By Thomas Knapp, on July 7th, 2011
This is intended as a brief response to Tibor R. Machan’s latest piece:
It has always been my view that corporations are groups of people united for various purposes, often to benefit from a business venture guided by competent management. Initially I worried little about the legal details, nor even about the legal history. A bunch of people incorporate or form a company to achieve certain perfectly acceptable, even admirable goals. Sometimes this can be done via a partnership, sometimes by incorporating, sometimes for profit, sometimes not.
Then I started to get involved in political philosophy and found that there is a whole lot of hostility toward these outfits, mainly from Leftists but also from some so called left-libertarians. I am not sure why from the latter.
First, let’s narrow this down to corporations specifically (as opposed to other types of partnerships).
The corporation as such is not just a large partnership — a joint stock company, or something of the sort.
Rather, the corporation is a creature of the state from beginning (its claim to legitimacy is based on state charter) to end (it receives “artificial personhood” and “limited liability” by state edict).
These state-bestowed privileges result in state-imposed injury on others. For example, a person injured by someone acting on behalf of a corporation is limited as to the damages he can seek to recover.
These state-bestowed privileges also distort the market by making the corporation artificially competitive/profitable. The single proprietor or partners in a non-corporate business must either carry liability insurance that corporate owners get automatically from the state (in the form of that “limited liability”), or else run a perpetual risk of personal financial ruin that corporate “shareholders” don’t run. This raises their costs, and therefore their prices, but not the corporation’s.
The corporation’s artificially inflated profits produce additional distorting ripples in the market. Corporations grow faster than they could in a free market because they have more capital to invest in that growth. And the bigger they get, the more effectively they lobby government for additional privileges, subsidies and “protections.”
It’s a snowball effect that starts with that one little thing — “here’s a corporate charter — you aren’t bound by the same rules as other market actors, the state will protect you from risk.”
Corporations are not pure market actors. They are part-market, part-state actors. The “market” part is privatized profits. The “state” part is socialized risk. Aside from the obvious prima facie unfairness of that kind of setup, it has consequences. Negative consequences. Sort of like Gresham’s Law — bad business drives out good.
By Thomas Knapp, on January 11th, 2010
Quoth Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal last week:
This was once a familiar line of criticism: Big business’s sin was that it wasn’t entrepreneurial enough. If given the opportunity, business would use government to form cartels and suppress competition. Free markets must thus be protected from the grasp of the corporate monster. The way to bring big business down is by deregulating even more.
If this sounds twisted and counter-intuitive, that’s because it is. This is an argument that might have sounded good in 1979 but for it to make sense today one has to disregard the wreckage all around us courtesy of three decades of regulatory rollback.
Figures from the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC:
Total number of pages in the Federal Register as of 1979: 77,498
Total number of pages in the Federal Register as of 2004: 78,851
Yes, that number has gone down (to as low as 47,418 pages) and up (to as high as 87,012 pages) in the intervening years, but while there are multi-year trends within the narrative, there’s no clear overall trend — and the bottom line is that there were 1.7% more pages of federal regulations in 2004 (the last number LLS offers figures for) than in 1979. How do you get “three decades of regulatory rollback” from that?
Quantity versus quality of regulation is an obvious factor, but frankly (pun intended) I never see any argument or evidence attached to claims of overall “regulatory rollback.”
For me, those claims always bring to mind California’s great turn-of-the-century electricity “deregulation,” which eliminated all sorts of controls … but which was accompanied by one eensy-teensy little bit of new regulation. That one little item — requiring utilities to buy their out-of-state power at the highest possible price in last-minute spot auctions instead of grabbing it cheap a month in advance — drove prices through the roof and resulted in rolling blackouts/brownouts. Which, of course, were promptly blamed not on the idiotic regulation, but on the deregulation.
Anyway, that’s my quibble with Thomas Frank. The rest of the piece is actually quite instructive and well worth reading. He smells a rat in the Republican Party’s faux-populist marketing strategy. So do I.
By D H Smith, on July 6th, 2009
As one of the large number of Americans who depends on a positive business and investment environment for his prosperity, I regarded the election of Barack Obama as president with Democrat majorities in the House and Senate with considerable concern.
But more than the usual number of my fellow businesspeople and investors supported them, contrary to their own interest as it always seemed to me. Of course many of these unlikely Obama voters were as eager for hope and change anyone else. If they gave consideration to the implications of Democrats supermajorities led by Obama for the economy from which they draw life and livelihood, they allowed their desire to believe to outweigh more sober analysis.
Obama took them in totally with the charisma, the gaseous uplift, and the promise of racial reconciliation; they convinced themselves that the redistribtionist, high-tax, anti-business, anti-capital policies to which he rallied his party constituted red meat for their base, not a program for governing.
This misapprehension survived the election, and permitted modest financial market recovery through the end of December 2008, followed by modest declines through Inauguration Day. On Inauguration Day, President Obama delivered a speech that any fair-minded listener would have to admit was far less than a rhetorical tour de force, and far more evocative of class envy and racial struggle than was expected.
Financial markets tanked that day and kept tanking for weeks, pressured further by the stimulus package that offered little real economic stimulus, but a shocking grab bag of packages to traditional Democrat constituencies and not the merest nod to the rights or concerns of the minority.
We experienced headlong collapse from Inauguration Day through first week of March. Obama Democrats in the business and investment community awoke too late to the realization that the Democrat program now encompasses nationalization of vast swathes of industry on the pretext of emergency (autos and banks) or necessity (health care); that owners’ property rights are provisional and expendable; that the ideological attachment of our rulers’ to the green agenda trumps their duty of care to the free-market economy; and that they mean to bleed the productive sectors of the economy to feed the non-productive to the full extent that they can get away with.
So far, so bad. But then something interesting happened — we had a dramatic bounce in stock markets from March through early May. Some of this is probably pricing out the possibility of a 1929-37 depression; some might even be what I regard as an unrealistic pricing in of a rapid economic recovery, when what we still have in prospect is a deep and long recession as in the 70s and early 80s.
But some of the bounce is almost certainly due to the business and investment interest of this country re-assessing President Obama’s grand and ambitious schemes and concluding that they represent impossible over-reach. Rightly or wrongly, they came around to the view that he has expressed extreme initial positions as a negotiating tactic to get more than he could with conventional bipartisanship, but less than he asks. Republicans and responsible Democrats in Congress will push back on the crazier ideas. The American people will not go along, will resist with mute passive aggressiveness and loud argumentation, once the full implications are clear. And if it is not just a tactic, if Obama really insists on every bit of what he says, Republicans will gain enough seats in 2010 to apply the brakes, if not an outright majority. On this view, one way or another, the entire Obama agenda can be resisted.
After stock price gains of over 30% from March to May, markets have stalled since then, and fallen into a few air pockets. The public policy problems for the markets at this point remain the administration’s apparent readiness to overturn our carbon energy-based economy and radical intentions toward the 15% of the economy that health care represents. But the overarching sentiment problem comes from a second reassessment among business people and investors: even if the entire Obama agenda can be resisted and its worst effects rolled back later, on this view a tremendous amount of violence can still be done to the U.S. economy now. In the meantime, we are still losing jobs at a sickening pace while Obama and the Congress wastes unimaginable sums of money on projects lacking any other point beside paying off their friends and allies. In the background the Chinese, our principal creditors, are objecting more and more forcefully to American fiscal unsustainability and the debasement of the U.S. Dollar that this portends.
At the very least, these mid-year movements call upon investors to review their portfolio allocations with care. My own view is currently defensive on U.S. Dollar assets, and seek for growth in Chinese stocks.
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By David Barr, on April 29th, 2009
I am bringing back an old thought that first occurred to me in 2001 after the collapse of Enron. Businesses exist to create real value for real people. Any business should be able to explain how the are adding value and for whom. Ideally, this should be a simple process; a sentence or at most a paragraph. If a company can’t explain this that should raise a red flag.
Of course, some companies provide genuinely obscure products or services. These companies profits should reflect the esoteric nature of their business. The largest most successful businesses from McDonalds to Microsoft should be those companies that are serving vast swathes of the population. If a business claims that its operations are so complex that mere mortals couldn’t possibly comprehend them, that should raise about 10 million red flags.
By Bron Suchecki, on March 16th, 2009
When the economic crisis becomes acute, when the rate of profit sinks towards zero, the bourgeoisie can see only one way to restore its profits: it empties the pockets of the people down to the last centime. It resorts to what M. Caillaux, once finance minister of France, expressively calls “the great penance”: brutal slashing of wages and social expenditures, raising of tariff duties at the expense of the consumer, etc.
The state, furthermore, rescues business enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the masses to foot the bill. Such enterprises are kept alive with subsidies, tax exemptions, orders for public works and armaments. In short, the state thrusts itself into the breach left by the vanishing private customers. …
In richer, more fortunate countries, the bourgeoisie seems to have succeeded, not in escaping the crisis permanently, but at least in extricating itself for the time being from its difficulties. They have been able to start up again, after a fashion, the mechanism of profit, resorting to expedients which at least have not required the substitution of dictatorship for democracy. But they used basically the same methods in both cases: the state refloated private capitalism, revived it with great public works and huge “defense contracts.”
Guerin, Daniel. Fascism and big business. 2nd ed. 1973.
Originally published in 1939 by a French journalist and scholar. I found this in a used bookshop many years ago and had never got around to reading it (there are a number of books in a similar state of limbo in my library). It title on its spine caught my eye tonight and I thought the chapter titled “Big business finances fascism” might yield something relevant to our current situation. Didn’t take long to find the paragraphs above. History repeating? Question is: if the “bourgeoisie” can’t start capitalism back up, are we headed for fascism? Some may say that the fact that the President/Prime Minister changes every now and then just distracts us from the fact that we are already there!
By Cheryl Grey, on November 20th, 2008
The advantages of going virtual for companies are obvious. One
of the greatest of these, yet one that’s often overlooked, is the ability to
select employees without geographical limitations or relocation costs. This
also carries cost-of-living possibilities even within national borders, as, for
example, the price of an editor outside of New York City is rather lower than
the price of one in Manhattan.
However, the most obvious and admittedly greatest saving for
companies is the real estate or total lack thereof. The comparison between a
month’s rent in an office complex to a month’s hosting on a web server is
laughable, and when IBM freed their sales and service personnel from corporate ties,
the savings on office space alone ranged from 40% to 60% per location and
totaled $35 million annually. AT&T gave their sales staff wifi laptops and
turned them loose, also letting go almost ten stories of office space and
cutting costs by 50%.
In addition to reducing direct property costs such as
maintenance and utilities, this also reduces other, less tangible ones as well,
such as liability premiums. After all, how many customers have ever slipped and
broken a leg on a website?
Shifting grounds
For employees, the benefits also seem obvious: save on
transportation, stress, clothing, and dry cleaning, work at home rather than fight
the traffic, live anywhere rather than stick near the office, be home for the
kids, dogs, Maytag repairman. But economically speaking, is it that simple?
In their thought-provoking book Revolutionary Wealth,
Alvin and Heidi Toffler put forward the concept of the “third job.” A person’s
first job, of course, is employment, what we do to earn money; the second,
unpaid job is the tasks that make up the background of life, such as running
the kids to soccer practice or cleaning the kitchen. But the third job, also
unpaid, consists of all the jobs that employees of businesses used to do for us
as part of customer service, but which we are now expected to perform for
ourselves.
The classic example of the third job is banking, and the
very alteration of the word symbolizes the change. The word “bank” used to be a
noun. It was a place people went to deposit or withdraw money, get a copy of a
check, or clear up a discrepancy in one’s statement. Now, however, the word has
become a verb, something that we’re supposed to do for ourselves either online
or at an ATM. The teller behind the counter hasn’t yet become a dinosaur, but
their employment trend is definitely on a downward slope.
This same dynamic is at work in telecommuting. The cost of a
brick-and-mortar establishment doesn’t evaporate; it’s shifted onto the
employee as a percentage of her home is reallocated to serve as her office. To
the mortgage or lease can be added supplementary costs such as electricity,
telecommunications, water and sewage, and even coffee. Additional expenses that
may be incurred include a back-up computer, equipment insurance, and
uninterruptible power supply. While some of these costs would, of course, be
taken as tax deductions or reimbursed by the parent company, or offset by the
savings in other areas, the idea of itemizing one’s beverage of choice is
humorous rather than businesslike. Yet the reality of the cost increase remains.
This third job has been touted as self-service, the ability
to manage our time and tasks for ourselves, and truly there is a gain in
convenience. But that convenience comes at a cost as efficiency is achieved not
through higher productivity per se but through fewer employees.
In addition, rather than merely collecting a paycheck, the
employee is now expected to request reimbursement for those costs considered
reasonable—that third job again, convenient but at a cost of time and effort
nevertheless. It’s also worth noting that the burden of proof has also shifted,
as a business generally pays their own light bill without question but scours employee
reimbursement requests for the same utility for evidence of artificial
inflation.
The concept of an employee-less society seems to be in the
same category as the paperless office we were promised in the 1980s. But the
parameters of employment are changing. As the Tofflers point out in Revolutionary
Wealth, the job as we currently know it is less than 300 years old; before
that time, craftsmen were expected to provide their own tools and workspace.
Perhaps that wheel is completing its circle.
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By Cheryl Grey, on October 17th, 2008
Traditional global credit markets have frozen, and they’re proving difficult to unstick. Under-capitalized banks are not keen to lend out what’s left on their balance sheets—not even and sometimes especially not to each other—and the value of the U.S. currency has risen steeply relative to those of other nations as banks around the world hoard greenbacks to shore up their reserves.
Few consumers are yet being hit hard enough to hurt except those who let the euphoria of easy credit tempt them too far. But the largest danger for the national economy lies in the companies large and small that provide employment, many of which depend upon short-term credit to fund their day-to-day operations.
Corporations that would normally issue commercial paper to finance their capital needs have been disappointed lately, as the market for such short-term debt fell by 11% over the past four weeks, according to the Federal Reserve. Granted this is a volatile data series; however, a fall of U.S. $22 billion in one month is still painful. Research conducted by Greenwich Associates reports that 45% of large corporations and 67% of medium-sized ones have located fewer buyers for their CP, while companies which have been able to sell their debt report that the cost of doing so has risen, in some instances significantly, to further increase the already steepening cost of doing business. Whether the Fed’s plan to bulwark the CP market will bear success remains to be seen.
The Fed’s most recent survey of senior lending officers reported that 65% of domestic banks have raised their lending standards for business loans in all categories, while a recent survey by the National Small Business Association claims that 67% of U.S. small businesses have been affected by the credit crunch, up from 55% in April.
So if the banks aren’t lending, what’s an established small business with the opportunity and desire to expand supposed to do? For that matter, what about the entrepreneur with a great idea? That other “business loan” traditionally employed, the owner’s credit cards, is looking increasingly problematical even if the owner can convince the loan officer to raise the credit limit.
Enter Alternative Financing
Americans are amazingly adept at finding new ways of financing their businesses. Two of the newer methods available are business cash advances and peer-to-peer lending via the Internet.
Unsecured business cash advances drawn on future credit card sales are becoming increasingly popular among small businesses. The funds are generally available within days rather than the weeks required for banks to sort through their paperwork, and because the funds are based on “plastic” sales to be made in the future, not on credit utilized in the past, no credit check is required. Think of them as payday loans for businesses.
Peer-to-peer lending can include loans from friends and relatives but it’s growing fast on the Internet. Of course, angels and venture capitalists have been around for a long time, but for much of that time they’ve limited the amount of exposure they’ve offered to the general business-owning public for fear of an avalanche of funding requests. However, the advent of the Internet has created social networking for entrepreneurs and investors, in the form of bulletin-board websites where those seeking capital can post their business plans and qualifications, and those with capital can locate ideas and teams that interest them.
With the credit crunch freezing traditional funding avenues, one such bulletin board, RaiseCapital.com, reported a “dramatic increase over the last few months” in the number of users on their site. “Both the registered users looking for capital and investors looking for opportunities have increased,” wrote Alyssa Miller, vice president of 5W Public Relations, in an email exchange discussing RaiseCapital.com.
Another online lending service, Angelsoft.com, displayed live statistics indicating 24,478 requests for funding currently submitted, up from 16,030 through the second quarter of 2008, a surge of 52.7%. However, the number of investors only rose from 9,416 to 12,336 in the same time period, a growth rate of 31%.
RaiseCapital.com is a free service, while Angelsoft.com charges a fee to both investors and entrepreneurs to weed out tire-kickers. Even with such entry hurdles to overcome, only 1.32% of all ideas submitted to Angelsoft.com receive funding, but whether that’s an indication of tightness in the market or lack of preparation among the entrepreneurs was not immediately obvious.
By Greg Beatty, on September 6th, 2008
The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth With Innovation. By A. G. Lafley & Ram Charan. Crown Business, 2008. 352 pages. $27.50.
As the subtitle (How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth) of The Game-Changer indicates, this recent volume by A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan is meant more as a business book, even a business how-to manual, than as an economics text. The stature of the two authors may make this a moot point; Charan is a highly influential analyst of corporate America, corporate consultant and author of books such as Boards That Deliver (2005) and Execution (2002), while Lafley is chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble (P & G). Between the two of them, these men regularly make decisions that fundamentally affect the economy. However, that’s not why this book was selected. Rather, The Game-Changer will be discussed for what it shows about the nature of the corporation in a changing economy.
The Game-Changer blends two distinct purposes. It tells how Lafley turned Proctor & Gamble around after being appointed CEO in 2000. The Game-Changer also explains how to innovate, and, as the subtitle suggests, how to use innovation to transform a business and make it more profitable. Since Lafley sees innovation as central to the transformation executed, these two purposes are definitely linked. Often, a challenge at P & G is used as a platform to develop general principles of innovation. What’s more, since Lafley is exceptionally open about how decisions were made, how ideas are developed and what mistakes were made, the sections on P & G are a worthy extended case study in themselves.
The Game-Changer has a number of strengths and weaknesses; like its purposes, these are often interwoven. The co-authorship provides an example. On one hand, it provides opportunities to switch perspectives usefully, moving from inside P & G to outside. On the other, switching points of view from chapter to chapter can be jarring, and it isn’t always clear why the switches occur as they do. (In some cases, I was more interested in the other perspective than the one given. This is especially true when Lafley was discussing things like P & G’s values; he was so caught up in emotionally charged language that he drifted away from reality.) The text doesn’t limit itself to P & G but gives examples from numerous companies—a definite plus. On the other hand, they aren’t as fully realized, and so they become mere sketches or hints at times.Central to the multi-faceted value The Game-Changer offers readers are two definitions. The first is the definition of “game-changer” itself, found on page vii. “Game-changer” is defined seven different ways. All are positive, and it’s clear the definition is meant to be sweeping. However, it also reveals the many potential paradoxes in their endeavor. Are these authors discussing the work of “a visionary strategist” who would reshape things unilaterally? Or the “hardheaded humanist” of the seventh definition “who sees innovation as a social process”? The tension between these two is part of what fascinates about this book and about innovation today; who controls the changing game? The economy?
The second essential definition is of innovation: “An innovation is the conversion of a new idea into revenues and profits” (21). The book goes to draw the distinction between invention and innovation and to explain that, without customers and success in the market, an innovation “is, at best, a curiosity.” From a business standpoint, that sounds pragmatic and perhaps even self-evident. However, notice what this does; it focuses solely on the successful innovations. It removes the learning process, and, because no time scale is provided, is likely to pressure firms to focus on the short-term.
Other tensions define the book and P & G’s struggle. On one hand, Lafley can sum up situations simply, saying, “P & G prices were too high” (9). On another hand, he can discuss his organization’s corporate cultures with phrases that are so cliché they are almost dim. What does it mean to say “P & G is purpose-lead and values-driven” (11)? Seriously. Are their organizations out there that are saying, “We’re proudly purpose-free”? And yet, there’s the much needed third hand on which we must recount the intense complexity of reorganizing an entire corporation, one with highly profitable brands, and realigning how business is done. There is a tremendous gap between the overly simple statements and the deeply complicated information sorting P & G, or any innovative company, must engage in. If you read The Game-Changer, you won’t just be studying Proctor & Gamble or innovation. You’ll get a glimpse at how an organization, even an immensely successful organization, must redefine itself as the economy shifts.
Two details of this redefinition deserve special attention, both for their centrality to the process and because the authors deal with them explicitly: unlike many of us, Lafley & Charan recognize the forces at work on them. The first is a push towards commoditization, a transformation that has blindsided too many firms who thought they’d differentiated themselves in the market. The Game-Changer explains how P & G used innovation to differentiate themselves in a market defined by commoditization. Second, and perhaps the most fascinating part of the book, Lafley describes the lengths to which researchers at P & G go to understand their customers. My favorite is “Living It,” a program developed after 2001 as part of P & G’s “consumer closeness program” (38), in which employees actually live with customers. The description of what they learned from living with lower-income customers in Mexico is striking, and it’s hard to imagine learning such a visceral respect for these specific values any other way. It’s clear that in an information economy, successful organizations may have to become economic anthropologists to get the information they need, and that is changing the game indeed.
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By Greg Beatty, on June 10th, 2008
University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education. By Jennifer Washburn. Basic Books, 2005. 326 pages. $26.00.
 University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education is a necessary book but also a sobering, even depressing one. If you’re concerned about your health, your education or your country, you won’t enjoy what you read in these pages…but you should read University, Inc.
Science is the reason. While numerous theorists since World War II have worked to theorize and complicate the process of knowledge creation in science—Thomas Kuhn’s work comes to mind immediately—the ideal of science as a disinterested arbiter of truth remains. In this vision of what science should be, truth matters. We trust scientific reports because of this aura of dedication, even purity. In these pages Jennifer Washburn documents just how tainted science has become.
Its transformation has not come through malicious intent. Indeed, as Washburn explains, at many points throughout this transformation, science and education have been changed with the best of intentions. As Washburn points out in her historical overview of higher education articulated in the book’s second chapter, scientific research in this country has long had two fairly distinct mandates. One was to pursue pure, abstract research. The other was to engage in practical research, especially applied research that would help the people in a university’s region, as has long been the case with the nation’s agricultural colleges.
However, in progressive steps since World War II—and especially since the 1970s when economic downturns led to a general increase in federal investment in science as a way to spark economic recovery—academic research has shifted not just to the applied and practical but also to a market model. What this means, Washburn explains, is a number of things. First, following the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, rather than new ideas flowing freely from universities outward to the community, universities have emphasized research that can be patented—and have retained the patents on these discoveries. This means that universities shift to what Washburn calls “Market-Model U.” In itself, this is not all bad. As someone who has taught in state colleges, I can attest to the waste found in some systems and the inefficiency and the dated slowness with which things are executed. If it were possible to infuse just the efficiency and pace of the finest private enterprises, this would be a good thing.
It hasn’t been possible to do only that, though, Washburn argues. Instead, as federal funding for higher education dried up, universities sought funding elsewhere, producing an increased emphasis on corporate funding. Washburn documents a second effect which is how this has chilled academic research. Stories of graduate students who, due to contractual obligations, can’t share their work, even with their own professors, should make readers blink, as should the anecdotes about faculty members stealing student work. Greed drives dishonesty in Washburn’s account.
This leads to a third damning trend: bias. Any bias in a scientific study should be disturbing, but Chapter 5, in which Washburn documents the systematic distortion of medical studies, should make readers more than a little queasy. These distortions range from the relatively benign (reporting a test drug has a positive effect when it has little or none) to the literally deadly. Deaths have been covered up, as have risks of death, so that drugs can be brought to market for profit. The conclusion is clear: whatever the ideal of science once was, it is not strong enough to stand up to temptation. Self-interest rules.
To be frank, the later chapters are not as strong as these early ones exposing abuses. The attempts to shape new Silicon Valleys and revive regions may fail, but their intentions are good and not necessarily driven by greed (except for prestige and regional pride). Washburn’s discussion of academic employment patterns is not bad, but it is insufficient. What’s more, that she really isn’t that concerned about these is witnessed by the final chapter: all the suggestions for reform focus on intellectual property and clinical research. The attempts to change the nature of education through the use of superstar education may repel some, but it needs to be put into a much larger and more detailed context. It seems more a symptom of the Information Age and what podcasts and computers offer than of the market model per se. How, for example, does MIT’s choice to put its courses online for free fit with this? In other words, the changes detailed in this book are part of a wider redefinition of the ownership of knowledge, a shift linked to everything from music downloads to Wikipedia, and needs to be put in that context.
While my objections matter, and I wish the second half of the book were better (richer, fuller, more inclusive and complex), the expose that fills University, Inc.’s chapters on science and medicine struck fear in my heart, and I suspect they’ll do the same for other readers.
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