As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
- Hughes Mearns(?)
The question mark is not as to authorship but refers to my uncertainty about
the authenticated wording of the poem. I found four slightly different
versions in a quick web search. One of the versions contained the line "a
little man who wasn't there", which conforms with several pop-culture
references to "the little man who wasn't there" (Glen Miller, The Shadow,
The Honeymooners).
What does all this have to do with the price of rice in China, or for that
matter, the variable cost of jumbo shrimp? Lots.
Variable cost is an oxymoron. Cost: from the Latin *constare*, "to stand
together". As one might suspect, constare is also the etymological root for
constant. "Fixed cost" is therefore redundant.
Q: What do you get if you cross an oxymoron with a redundancy?
A: A profession.
The marriage of variable costs and fixed costs gives us accounting.
Accounting could be called the practice of viewing variable costs *from the
perspective* of fixed costs. The trick is to identify regular behavior
patterns (trends) of the variables and to project these regularities as "fixed".
The "man who wasn't there" is the eccentric accountant (oeccountant?) who
views the fixed costs (capital) from the perspective of the variables
(labour). In one sense, this latter practice could be dismissed as
impossible, since the variables have to be (at least provisionally) fixed
before they can be taken as the vantage point from which to view anything.
But the irony is that _all_ costs are variable to a greater or lesser
extent. Everything is provisional. "All that is solid melts into air."
The great difficulty to turning accountancy on its head is the establishment
of an adequate, non-derivative unit of measure. Non-derivative means the
Ugly American question, "how much is that in dollars?", is meaningless. That
single difficulty has been sufficiently great to squelch the emergence of
oeccountancy.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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Know Ware Communications
Vancouver, B.C., CANADA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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