Negative Externality: Transaction spillover, a cost not transmitted through prices that is incurred by a party who did not agree to and was not part of the transaction.
When a large air carrier suffers a loss the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] conducts a thorough investigation to determine the “probable cause”. It then recommends what procedures should be adopted to preclude the same catastrophe from happening again.
While many consider this to be a “gravestone mentality” it is far better than what we have with economics—which is nothing. The same morons who crashed the economy in 2008 are still flying the line. Psychopathic Economics has been studying to determine the probable cause of our economic crash.
While we haven’t released a formal “Blue Book” on the crash of Flight 2008 we’re resolved that Capitalism has been replaced with Corporatocracy. That is the “how” they (the Dark Triad) did it. It is not the “why”.
The “why this came about” comes from within the Dark Triad itself and from the predisposed psychopathic tendencies that are an integral and inherent fiber of a corporation.
The Dark Triad is comprised of: Machiavelliasts, psychopaths and narcissists. The documentary The Corporation can be viewed in the article “Why We Are Totally Finished” (which is up to 150,000 reads). The Corporation clearly reveals that corporations are predisposed to exhibit psychopathic characteristics. The scope of Corporations was limited by charter 150 years ago. They were formed to do a specific public good—like build a bridge.
After the Civil War corporate lawyers argued that the Fourteenth Amendment afforded people equal rights. They filed 288 cases, former slaves filed 18. The courts gave corporations “people status”. Soulless entities whose legal DNA puts profit above all else—even its fellow citizens. As a result they exhibit all the traits of a psychopath: A callous unconcern for the feeling of others, they are incapable of maintaining enduring relationships, they posses an incapacity to experience or feel guilt and they fail to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.
I’d argue, and did, about the “lawful behavior aspect.” Quite frankly, Corporatocracy allows corporations to obliterate any laws by using their former C.E.O.’s who revolve out of the boardroom and land in high positions of “our” government. I’d go so far as to say that they are such strong manipulators that they can twist the law or change it—so breaking it becomes unnecessary. That is really a conniving characteristic thought out by the Machiavelliast and carried out by the psychopath and the narcissist.
On September 11, of 2011 the movie I Am Fishead was released, a huge hat tip of appreciation to Jess over at Jesse’s American Cafe’ whose fine blog covered this. In I Am Fishead at about the 23:00 point, Dr. Robert Hare dropped the bomb: For the first time in history Fortune 100 companies had large numbers of high level executives analyzed to determine if psychopaths existed. It was the first empirical study of this sort that was able to use a well validated measure of psychopathy with a lot of high level executives.
What blew us away at Psychopathic Economics was the Dr. Hare mentioned 8 or 9 of the 203 had extremely high scores. Stop right there. Let’s do the math. If you sample our population you’ll find 1 percent of it is comprised of psychopaths. If you sample just women it’ll be 1/2 a percent. Just men? About 1 1/2 percent.
Eight or nine is between 4 and 5 percent.
Psychopathic Economics interviewed Dr. Daniel N. Jones Ph.d, Dr. Hare’s postdoctoral researcher and the podcast I think you’ll find amazing. Perhaps the most fascinating thing was how new the study of psychopathy is. Dr. Jones says, “It’s amazing and baffling to me that we are almost starting now to ask these questions". Which prompted me to ask just how long ago it was that psychopaths were identified. Dr. Jones explains, “Hervey M. Cleckley and Robert Hare both kind of fed off each other. It was really late 1970s early 1980s before we really kind of had any working conception of what a psychopath really was.”
