Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper", that nearly destroyed the entire set o

Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper", that nearly destroyed the entire set of advanced societies and still threatens to destroy democracy — that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Not only have the US and EU shipped off much (and in some industries effectively all) of the R&D and manufacturing know-how required to lead an industry, but we have put ourselves in a militarily weak position by relying on manufacturing in adversary nations and even subjected to espionage from uncontrolled manufacturing. The MBA schools focusing solely on short-term optimization to extract greater superficial profits are truly toxic for society. Worse yet, they are toxic for the businesses that rely on their "expertise". Everything is optimized away, including R&D investmentand market development, and the numbers look better and better. Until they don't. At that point, the company has zero capability to recover, because it has lost all the internal talent that knows how to develop products and markets, and the death spiral begins. My company was once invited to bid on a large software project for GE, very cool document management system. Later in the process, we were given some astonishing terms — this was developing new-at-the-time technology, and we were to be both paying our software developers something like 3rd-world rates, and exposing all our books to GE, and could not have more than iirc 10% profit on any hour of labor. Basically, they were hiring us only to run a software sweatshop, and showed zero interest in state-of-the art development. I passed and decided that with that attitude, GE was on the road to failure. It took over another decade of the stock rising nearly 10x, and then some before all the chickens came home to roost, but it really was a true sign of MBAs rotting the company from the inside out.