A decent summary of why business, particularly modern American corporations, is good. I guess this is contrarian among mainstream people these days, and the arguments might be somewhat convincing, but there weren't enough "compare business to other areas of life" to really convince someone who wasn't already at least somewhat pro-business. As an ardent capitalist, there was nothing new in this book or really terribly interesting, but it was a quick listen at 3.5x on a plane to a Maltese cryptocurrency conference, so I can't complain too much. Cowen and MR have a lot better stuff out there than this book. ( )

Refreshingly contrarian and well-argued. ( )

Poor misunderstood corporations

For whatever reason, I never expected economist Tyler Cowen to show up as a bleeding-heart apologist for Big Business. His book of that very name is a fawning, treacly adoration of corporations and extremely highly-compensated CEOs. The syrup fairly drips from the pages.

He loves to compare corporations’ behavior to individuals, with all their deficiencies (but then gives an entire chapter to how corporations are not people). His diversions include: “Just look at the individual lies and misrepresentations in online dating profiles,” and, “We moralize about companies instead of trying to understand them.”

Cowen:
-deals with sexual harassment at work by announcing women are better off than staying home with an abusive spouse.
-is against raising taxes from the rich: “We should not tax CEO salaries into oblivion,” he says. (Not to put too fine a point on it, Cowen considers modern CEOs to be philosophers.)
-spends a great deal of effort showing that work is better for you mentally and physically. It is a stress-reducer, and provides satisfaction. He doesn’t touch on the fact that more than 40% of jobs pay minimum wage or less, while the CEO makes an average $18.7 million, or that workers have stress just making it to the end of the month. Nor does he mention work suicides, nervous breakdowns, burn out or mental health issues.
-says online companies post so much content, that maybe we shouldn’t “be surprised that some of their take-down decisions turn out to be mistaken.”
-thinks the mainstream media are unfair in their coverage of Facebook and Google because they are competitors. (Which shows only that he has never been a journalist.)
-says Americans’ pathetic savings rate (4-5%) “reflects too little engagement with financial intermediaries, not too much.” (No, what it shows is the total lack of disposable income.)

Cowen can find a heart-warming excuse for every abusive corporate practice. His method is to name the practice without showing how damaging, penetrating or pervasive it is, and turn right back to how wonderful corporations are. This was particularly evident in the chapter on lobbyists, who he made out to be tiny, ineffective, and dismissed by their own clients. (As I write this, Donald Trump has nominated a lobbyist for Secretary of the Interior. He already has one running the EPA.)

Cowen completely ignores lobbies writing the very legislation that electeds present for passage (which is why laws are becoming identical from state to state), that they spend virtually every night in the company of lobbyists, and that lobbyists are the backbone of fundraising, either directly or by holding events for the member.

He says companies have little or no effect on state governments and that most state actions are at voters’ behest. He ignores the “right to work” legislation, anti-organizing laws, cutbacks at schools, privatizing prisons and endless other issues that allow companies to step in and take over. Lobbyists will work a state over until it passes some repressive law (or a giveaway to companies), then threaten adjoining states with loss of business if they don’t at least match it. Please don’t tell us companies don’t operate at the state level.

His rah-rah, gosh golly fandom gets cloying. In apologizing for Facebook, he says Russian fake news ads were “at the time about 0.1% of Facebook’s daily (his emphasis) advertising revenue at the time.” (So imagine the ill effects of the other 99.9% on unwary users.)

He says of Android that Google promoted it to “the most commonly used cell phone software in the entire world.” (He likes saying entire world) and “The United States has been proven to be one of the most significant financial havens in the entire world.” He never mentions that Google buys up small innovators before they can become familiar brands, helping stifle innovation. Or how many trillions have been squirreled away in secret tax havens by innocent CEOs and their innocent companies. He likes to think it’s after-tax money.

Incredibly, Cowen assumes right from the first page that the reader is anti-business, presumably because “everybody” is. This is rather ironic, as precious few people who think corporations are too big and heartless and bad will plunk for a polemic telling them corporations are wonderful, generous and misunderstood. So I don’t know who Cowen wrote this for. Maybe billionaire CEOs will hand it out as Christmas gifts.

He concludes with “The social responsibility of business is to come up with new and better conceptions of the social responsibility of business (His italics).” In other words, total, hands-off, self-regulation.

At least he’s consistent.

David Wineberg ( )