Arthur Anderson LLP (at the time the world’s largest ever partnership) engineered Enron’s finances by gaming partnership law to the max, by creating convoluted layers of dummy partnerships. The “A” “I” industry is also built on self-dealing, but seems to be structured as “strange loops.” “Computer aided drafting” of contracts (boilerplate in general) and legislative language (cf. ALEC) is a pretty lucrative industry, as it’s a LOT easier to obfuscate information than to unravel obfuscation. I suspect that >90% of what is called “consulting” is basically optimizing business processes for minimal compliance. I even suspect there may be some malice motive (as in malicious compliance) along with the profit motive.
The question is, assuming they are optimizing for longest possible bubble expansion time, how does one strategize against that? That someone wouldn’t be in government, of course (at least not the US federal government). Someone who has resources to strategize against advanced optimization, but also has independence. Resources vs. independence has always been a harsh tradeoff, but the P25 clique, of course, is finding ways to make it harsher, raising the price of entry into cognitively powerful fields of work.
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