BIG BUSINESS: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen (Average is Over) comprises a set of musings on aspects of the American corporation. Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, first provides "a new pro-business manifesto." Other chapters explore whether CEOs are paid too much, how monopolistic big business might be, and whether the big tech companies are evil. In response, Cowen asserts that "on the whole our CEOs are providing good value for the money they earn;" that although "K-12 education is arguably an example of a big monopoly problem ... the analysts who raise this issue [more generally] usually are exaggerating the problem;" and "America's tech sector is increasingly underrated [due in part to less than objective media coverage]." Our students have recently shown increased interest in researching the values of socialism and would undoubtedly be interested in the questions that Cowen raises, although they would might be less apt to agree with his generally pro-business argument. Clearly Cowen raises issues and responds to critics while sharing a great deal of emotion, caveats, and opinion in this accessible text; roughly twenty percent of BIG BUSINESS provides additional detail through references, notes and an index.

This definitive discussion of the role of large for-profit institutions in the US doesn't turn up any big surprises. Most people already know that big businesses provide an incredible array of satisfying goods and services at extraordinarily low prices, that they pay employees high salaries with generous benefits and that they provide investors with their best hope of gaining financial security on their own terms.

If you don't know those things, or don't believe them, you will find a very strong case for them made in this book. But the author does not write like an advocate, although he makes his position clear at the start. He breaks these things down in to simple questions for which clear empirical evidence is available, and shows the evidence.

The case is not irrefutable. If you want to believe big business is really destroying the environment and our quality of life with polluting, toxic, lowest-common-denominator products, ruining lives with soul-deadening, degrading jobs and hijacking all the profits for insiders--you can explain away the data. But the book does make clear there's a lot to explain away, and little clearcut evidence in support of this view.

The author makes no claim that big business is perfect; that all large companies are net good, that we don't need any regulation or that things can't be improved. The case is that the good far outweighs the bad, and that big business seems to perform better overall than small business, non-for-profit institutions, individuals acting on their own and government. Yet those last three categories do a lot of criticism of big business, while you seldom hear big business complaining much about them.

The interesting question is why these well-known facts are so often overlooked. In popular culture fiction, big businesses are likely to be evil, ruthless, criminal thugs or incompetent, innovation-suppressing, rigidly unimaginative bureaucracies. You rarely see celebrations of their undoubted good qualities.

One obvious point the author makes is the negative stereotypes conflict. This doesn't prove that they're wrong, some big businesses could be hypercompetent and evil, while other big business could be incompetent and everything but exploiting cronyism. But the trouble with stereotypes in general, not just with respect to big business, is that people do carry conflicting ones around in their heads. That allows them to pull up whichever one can be stretched to cover the immediate case, and makes them impervious to evidence.

The book is a little on the dull side. The author's writing is lively and stylish, but it can't overcome the fact that his book is mostly a mass of facts woven into tight argument, not a story with twists and surprises and a climax. It's healthy nutrition, not a tasty dessert. It probably won't teach you any dramatic new truth, but it can help you consolidate what you already know, and buttress it with firm empirical underpinnings. This is true whether you are generally Left or Right in your economic opinions.

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