Trump will find that fierce nationalism goes only so far

This Trumpian view of the world, and of how his country fits into it, is something we have seen before in many places and at many points in history: the blaming of others for misfortunes. Sometimes the enemies are within (Communists, racial and religious minorities); sometimes they lurk abroad.

A strong and confident United States would never succumb to this appeal, and perhaps, in November, most of the country will have seen the appeal for what it is: a dangerous diversion.

.. These anxieties relate in part to Americans’ own choices: an unwillingness to tax themselves sufficiently to pay for programs; income inequalities that have been allowed to grow; a political system that is dysfunctional, grossly distorted by money, gerrymandering and inflamed partisanship; a financial system so loosely regulated and consumed by greed that its collapse in 2008 is still being felt; misguided foreign military adventures. But these observations are too toxic for domestic consumption.

.. So we have the plutocrat as the worker’s friend. The deal maker whose foreign policy will be a unilateral set of demands. The free-trade critic who has made lots of money outside the United States. The neophyte who almost revels in his ignorance, because knowledge breeds an understanding of complexity, and who proposes his daughter as an adviser in the White House.

Goldman Sachs Recasts Its Reputation to Woo Tech Talent

A panel of Goldman Sachs employees spent a recent Tuesday night at the Columbia University faculty club trying to convince a packed room of potential recruits that Wall Street, not Silicon Valley, was the place to be for computer scientists.

.. “It breaks my heart when my engineering students use the talents I taught them to engineer the financial system instead of engineering solutions to the world’s problems,” he said.

.. “As soon as we start talking to the candidates about what our starting packages look like, the lifestyle questions about flip-flops and beanbags really start to go away,” he said.

 

The Origin Of ‘The World’s Dumbest Idea’: Milton Friedman

How did the corporation’s money somehow become the shareholder’s money? Simple. That is the article’s starting assumption. By assuming away the existence of the corporation as a mere “legal fiction”, hey presto! the corporation’s money magically becomes the stockholders’ money.

.. Is the money the stockholders’, the customers’ or the employees’? Apparently, it can be any of those possibilities, depending on which argument the article is trying to make.

.. In due course, Jack Welch himself came to be one of the strongest critics of shareholder value. On March 12, 2009, he gave an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times and said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.”

.. Not everyone agreed with the shareholder value theory, even in the early years. In 1973, Peter Drucker made a sustained argument against shareholder value in his classic book, Management. In his view, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. . . . It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. . . . The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.”