[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 27, 2020
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In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
-- Motor Trend, May 1983