Home > Work > Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
1 " The books that are most likely to be stolen from libraries are books on ethics, especially those that are likely to be read by faculty and advanced students in moral philosophy. Those books go missing at a rate 50 to 150 percent higher than comparable texts not about ethics. And if it is any consolation, books by Nietzsche are among the most likely to be snatched, and another target is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Again, maybe businesspeople are not the most dishonest group after all. "
― Tyler Cowen , Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
2 " All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form—some of which are valid—pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues. First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs. The two words that follow most immediately from the world of business are “prosperity” and “opportunity. "
3 " People commit fraud both in and out of businesses, and the evidence shows they are just as dishonest outside of a business context as within it. "
4 " According to a 2002 University of Massachusetts study, 60 percent of adults will lie at least once within the course of a ten-minute conversation, with the average number of lies from the liars being three. And that is only what people admitted to. (If you are wondering, in this study men and women lied at about the same rate.) I don’t think there is any single number that captures how much people lie, as that depends greatly on context. Nonetheless, lying is rather deeply embedded in human nature. "
5 " So to line up this simple comparison, in revenue terms the personal income tax sector is 4.7 times greater than the corporate sector. The relative “cheating factor” is about 6 to 1, with more of the cheating done on the personal income tax. In terms of those simple proportions, individuals would appear to cheat more on their taxes than businesses do. "
6 " Overall, the people from the more commercialized societies are much more willing to cooperate outside of narrow kinship circles. The core message is that commerce and advanced market societies tend to breed trust and reciprocal cooperation. It is no accident that such hypotheses were common among eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, such as the Frenchman Montesquieu, and others who were observing the rise of commercial society on a massive scale for the very first time. "
7 " That is one of the truths about American business that you are least likely to read about in a major media outlet: income inequality is mostly about the differences between the superstar companies and the others. "
8 " Again, the main issue is not control-seeking bosses versus freedom-seeking workers; very often the person most likely to restrict the workplace freedom of one worker is another worker. "
9 " Texting and social media aren’t a good substitute for everything; they can’t fill in for a needed heart transplant, or if you are on the verge of not having enough food to eat. But it’s remarkable how many of our daily activities they can substitute for, as evidenced by the big time shift to those activities in so many of our daily lives. And that is the great unheralded virtue of the mobile internet. It’s not only fun but also a kind of near-universal consumption substitute that constrains monopoly power in many invisible ways. You call it addiction; I call it trust-busting. These days, virtually all suppliers, whether they know it or not, are competing with Facebook, social media, and texting. That’s a hard battle to win. "
10 " As government regulates business more, that favors corporations large enough to have substantial legal and compliance departments. Regulation serves as a kind of fixed cost of doing business, discouraging market entry. Not only do higher rates of regulatory growth correlate with increases in market concentration ratios, but the period during which regulation increased significantly, 1990–2000, was followed by increases in market concentration. None of those correlations prove causality, but at the very least it is possible that government regulation is a major force behind the rise of market power. "
