It’s easy to go after Big Business. The David vs. Goliath narrative plays well on Main Street. It plays particularly well among the plaintiff’s bar, which has taken advantage of a class action-friendly litigation environment to move from silo to silo. Their industry naming convention (Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Oil, most recently Big Tech) invoke their sins. That is, they are legal; they exist. And for the plaintiff’s bar, that is more than enough to go, Willie Sutton-style, after them. It is certainly true that one agency cost of scale is abuse of that scale. Treating customers poorly because they can—in classic Lily Tomlin phone company fashion--is undeniably part of the historical record. Yet, the reality of life in modern society casts that scale benefit in a very different light. Getting around without Big Business would be very hard. While that reality is clear in your everyday activities, it can be easier to appreciate when you step out of your normal routine, which I did last week, when I rented a car from National Car Rental (a division of Enterprise) at the other end of the country. My resulting thoughts on Big Business are in the attached Substack. https://lnkd.in/e6SxSeCr You might not like Big Business—few will admit to it—but there’s no denying its role in modern society. I’m not alone in taking that stand. A few brave economists are also willing to do so. They include the omnipresent Tyler Cowen & tech-guru Rob Atkinson. Their discussions about Big Business on the New Books Network are here: https://lnkd.in/ecY5B6KY and here: https://lnkd.in/eC-5fsDW Yes, Small is Beautiful is a great slogan and remains a fine read about the sentiment toward business at its time (1973). It’s also more appropriate in certain areas, such as food production, than others. But’s it not a practical approach to most of the goods and services that we use on a daily basis. Managing scale is not easy, but it is infinitely preferable to pretending that scale businesses are not central to the running of the modern economy. Ernestine may be poking fun at General Motors, but she knows the truth: https://lnkd.in/eNzD6ssp
This article also seems to beg the question: Yes, it would be harder to be an atomized rootless cosmopolitan without “globohomo” — but that’s exactly the point Reactionaries are making too. That urban liberal lifestyle is toxic and an evolutionary dead-end. The “modern economy” is not a desirable feature/outcome. That’s the whole reason so many people want to burn it down! https://youtu.be/NcIPrH0DhYM
Founding Principal at Tannhäuser Financial
2mo“How I learned to quit worrying and love Big Brother (the Managerial State).” 🤔