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Also known as "rent seeking" behaviour. Administrators who are successful in their careers are those who are ambitious about moving up, which requires continual

Also known as "rent seeking" behaviour. Administrators who are successful in their careers are those who are ambitious about moving up, which requires continual expansion of the departments and work that they oversee. They want more budget to hire more people, they want more work to justify the budget, they produce no wealth and generally just collect rent off of everyone subjected to their administrative powers. > There are also self-reinforcing effects in licensing professions, which demand more qualifications, feeding the vocational training industry. Same in finance, with Dodd-Frank, AML and KYC (all justified by fake 'wars on terror' and 'war on drugs'). Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe accounting is one such discipline. 90% of it could have been automated out of existence decades ago - the CPA industry exists to ensure the continuation of the employment of the people in the industry by artificially making the whole thing more complicated than it has any reason to be.

tim333 8y ago
Complexity in accounting is mostly down to tax laws which politicians seem to enjoy complicating without needing to be nudged by the accountants.
- felix_nagaand 8y ago
  If taxes were simple the IRS could be just a few engineers, a couple advisors mgmt, and a warehouse of servers.
akanet 8y ago
I think you are mistaken about CPAs and accounting. For one, they cost relatively little, and two, they perform actually a pretty substantial task. It's very difficult to tie spend together end-to-end through a company automatically. Tooling for CFOs is getting better, but we are nowhere near this being something that can be done completely automatically. There are some nascent SaaS platforms like Bench and Pilot that provide bookkeeping services augmented by some computer automation, but a human usually has to supervise, still.

tim333 8y ago

Complexity in accounting is mostly down to tax laws which politicians seem to enjoy complicating without needing to be nudged by the accountants.

felix_nagaand 8y ago
If taxes were simple the IRS could be just a few engineers, a couple advisors mgmt, and a warehouse of servers.

akanet 8y ago

I think you are mistaken about CPAs and accounting. For one, they cost relatively little, and two, they perform actually a pretty substantial task. It's very difficult to tie spend together end-to-end through a company automatically. Tooling for CFOs is getting better, but we are nowhere near this being something that can be done completely automatically. There are some nascent SaaS platforms like Bench and Pilot that provide bookkeeping services augmented by some computer automation, but a human usually has to supervise, still.