I must be sorry to non MBA students in advance for the jargon am going to use. (In case am sounding totally greek, u can goto wiki for invisible hand and visible hand in economy :)

The economic forces acting on birthday cakes -

As has been observed by me in this birthday of mine as well as last one and all others of my friends in college, a birthday cake is acted upon by two economic forces. First one is the administrative force, as defined in economics by Adam Sandler, the visible force. This force acts to cut the cake into equal pieces for uniform distribution, or to say that to just cut the cake in all practical aspects.

Second is of the ‘stakeholders’ here, the free market one may say, or better known as ‘bugger friends who just want a lions share of the cake’. This force, an invisible hand, acts rather ‘invisibly’ to sublimate the cake with fractions of seconds of visible hand touching the cake with a knife.

The dominance of the force depends upon the moral ethics of the invisible hand, which most of the time, rather than exception, is highly questionable. In some cases, as seen by me in my last birthday, it may happen that a small voice may supply the market with a small but false shout of knife touching the cake, resulting in the visible hand’s knife looking for blood rather than cake.


:: Jas – 2007