voidstaresback on Nostr: I worked at the World Bank back in 2010-2012. It was a depostic place where political ...
I worked at the World Bank back in 2010-2012. It was a depostic place where political hierarchy and games ruled everything. Due to extreme woke ideology on hiring, I was a very rare white American male hired there - and was in the group that planned the meetings for the sector directors, country directors and managing directors.
Although "headed" by the US, and all of the lead economists being American- literally everywhere else was European run. I got to see cancel culture and the woke agenda 5 years before it came to corporate America.
All of the organization was setup to run the way Europeans run their country and it is filled with European bureaucrats that only want to stay in their cushy job, just 1 block away from the White House. Why produce anything of value when you could just stand next to power?
The people inside the World Bank, the frontline workers are the epitome of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" they spend their days filling time with meetings and being pawns for a larger political game of budgets and org charts. They believe fully they are there to do good work, but many would do anything (and are involved in insidious political treachery) because if they were to loose their world bank job they would be sent back to their country, so their managers have enormous power over them.
They were convinced that their business class trips to Zimbabwe, to distribute a loan for a hydroelectric damn that would never be built, was the very core of saving the world. You cannot imagine how big the organization was just to give away money... but that is because just like USAID most of their work isn't about aid it is about propaganda
Also the full time employees get sweet perks, like they don't have to pay income tax on their earnings, neither US tax or their home country- so a position like a secretary is making massive amounts more than they would back home. So they would participate in maddeningly complicated byzantine processes because by staying in the circus they did very well financially.
Because I was helping plan some of these meetings where the top of the organization met I got a chance to spend time with lead economists. I was so unbelievably naive then, I would ask very simple questions about "why don't we have each country use a gold reserve to prevent them from printing too much money" I would get laughed out of the conversation- literally, they would laugh and blow off the question- I didn't realize that my naivety was not in asking the question, it was in thinking they knew the answer... they didn't. The economy was a mystery to these people, they genuinely didn't understand how the printing of money impacted its value.
I think this is my insight into places like the World Bank when you see people like Kristalina Georgieva they are not actually in charge- they are figure heads doing what they are told and they don't have the same questions that an outsider would. They get into these positions because they know how to fight inside of a bureaucracy not because they have strong feelings about monetary policy. The people above them, that is probably a different story, but the people we can see, those people are all just bureaucrats- but like the NBA all stars of bureaucrats.
I was thinking on my run this morning that I saw a lot of crazy stuff when I was there, but never told anyone... because who would I tell?
Although "headed" by the US, and all of the lead economists being American- literally everywhere else was European run. I got to see cancel culture and the woke agenda 5 years before it came to corporate America.
All of the organization was setup to run the way Europeans run their country and it is filled with European bureaucrats that only want to stay in their cushy job, just 1 block away from the White House. Why produce anything of value when you could just stand next to power?
The people inside the World Bank, the frontline workers are the epitome of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" they spend their days filling time with meetings and being pawns for a larger political game of budgets and org charts. They believe fully they are there to do good work, but many would do anything (and are involved in insidious political treachery) because if they were to loose their world bank job they would be sent back to their country, so their managers have enormous power over them.
They were convinced that their business class trips to Zimbabwe, to distribute a loan for a hydroelectric damn that would never be built, was the very core of saving the world. You cannot imagine how big the organization was just to give away money... but that is because just like USAID most of their work isn't about aid it is about propaganda
Also the full time employees get sweet perks, like they don't have to pay income tax on their earnings, neither US tax or their home country- so a position like a secretary is making massive amounts more than they would back home. So they would participate in maddeningly complicated byzantine processes because by staying in the circus they did very well financially.
Because I was helping plan some of these meetings where the top of the organization met I got a chance to spend time with lead economists. I was so unbelievably naive then, I would ask very simple questions about "why don't we have each country use a gold reserve to prevent them from printing too much money" I would get laughed out of the conversation- literally, they would laugh and blow off the question- I didn't realize that my naivety was not in asking the question, it was in thinking they knew the answer... they didn't. The economy was a mystery to these people, they genuinely didn't understand how the printing of money impacted its value.
I think this is my insight into places like the World Bank when you see people like Kristalina Georgieva they are not actually in charge- they are figure heads doing what they are told and they don't have the same questions that an outsider would. They get into these positions because they know how to fight inside of a bureaucracy not because they have strong feelings about monetary policy. The people above them, that is probably a different story, but the people we can see, those people are all just bureaucrats- but like the NBA all stars of bureaucrats.
I was thinking on my run this morning that I saw a lot of crazy stuff when I was there, but never told anyone... because who would I tell?