As for my proposed alternatives… they’re complex. Essentially I think we need to get away from the industrial, machine metaphors of both Marxism and institutional capitalism (or rather, we will get away from those metaphors — it’s more a matter of how smoothly/disastrously).

To do that I think we need better metaphors for psychology and philosophy… I’m working on it.

I think the best solution in more practical terms is to make organizations better from the inside-out. Plenty of good, smart people work in big companies. We’ll get better at managing (see my post on Cisco) and bringing out the best in people, rather than the worst.

Francois: Like your comments about China you seem to be going where I want to go with a future post… (I think that’s awesome — thanks!) That’s a good point that, big or small, those bonuses point to deeper and broader problems.

The case I’ve been making in all of my posts on the economic crisis is that there are underlying cultural practices and assumptions that need to change. I’ve got a lot of problems with this society’s attitudes about wealth and it has been disconcerting to see it spread around the globe. The disparities are both socially divisive and economically unsustainable — a big step backwards.

But my worry about public outrage is that it isn’t very conducive to practical, rational articulation of possible solutions. If we’re going to claim moral high ground we should at least demonstrate we deserve it instead of degenerating to the same “primal” level.

Suggesting that the public has some kind of “right” to be outraged is, to me, equivalent to saying executives, traders, and athletes have a “right” to grab as much as they can (i.e. they could argue winner-take-all competition — “survival of the fittest” — is ok because it’s a “primal instinct”… and some of them do argue that: pseudo-Darwinism helped destroy Enron).

To paraphrase Chris Rock, I understand — but there’s no way I’ll condone or enable it.

I don’t think that the fact the it is relatively a small portion of the total is very relevant here. The problem seems to me to be more the disproportion between the money a few (apparently incompetent) executives are making with comparison to the average worker. Personally I put these bonuses in the same category as the incredibly high retributions star basketball and baseball players are getting. But at least these stars are playing well and we can all see it, which is not the case for the executives of those big companies that apparently are at least partially responsible for the meltdown in the first place.

Maybe vengeance is a factor, but can it be really discarded as primal instinctual reaction when we see on the one hand the disproportion between their earnings and ours and their apparent incompetence on the other?

Remember Marie Antoinette saying about the people: “If they have no bread, let them eat cake”?

When you consider Nortel’s decision to give a bonus to a certain number of executives (I forgot exactly how many) when their laid off workers have not been paid yet, you have a feeling they are saying “if they have no bread, let them starve”.

Personally I don’t think it’s so much a question of trying to regain control as just trying to even the odds for all of us.