Actually, I really like his hair. Unfortunate choice of words, though.

I'd take 1 gladwell over 100 newtons.

You are so tired. Why don't you try to have some originiality instead of incessantly bringing up the New Yorker. We fucking get it!! Christopher Frizelle would rather be writing for the New Yorker! And you package your agenda as "cute" by making an ever so expected ironic stab at what actually makes your subject appear physically unique. It adds to his charisma, which you don't have. Please somebody do something about this tragic hack!

I haven't read Gladwell's article, but I noticed in Newton's article he repeats the often-said "More than $1 billion in employee pensions disappeared; investors suffered over $30 billion in losses."

Yes, but that $1 billion/$30 billion wasn't real money, it was the height of the inflated value of Enron stock.

Let's say you take $200, invest it in your company's stock, and based on fraud the stock shoots up and your $200 become $10,000. When the fraud is discovered and the stock crashes, it's a bit cheeky to claim you lost $10,000 when the stock was never really worth that. In fact you lost $200 plus whatever you might have gained had you invested in a another investment instead.

I stopped reading at the absurd and cruel "...beyond a reasonable doubt” — or 90% certainty of guilt."

We are going to put someone in jail for life on a 90% chance of guilt? On that basis of certainty I'd say let Skilling go and put in Maud for a 90% chance of being stupid.

Hey #4. Let's say the corporate culture of your job puts enormous pressure on all employees to invest most if not all of their retirement savings in the company's stock. Let's say that even if you have some misgivings about this strategy (which is a very bad retirement planning strategy btw), you do it anyway, because the returns do look good, and you receive a lot of support and assurances from your co-workers that it's a good way to go (then there's the pressure).

Let's say that the stock price is inflated. So maybe the aggregate loss does look worse on paper than it was in actual fact. But even if that's the case and the pension plan should have been worth half as much, if you are the person whose retirement savings went from being worth something to being worth nothing, you've still suffered a pretty serious loss.

In addition, your argument doesn't account for the lost opportunity of having the money in that investment instead of another one. The period of time we are talking about was a period of strong growth in the stock market as a whole. Perhaps the Enron returns were better. But there is plenty of other stock that appreciated a great deal during that period and is still worth something.

Presumably, if someone had put the money in a relatively conversative idexed mutual fund or something like that, the returns during that period would have been pretty good.

Instead, because of the fraud, a lot of people didn't have the information they needed to make a good decision and they ended up with nothing.

To me, that's kind of screwed up. It's all well and good to say that the employees should have been more careful or taken more responsibility for this stuff. But I think the management of the company owes at least some sort of fiduciary duty to the employees. I think ERISA establishes duties as well.

People can only make decisions based on the information they have. Here, I think the information provided was either outright false, or insufficient for people intelligently assess the risk of the investment.

In many respects, Enron was like a cult. Over time, the leaders slowly but surely escalated the anchor point of many of its employees. That's what cult leaders do. They slowly change people's frame of reference. It's a very powerful negotiation/mind control tactic, especially when people are operating in a large organizational culture.

Jim Jones didn't ask people to drink the Koolaide in the first five minutes they joined his group. It was only well into this process that people had been moved to a place psychologically where this seemd like a sensible idea.

If you watch that documentary about Enron, the cult vibe comes through very clearly.

Regardless of Newton's comments, Gladwell's piece is really dreadful work. My longer comment on it is here, but the short version is that Gladwell basically says that Enron's accounting is too complex and mysterious for charges to have been confidently brought against the executives. He tries to paint a very sympathetic portait of Skilling and seems to imply that his sentencing was overly harsh. But the worst part is Gladwell's comments at his blog. He challenges anyone to explain, in plain and concise language, what crimes Skilling and Lay committed. Thankfully Gladwell has smart readers, because several of them quickly post concise explanations. Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong stops in and states the case about as clearly and plainly as can be, but Gladwell continues to insist there is a "grey area" where there is in fact none. DeLong's suggestion: "You're digging yourself a hole. I suggest you stop."

Gladwell basically just didn't understand the Enron case, and so wrote an article stating that it is an unsolvable mystery and that charges perhaps shouldn't have been brought. Why did The New Yorker publish an article by somebody who simply didn't understand the case? Why didn't Gladwell ask somebody like DeLong for an explanation while he was doing his research? This is really shoddy work.

Julia, are you jealous? I mean really attacking Christopher??? Wait, you like him don't you? Julia loves Christopher!!!! La la la la!!!

Julia and Christopher.
Sittin' in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G...

I repeat: tragic hack.

Please someone, do something.

Misty Brown? Sounds like Mr. Frizzelle is writing under a fake name. Loser.

Ohhh, watch it Missy Julia! "Mr Frizzelle" is my future ex-boy friend and your words are fightin' words!!!

In other news, Gladwell doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to microexpressions either. I enjoyed The Tipping Point, though.

You go Julia! I work at a magazine shop. Everytime a new Stranger used to come out, we'd all have great fun reading Frizelle. It was always fun to experience his "writing style" du jour and figure out exactly who he was reading--and therefore totally rippig off---each week. But even that got old, and now we don't even bother. Hack? Right on the money. He should be arrested.

#6 -

Learn to read. The last line of my post was "In fact you lost $200 plus whatever you might have gained had you invested in another investment instead." Sure, over time that might be significant, but it's still not going to be anywhere near the inflated Enron value. I'm not saying they didn't lose anything, only that that number is juiced.

Frankly, I believe that more than a few Enron employees knew there was funny business going on and didn't give a shit because they were watching their retirement accounts soar. If you think those sorts of scandals aren't well known inside companies long before it's revealed to the public (and I'm talking all levels of the company), you haven't worked for many companies.