Let’s start the week with a little severe-economic-downturn-humor, courtesy of Maxine, found via the blog Economists Do It With Models. Think Jay Leno after he’s really given up… More bad-economy Maxine here…

More economic song parodies by Marcy Shaffer of the web site Versus: You’ve got the Fed (sung to the tune of “You’ve got a friend”) Lyrics: This is when. From your den. You call men. Who then all call Ben. Squeal you’re breakin’. You’re caught in the red. Too big to croak ’cause markets could [...]

We’ve posted before about hard-hit Detroit, which by some counts is sporting a 45% unemployment rate. The following excerpts are from The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, a play by Mercilee Jenkins, which received a staged reading at Detroit’s Matrix Theatre Company last year. The play is intended to be performed by two actors, a black [...]

From Ribbonfarm.com, a blog about “business and innovation,” written by Venkatesh Rao, who works at the Xerox Innovation Group. Rao has written two posts — “The Office According to ‘The Office’” and “Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk” — dissecting NBC’s hit sit-com “The Office” as “an interpretation of The Office as management science.”

“The Office” is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore…

Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.

Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop…

David Gillette, creator of IllustratedEssays, has a new one out about the disappointing Copenhagen climate change talks. If you missed last month’s Gillette/Robert Reich essay on EconomyStory called “Why the Recovery is Happening Without Us,” here it is again:

Seen the movie Up in the Air? It’s about a guy (if you can call George Clooney just a “guy”) who works for a company that hires out its professional downsizers to companies who are conducting layoffs. These axe pros then give the workers the bad news, absorbing for their bosses their angry, bitter, and panicked reactions. Interviews with real people who were laid off are interspersed throughout.

Critics are touting the film as Oscar material. But what do audiences and non-professional reviewers think? We looked at Yahoo! Movies and Rotten Tomatoes. A solid majority of viewers liked the movie (myself included), but some of the most interesting assessments are negative, so those are probably over-represented here.

Hear about this one? Complaint choirs. Apparently, they’ve been around a few years, but if you ask me, the concept is the ultimate Internet meme for our current plight: Groups of people getting together to sing (quite well, actually) a litany of things that irritate them. Naturally, economic issues figure in. In Juneau, they grouse [...]

“Laid Off” by C.H.A.Z.Z.

Here’s a repost from EconomyStory.org on a segment from Sparrow Songs, filmmaker Alex Jablonski’s project in which he and cinematographer Michael Totten shoot a short documentary every month for one year. Here, Jablonski interviews people affected by the recession in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

That’s right. It’s Christmas Eve eve, er, eve. What a fine time to check out these parodies from the holiday songbook on Marcy Shaffer’s Versus web site. “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot More Riskless” Lyrics here “The Cinders of Ayn Rand” Lyrics here “Oh CRE” Lyrics here “Go Tell It In Accountin’” Lyrics here