Writing at The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes the bankruptcy of a neighbour as the occasion for a characteristically wry meditation on schadenfreude, the parasitic industry of consultancy, and the universal human pleasure of investing malice with a semblance of moral outrage.
Only in a world of assumed incompetence can so much consultancy be thought necessary. No doubt it is sometimes true that a third party can see things that the people more directly involved cannot see. But there are now giant companies of consultants, which must surely have a vested interest in the inefficiency and incompetence of others, because inefficiency and incompetence are what makes consultancy necessary in the first place.