Dilbert Inspires to Heights of Economic Success
Financial Experts Feel Scott Adams Knows Whereof He Speaks
Jan 6, 2009
Paul B. Farrell, JD, PhD, an investing and personal finance columnist for CBS MarketWatch, asserted in 2006 that our favorite cubical-bound cartoon engineer Dilbert deserved the Nobel Prize for Economics, but that it might only be possible in a "parallel universe."
From the Mundane to the Ridiculous
Author of the Dilbert comic strips, multiple Dilbert books, and a former telecom engineer, Scott Adams is everyone’s hero. He braved the world of big business for 25 years and then achieved his salvation from it by sorting out its buzzwords, and sometimes ludicrous corporate philosophies, and poking snide fun at them from behind his cartoon alter-ego Dilbert. Many corporate workers, feeling trapped within similar environments, small insignificant cogs in a huge company wheel being controlled from daybreak to dusk, began to see a glimmer of hope in the unstoppable humor that his cartoons generated.
Adams' cartoons provided a saving grace that enabled employees to continue to play the corporate games, coming up through the ranks from low-back chairs with no arms, to low-back chairs with arms, to the prized high-back chair with arms, all the while chuckling at the inside information Adams had made them privy to. Dilbert cartoons can be found taped to cubical walls (inside and outside) of the smallest and largest companies in the country.
And Adams’ self-liberation from the same plight as the common worker proves that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel to get out on your own, start your own venture, and make a good living doing what you love. And greater power to him, he managed this all before the Internet freed many others into successful lives of consulting and freelance work.
It was No Joke
Adams' undergraduate degree in Economics, and his MBA in economics and management at the U. of California, Berkeley, give him credibility when he spoofs the topic. But when he offered his practical Unified Theory of Everything Financial economic plan (as a take-off of Einstein’s fixation on the elusive Unified Theory of Everything), amid the wealth of sarcasm in Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels, no one knew he was serious. How serious can you expect to be taken when you are trying to "discover the exact dollar-per-weasel equation that explains our world?" That’s right, Adams wasn’t talking about wildlife.
Farrell points out that “Adams' formula would eliminate thousands of weasels from Wall Street, vastly improving the efficiency of America's financial markets, while his Unified Theory would improve the wealth-building power of all investors.” Maybe it's time to see if it would improve our standing in the present economic conditions.
