Thursday, October 17, 2013
Proficiency vs efficiency
Been reading some old books on banking, trying to trace the trends of abstraction and speculation vs healthy deposit-and-loan. The wavelength of these cycles is shorter than I had imagined, with frequent bubbles and frequent returns to sanity. Nothing new about TBTF banks or gov't bailouts of TBTF banks, either.
The current bubble is vastly larger than earlier bubbles in geographical terms, but fairly ordinary in temporal terms; 10 years between bubble and re-regulation is fairly typical. We haven't reached the 10-year point yet, so we can't say for sure that this bubble will go unfixed forever.
One book goes deeply into error-checking methods, reminding me of some tricks I had used in my long-forgotten bookkeeping days....
Humans and machines are both good at making errors, but humans are still unbeatable at catching errors. This detective work was the fun part of bookkeeping, especially when the error was made by someone else. Not so much fun when it was my own error! Note the author's tone of regret at the loss of "the accounting genius" and the replacement of proficiency by efficiency.
¶ 5:00 AM 
Humans and machines are both good at making errors, but humans are still unbeatable at catching errors. This detective work was the fun part of bookkeeping, especially when the error was made by someone else. Not so much fun when it was my own error! Note the author's tone of regret at the loss of "the accounting genius" and the replacement of proficiency by efficiency.
¶ 5:00 AM
