whether there is a shortage of low skill workers varies from time to time, and often it doesn’t make much difference since they can often be replaced but other options.
Covid Zoom showed that it could work very well, and when you can get a team of people for the cost of one person, that one person had better be a rockstar. One of the things I do for money is interview programmers, and I assure you “rockstar” is about 1% of that population, “barely competent or better” is about 33% of that population. And I also interview outsourced programmers, and the proportion of rockstars there is about the same.
The problem is, if you want to build a wall, you can’t replace an experienced brickie with 10 people none of whom know anything about bricklaying.
In my experience, from working many years in IT, any foreign rockstars are going to up sticks and migrate to somewhere so they can be paid what they are worth, if they have any sense.
@Fraser Orr: But what is the ROI their shareholders are seeking?
Denninger points out (heck, really stresses: it’s in his annual predictions, and he’s posted on it several times) that with the ending of zero-interest money, competition is going to come roaring back and the business world is going to get cutthroat. This suggests (and Denninger says this is the year it’s gonna’ hit) that “leaner, meaner” will put an end to DEI. Companies will have to get back into real competition, or go under; and one of the major break-points of real competition is the price point. This will result in (1) “no more excess salaried positions” and (2) “it’s better to hire three people who can do the job, than ten people who are ethnically diverse but can’t”. Both improve the bottom line; and both render your company more competitive – and in an era of tight money and cutthroat competition, can help make the slim difference between profitable and bankrupt.
And right now, the pendulum is ‘waaay out to the left; and in an era of having to pay interest, insupportably so. The U.S. university that has one “facilitator” for every two students is an example. And Denninger mentions Elon Musk blowing-through Twitter’s office spaces with a portable wood chipper; if the thousands of “diversity hires” he shredded from the payroll had been vital to the function of Twitter, Twitter would’ve become a business failure. And the City of San Francisco said it would hire all of Musk’s rejects; but it didn’t – wonder if its cratering budget deficit has something to do with that?
In sum, the “bottom line” is the bottom line when you can’t borrow more money to cover a shortfall; and interest rates will likely kill DEI/ESG – for now…
DEI is from modern “Critical Theory” Marxism, SEG is more from the “Green” and “Noble Savage” Collectivism of Rousseau – yet they have combined. Big Business has gone along with this (although that may be changing – as the post says) and has got vast amounts of Credit Money (money created from nothing) which has concentrated the economy under the control of a view entities – very Henri Saint-Simon (French Collectivist of some two centuries ago).
The vile doctrines of Collectivism are spread by the education system – the schools and universities, which teaches people to hate traditional principles of justice – for example the jury in Minnesota that convicted police offices for Mr Floyd dying of drugs that he choose to consume (a jury made up of the sort of people who voted for Mr Keith Ellison to be Attorney General of Minnesota), or the juries in New York (the jury pool is carefully purged of honest human beings by judges, yes judges, asking such questions as “do you accept the 2020 Presidential Election was free and fair” and removing any potential juror who answers honestly that the election was rigged) who then openly decide Civil Cases against Donald John Trump for things they know (they make no pretense that they do not know) he-did-not-do.
Whatever changes in fashion there may be it is not possible to live in peace with such beings as make up these juries – it is not possible because they will not allow other people to live in peace (they make that very obvious). It is not just the leaders of the left who are evil, the “foot soldier” activists are also evil.
It is not possible to live in peace with such beings, because they are followers of “Social Justice” (a doctrine a lot older than Karl Marx), they believe in, they support, plundering and persecution – which is what “Social Justice” is. Social Justice is the ancient enemy of Justice.
Over time it will become obvious, if it is not obvious already, that it is not possible to live in peace with beings who wish to see us enslaved or just wiped out. And that, I repeat, is not just the objective of the leaders of the left (the Keith Ellison types) – it is also the objective of the “foot soldier” “activists” (the sort of person who nods in agreement to things the “Critical Theory” teachers and academics say). They know what they serve – they have made a choice to serve evil, knowing what they do. Although most ordinary Democrat voters are NOT “foot soldiers” are NOT “activists”.
How things will turn out – I do not know.
How many of them are there? Officially there were 81 million of them in 2020 – supporting such things as the sexual mutilation of eight-year-old children – to pretend that little boys are little girls and little girls are little boys (Mr Biden was quite clear on that policy in a televised “Town Hall”) – fortunately I suspect the true number is not even close to 81 million.
Millions of those “votes” were not from real voters – and many of the real Democrat voters did not know what they were doing, it is only the “foot soldiers”, the “activists” who have gone down the left hand path (the broad and easy road), most ordinary Democrat voters are not “foot soldier” “activists” of the French Revolution type.
. After all, most of our companies’ middle managers were raised on it from their mothers’ milk.
But if interest rates remain roughly where they are, and making a profit is an existential requirement, then the assumptions of these middle managers will become unsupportable.
Clearly, that might mean that a lot of firms full of this crap will go bust. There will be more cases of Anhauser-Busch, Disney, etc, making the mistake of “going broke by going woke”.
The more serious problem is the public sector, which tends to be more shielded from the winds of competition. But this is hardly a new issue, and those who have looked at how states can be overrun by toxic ideas know this has been going on for decades, or indeed centuries.
The more serious problem is the public sector, which tends to be more shielded from the winds of competition.
– But the public sector is vulnerable to being forcefully reminded by their bosses, the politicians, that priorities (including priorities for their continued employment) have changed; and successful politicians must have their ear to the street. And the more businesses, manufactories and enterprises struggling to keep their heads above water in a higher-interest environment, the harder it will be for their employees, the voters, to keep their heads above water, and the less likely the voters will be to tolerate politicians and public servants wasting their tax money on “that crap”. This could have broadly satisfying results in several areas of out-of-control public spending, such as over-regulation of everything, “SAAAAAAVING THE EARTH!!!”-ism, purblind gun-control, sanctuary city-ism and broad swathes of elite-mandated political correctness including city authorities mollycoddling BLM/Antifa/pro-Gazan protests, tolerance of rampant shoplifting, DEI, ESG, etc etc ad nauseam. And it won’t go away – that stuff never does; trust me on this, I have socialist relatives – but it can at least get heavily toned-down for a few gratifying decades.
Essentially, the pendulum has a long way to go but at least it has begun to swing again.
Columbia Journalism Review (among others) agrees with jgh
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/plural_problems.php
but that’s the Amrican answer, the British (which is a fair amount of the readershere) are more likely to write attorney-generals (with a hyphen).
Certainly it’s major generals (of which, of course,I am the very model) rather than majors general, but then a major general is a kind of general and not a kind of major. I think.
I used to think for attorney general, surgeon general, postmaster general, and witchfinder general the “general” was an adjective, until I saw the Seinfeld episode where the Postmaster General appears in his general’s uniform and declares “I am a General”. Since then I’ve seen a Surgeon General wear a general’s uniform, and also there was a Witchfinder Sergeant in “Good Omens”. I remember someone referring to Janet Reno as “General Reno”, at the time I thought it was a mistake, an attornet general is not a general, but maybe I was wrong.
If general is an adjective, why don’t we put it before the noun like we usually would? I’m guessing it’s somehow the Normans’ fault.
@Runcie Balspune
In my experience, from working many years in IT, any foreign rockstars are going to up sticks and migrate to somewhere so they can be paid what they are worth, if they have any sense.
In my experience, having hired and managed a LOT of offshore guys from many different countries, that is true some places, however, in Eastern Europe (including, even today, Ukraine) there are significantly higher number of rockstars and they usually stay there. I used to run two development centers in Ukraine in Kiev and Odessa, and they are top notch, though obviously everything is a big mess there right now. I worked with one guy from Belarus years ago and asked him why Belarusians were good at programming. He said that it was either that or drive a tractor…
FWIW, when people think of programming offshore they automatically think of India and China. But they are not good places to offshore. The best places are in Eastern Europe, followed by Pakistan and then probably Central America, which has the advantage of being in the right time zone. However, for big companies they go with India/China because they are volume shops all about butts on seats rather than quality, and India and China tend to be perfect for that. India over China, because their English tends to be good, even if their work quality is usually mediocre (because, as you say, the good ones get the hell out of dodge.)
@Y. Knott
In sum, the “bottom line” is the bottom line when you can’t borrow more money to cover a shortfall; and interest rates will likely kill DEI/ESG – for now…
So let me ask you a question. Another major cost to business is employee benefits. For example, maternity leave is extraordinarily expensive to employers, or, in the USA anyway, employing older people is much more expensive because their medical insurance is much higher. Do you think all this new “cut throat” competition is going to cause employers to ditch these benefits? It might make it harder for fecund women and older people to get jobs, but there are lots of laws to make that sort of discrimination very hard to do.
There are some things many employers (especially, perhaps particularly in larger corps) where there is a “we’ll go down with the ship on this one” and DEI and Carbon Righteousness is often one of them. Whether that comes from the board or the major woke shareholders the effect is the same. Some choices are irreversible, short of total collapse. Especially so when the people in power who made the bad choice, despite all the evidence, think it was a good choice.
And there is another side to this, if I might use an analogy. Among athletic folk, men run much faster than women. However, women can still win gold medals in track if you exclude all the men from competing with them.
At the end of the day though, the reality is that American business and the American economy is not going to wake up and come to its senses. It is going to collapse in an ugly way. The collapse might be fast or it might be slow, but America (and the west) are on a irreversible road to the crapper. And nobody, not even Donald Trump, or Vivek Ramaswamy can fix that.
george m weinberg
January 30, 2024 at 7:38 pm
but that’s the Amrican answer, the British (which is a fair amount of the readershere) are more likely to write attorney-generals (with a hyphen).
So a couple of comments. If you look at this data comparing the plural forms of various of the phrases you mentioned: attorneys general, surgeons general, postmasters general, attorneys general (British usage only) you will see the jgh is correct that the first word takes the plural ending, including in the UK. I also should mention courts martial too, since it is an interesting case. As to major generals is, as you correctly observe, completely different since it is a type of general, not a type of major.
However, one thing to note about court martial is that when we verbify it we say “court martialed”. So here we convert the adjective to a verb, which is not the usual practice. This is because, more and more, in the mind of English speakers “court martial” is a single entity, not a compound, and so we treat it as such rather than by its etymology (basically it means “military court.”) As to attorney general, if we use its abbreviation, we might say “AGs from twenty states are supporting Texas.” We do not say “AsG from twenty states…” for the same reason. “AG” is almost its own word.
Another example of this is “letters patent”. This is of similar form, however that specific phrase is only used in esoteric circumstances, the far more common “patent” which is really the same expression shortened and made to have a more specific meaning, is pluralized like any normal word.
But the story of English in the past 100 years is one of simplification. English is a mess because it is a careless mixture of Anglo Saxon, Norse and Norman French and a bit of Latin from the lawyers and the church, with some meddling by Latin scholars in the 19th century, and a mass of confusion since the great vowel shift happened as English spelling was frozen by the invention of printing. But really, since then, the story of English is simplification.
Having said that, I think that to be horrified by a failure to follow some esoteric, and rather pedantic rule of English grammar does make me suggest, with Johnathan Pearce, that he needs to get out more. (Says Fraser, after a page of pedantic analysis… perhaps I need to get out more too.)
Fraser, recruiters’ concept of “highly qualified workers” is advertising for Windows 11 experience and saying FUCK OFF!!!!!! to anybody whose last job was working with Windows 10. IT’S JUST A FUCKING COMPUTER! THERE’S NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE!
I had years work rolling out upgrades from WinXP to Win7. Immediately followed by years of work rolling out upgrades from Win7 to Win10. HTF would I have got the Win10 job when my previous experience was Win7? According to recruiters, FUCK OF!F!!!!!!Q NO EXPERIENCE!!111!!” I now see jobs demanding Win11 experience, but NOOOOO, FUCK OFF!!!
Similarly, I’ve decades of programming experience. About 15 years ago I needed to do something for a personal project that needed PHP. I looked up how PHP worked and…. just wrote it. It’s JUST PROGRAMMING.
About five years ago I needed to do something that needed JavaScript. I looked up how it worked and……….. Just. Wrote. It. IT’S JUST PROGRAMMING.
To recruiters it’s “we want a BableZoop 6.556 programmer, Wot? you only have BableZoop 6.554 experience? FOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKM OFGFFFFRFFFFf!”””…… Hey, there’s a skills shortage, MOOOOOOOOOOOOaaaaaarrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR IMMIGRANTSSSSSSSSTT!!!!!!!
NO!
USE THE FUCKING WORKERS THAT ALREADY FUCKING EXIST.
OR GO BUST AS YOU DESERVE.
Returning to DEI/ESG, I see absolutely no sign of it disappearing in my industry, especially the larger companies. And much of it is driven by institutional investors, especially in Europe.
Everyone claims that ‘green’ busywork is justified because they have a fiduciary duty to protect their businesses and clients from the ‘climate crisis’….
Fraser,
As I understand it, the etymology is the same as for the others. A military force had a captain, a lieutenant, and a sergeant major; a larger army had a captain general, a lieutenant general, and a sergeant major general, later shortened to general, lieutenant general, and major general (which is why a major outranks a lieutenant, but a lieutenant general outranks a major general). Then, in the usual sloppy fashion of linguistic change, the ranks got reparsed to make “general” the noun and the other words the adjectives. The word “general” is still an adjective in the phrase “general officers,” which reveals a little of the history.
I remember being puzzled at one of the Bond novels that used the Soviet rank of “colonel-general” . . .
Yep! Recruiters aren’t particularly clever. Don’t have much or any experience in the field they’re recruiting for, likely the job specification provided by the manager in the company, who probably has just taken the role, and thus doesn’t have any idea what the role requires either.
So recruitment degenerates into a ‘box checking’ exercise, the company asked for x, y, z. The recruiter supplied x, y, x. what do you mean the candidate you supplied doesn’t know what he’s doing? You got what you asked for!
A decent education system would help too. If the recruitment system is bad, the state education system is worse.
@APL
Yep! Recruiters aren’t particularly clever.
That’s not true. They may not be technically knowledgeable, but they are very good at other things — like selling and networking for example. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t need them.
I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of sympathy for jgh here, partly because of all the yelling and swearing, which immediately makes me think his argument isn’t strong if it needs enhanced with such ranting. But the bottom line is that all of us are in business, whether we are an employee or run a corporation. And selling and marketing is an important part of business. Rather than yelling at the dumb recruiter, perhaps the answer is to get better at selling and marketing one’s skills? Don’t have Win11 upgrade skills? Install Win11 on a virtual machine and learn it, then find a friend who runs a local business and offer to do the upgrade for free. Then spin the crap out of that on your resume. As a for example.
Unsuccessful people whine about how unfair it all is, successful people grab reality by the ‘nads and make it submit. The reality is most people don’t do this, so with a bit of effort you can move into the 1% who do, which leads to… profit.
Even for people looking for a full time job, that is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful. When you are an employee you don’t get to practice much, which is one of the many reasons I think that it is much smarter not to be an employee if you possibly can avoid it.
Of course @jgh can get mad at me for not agreeing. Or alternatively he can take the chance to learn from someone who has done this stuff for a long time, and been very successful at it. I have probably interviewed 200 technical people in the last couple of years and it never ceases to amaze me how little effort people put into marketing themselves, or how much of the time they just phone it in.
@William H. Stoddard
As I understand it, the etymology is the same as for the others.
I think you are right William. But it rather enhances the point I made which is that English is going through simplification and normalization. No doubt before long “attorney generals” will be the norm.
BTW, it is a curiosity of how English works. If an attorney general is an attorney who is general in nature, why is he not called a “general attorney”? The purpose of the unusual framing (with the adjective after the noun) is to distinguish it as a phrase with a special meaning, a meaning beyond the literal words. Which again goes to show that it should be thought of as a single semantic unit, a single noun in a sense. This is pretty common in English (and in other languages I believe), where we use fairly complex phrases in that way. For example, if a newspaper headline was “one scandal doth not corruption make” it means a lot more than the literal words because it is a form of idiom with readily swappable parts, but the basic form of the phrase you cannot change without obliterating the overall sematic history and baggage it comes with. THe unusualness of the phrasing makes it into a whole that you can’t fiddle with.
I’d point out it’s lord-lieutenants, as the post is a lieutenancy not a lordship.
And Doctors Who…
@TomJ
And Doctors Who…
Which reminds me of something else. It is “Doctor Who’s Tardis”, not “Doctor’s Who Tardis” or “the Attorney General’s briefs” not “the Attorney’s General briefs”, in fact using it that way really makes it more like the adjective applies to the object — the “Who Tardis”[*] or the “General briefs”.
Which goes to show that with this saxon genitive, once again English is treating these compounds as a single word rather than two words, and once again that the odd plural is very odd indeed.
Detour — what about if it is both plural and genitive? Is it “Attorneys’ General Briefs” or “Attorney Generals’ briefs”, or “Attorneys General’s briefs”. It seems it is the third option, at least according to this discussion, including a Google ngram analysis.
OK, I am done flogging this dead horse.
[*]BTW “Who” is behaving as an adjective here, even though it is s proper noun, since it is appositional.
Disagree. There are exceptions, but broadly it’s an accurate portrait.
( individual ) Recruiters don’t have the network, the company they work for has the network. An individual recruiter might move from one sales(person) role to another, where they are equally ignorant of the businesses they service ( in the agricultural sense ).
We don’t need them. If Personnel/HR/’Employee relations’ wasn’t concentrating on legal compliance, they’d be able to recruit themselves. The problem is the administrative layer that is imposed on businesses by other ‘pig ignorant’ people in government.
Recruitment agencies are just the least worst solution to the underlying problem of bad government.
The madness continues – for example in “Suicide Squad kills the Justice League” leading figures of pop culture, such as Superman and Batman, are presented as evil (all accept Wonder Woman – because women are superior) and are not just killed, but are also stripped and urinated on – yes pissed on. All part of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda of death-to-the-West.
I remind readers that such characters are owned by some of the largest Corporations on the planet – who must have signed off on this, and the Corporations are controlled by BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, who control the shares (thus making the idea of “competition” of a “free economy” a bit of a farce).
“But Paul, customers will not like justice being stripped and pissed on”.
Who cares about customers? The money of BlackRock and the banks is created from NOTHING and dished out by the Federal Reserve.
This is one of the reasons why this Credit Money must come to an end, no matter how terrible the end is, as it is destroying culture – destroying society.
I repeat – BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard control shares in each other, and they, and the Credit Bubble banks, are dependent on the Federal Reserve – on its money created from nothing.
This is not a Capitalist economy – it is not founded on Capital, Real Savings of Cash Money. The present economy is a blog – and it is like “the blob” in the old horror film. It must go.
@APL
I don’t want to get too bogged down in this, but I’ll give it one more hurl.
( individual ) Recruiters don’t have the network, the company they work for has the network.
Do you know any recruiters? I mean personally? I know lots, and that simply isn’t true. Their network is their value proposition. They guard it like treasure. No doubt there are some internal sales people at these firms that “smile and dial” but there are really just secretarial staff for the actual recruiters.
And one place that might not be true is recruiting of low level people or fungible people — say administrative staff or nurses (Who are not low level but are fungible.) However, we are talking about tech recruiting here, which is a different world.
We don’t need them. If Personnel/HR/’Employee relations’ wasn’t concentrating on legal compliance, they’d be able to recruit themselves.
Not true. I mean they might be able to recruit some people, but the best people are not recruited when they are unemployed but when they are employed. It is the network recruiters have not just into clients but into candidates that means they bring value to the table when you are looking for high quality people.
Moreover, unless you are some huge firm your HR department simply isn’t big enough to recruit people, so you outsource it to specialists. I don’t know if you have ever been involved in a recruiting process, but it is a huge amount of complex busy work. Have you ever gone through a pile of 200 resumes? I have, and it is not fun.
If you are a big firm continually hiring then it might make sense to do it internally, and often they do, especially for low skill, generic and fungible workers, but it is a big expense to carry for an occasional hire, which is why they outsource it. And even for these larger firms, if they have a special need, a CEO, a software architect, a director of sales, almost always they outsource to a specialized firm of recruiters who know the market, who have a network of candidates, and have the knowledge and skill to sell and market in the right places.
What I hear from you is a very tech person centric way of thinking. The reality is that for any business its primary function is NOT creating great products, it is sales and marketing. This is hard on the ego of product creators like you and me, but it is the reality of business. And that is the function recruiters do. And thank god, because it means I don’t have to deal with all that bullshit.
Mostly to address the last paragraph of this post…
I think the root issue here, with low interest rates? The fact that government intervention has yet again given us an example of why such things don’t work out over the long haul: Obscuration of the actual signal.
Economics is really a behavioral science for the most part: You can ideate many of the issues inherent to it as being almost purely Skinnerian, in that every economic transaction is a Skinner Box in miniature.
The problem is that the idjit class thinks it knows what it is doing when it seeks to manipulate these things, but since they’ve got almost no understanding of what’s going on with the rest of the human race, and never bother to look for themselves? We get what we get when they seek to “influence” the economy.
It’s the mentality permeating just about everything. The people in charge truly do not understand how their organizations work, or how their decisions and attempts to get people to do the things they want them to simply do not work. In fact, they’re usually far better at setting up perverse incentives for people to do the exact diametric opposite, as though they were colonial administrators trying to eradicate cobras…
Playing games with the interest rates? Perfect example; money should not be free, because if you make it too damn easy to get loans, then people will tend to do stupid things with those loans because a.) they’re not sufficiently emotionally invested in them, not having had to really work for those loans, and b.) why worry? There’s more “cheap money” where that came from, so why not do stupid and ill-considered things with it? It also means that the bankers aren’t risking anything, either: There’s more money at the Fed, so why vet the loans we’re giving out? They’ll just print more, and we’ll conceal the losses in the accounting details…
They’ve turned the average banker into a venture capitalist, I fear.
Venture capitalists rarely think through the long-term effects of their decisions about who and what to support with their “ventures”. You go back to the Age of Exploration, and if you were to ask the typical “venture capitalist” of the times about them lending money on some venture to the South Seas in order to found a new spice trade route, they’d have had some questions. A lot of really bad investment decisions got made back then, but the majority of the time, the guys doing such things were icy-eyed about it, and demanded answers and good planning. Not so much today… Swear to God, you look at some of the business plans from the various internet busts, and you’re just left in awe at the hubris.
Of course, there were also cases from “ye olde dayes” where you can find similar instances of ill-judged “irrational exuberance”, but because they were doing it with either their own money or that of smaller-than-state banks, the long-term effects were not as pervasive or widespread. Today’s central banks? LOL… Yeah, we’re gonna be paying for this for decades to come.
Unless, of course, they decide to do a total economic reset à la the ancient Hebrew custom of Jubilee… Which might not be all that bad an idea, if they simultaneously stop the market distortions currently prevalent at the same damn time.