Tenth law of worker entropy

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Of any agent, the point at which her immediate concern — making enough of an intervention to convey an air of the indispensable — is eclipsed by someone else's. Especially if that someone else is also an agent in the service of the same principal, and especially where that principal by dint of the corporate nature of its personality or its great remove from the details of the matter at hand is in no position to assert its own view of what is in it best interests.

This amounts to a kind of honour amongst thieves. As we have remarks elsewhere, much of the financial services industry consists in agents of one stripe or other extracting a livelihood from the transit between them of a parcel owned by someone else. Typically, millions of little parcels. Each parcel’s owner, a principal, has for one reason or another little capacity to observe or intervene in this game, but participated it all the same because of the historical tendency of the parcels to rise in value over time at a rate greater than is subtracted by the agents.