Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society, and at some point, some CEOs decided: "You know, the Ludlow massacre and the Bisbee deportation were not that bad". And now, we get the pushback, where some employees think that murdering a CEO in the middle of Manhattan is fair game.
Rules didn't disappear. But people are more willing to go to conflict about them.
This feels like a whitewashing of a lot of post WWII history. That “less violent society” included the Korean and Vietnam wars, multiple assassinations, civil rights riots, the Kent State massacre and the Cold War.
Was it that society was less violent or that we became more diverse in our ability to commit violence?
I don't think this is an accurate assessment. More of the violence was swept under the rug, but it was still there.
Post WW2 the US did well because a lot of old incumbent industries were disrupted by the war and swift technological advancements in many areas that opened up a lot of opportunities for scrappy startups. Also, the baby boom meant the workforce was skewed young and entitlements were not a major factor in the economy. Finally, the US had a federal government that was willing to tax the rich and not yet fully infiltrated by moneyed interests as well as an independent news media. Well, more independent than today's news media at least.
The primary problem with capitalism is that once you accumulate enough money it is easy to create a feedback loop where that money creates more money with little to no input on your part. This causes money to accumulate at the top where it has nothing to do but make more money. The primary advantage of capitalistic economies is that the power is pushed down to the edges closer to where the information is, but when allowed to run unchecked that advantage is lost as the power accumulates at the top, just like a command economy. This is why it is so important to tax the rich and to avoid creating billionaires, they can't efficient spend the money they have for the same reason communism doesn't scale well: the information bottleneck.
Welch wasn't a problem until what he feared, backlash from people who had been around for the last cycle of cruelty precipitated by his ideas, sufficiently died/attritioned out.
Give Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames a read.
He does an excellent job at laying out the pedigree of thought from slave/plantation management to modern American management theory, and charting out the trends and consequences that arise from political shifts in the equilibrium between capital and labor.
https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Col...
What he was good at was exploiting the system for personal gain.
Agreed, Welch didn’t invent shareholder primacy, but he industrialized it. What makes him so consequential isn’t that he played the game better, but that he normalized a playbook that treated human capital as expendable
Sounds like Trump, for better or for worse
What many free market advocates don’t seem to understand is that free markets aren’t actually a default but require the right environment with certain government regulation and societal norms.
Folks like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman helped diminish those conditions. Now after 4 decades we’re seeing the results.
Think Warren Buffett style billionaire versus Elon Musk style.
what a man! Sorry, but while I claim no great ethical or moral standing myself I do dislike anything that smacks of applauding their absence in others.
Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry (infrastructure, resources, education, labour, health system) and give almost nothing back (except for a few workers and too few taxes). I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.
“The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”
—George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
It was fairly real up until about the 1970s: every generation had it better than the one before it. After the 1980s, Gen-X and everyone after them started having a tougher time.
At which point in history was it not about exactly that?
> At which point in history was it not about exactly that?
Up until (at least) the 1960s. In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...
Not that I found corporations great, but there is no indication that society was doing really well before global corporations existed.
Curtis has done a good job of getting people to forget his white nationalism, though he insists he isn't one, but he's quite comfortable with it.
> It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.
And though he later wrote articles saying "I'm not a white nationalist", they were largely sympathetic to the "cause" and then just said "but I'm not one."
As far as I'm concerned, Welch turned GE from an industrial behemoth that more than lived up to its name, to a pale shadow of itself that has sold off almost everything. "Outsource Everything" has been an absolute disaster for our economy that will take decades to dig out of, if we even have the will to try.
If we accept the premise that Welch sold the goose that laid the golden egg for short-term "number go up" and immediate shareholder satisfaction, another question arises. Are there other non-market forces (such as easy money policies from the central bank, or an unfriendly domestic regulatory environment) which created this equilibrium? If so, then laying blame at the feet of "capitalist greed" or the trope of monocled Monopoly men in stovepipe hats, may be misplaced.
That said, I'm not sure that, "Jack Welch, the Man Who Optimized For the Corporatist Mixed-Economy" would resonate as well with audiences.
Squeezing people is an easier source of investment gains. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but competition is for the little guy. If you listen to business pitches or investor relations or take business classes you know the real game is all about avoiding fair competition by hook or by crook, and the biggest companies are the ones who have done this successfully. Two-sided markets, network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, etc, etc, and yes, at the bottom of the the list of anticompetitive forces we have the runt red-headed stepchild of regulatory capture, which is real, but tends to be overstated by people who want blanket deregulation and reverse-engineer their complaints to get what they want.
> Are there other non-market forces which created this equilibrium?
Haha, and here we see the reverse-engineering process in action. Capitalism is never responsible for its own messes! Every mess MUST have come from a market distortion! Deregulation is always the answer!
Welch exploited a combination of events when a lot of those limitations (especially legal) ended, acting in extremely capitalist ways.
At the risk of a serious tangent, the bots here have become so out of control that there is also a major anti-bot pattern that downvotes anything that remotely looks like a bot.
I know we aren't supposed to ever say HN is in decline, but LLMs really do look like they've killed it.
Regardless I say that to say it bewilders me how easily we, well mostly Americans, fell into this trap of believing that most humans are unnecessary and all that matters is skill at amassing capital. After a certain point not only does the economy of scale break down the whole system collapses in on itself. I’m sure they’ll have a great time pontificating and self aggrandizing in the Gulch while everyone else is doing the real work of rebuilding.
I suppose in hindsight they have a point. So much human effort is merely discovery that, if perfect information existed, really would have been pointless and unnecessary. Those who land into the right information, even if only by dumb luck, end up amassing capital as a natural consequence, so to the outside observer such people appear to be the "chosen ones" who have it all figured out.
This doesn't end with economics. In general, those who are deemed to not have the right information tend to be ostracized. To be wrong is the greatest sin a person, at least an American person, can make. This was particularly apparent during the high tensions of the COVID pandemic, where great friendships were lost when the parties involved couldn't agree on who had the right information.
The flaw in all that, of course, is that perfect information doesn't exist. I suspect the idea that it does was fuelled heavily by the college marketing campaigns of a several decades ago — that which also brought us the idea if you don't get a degree, you'll be forever stricken to flipping burgers at McDonald's — selling the idea that perfect information is available if only you choose to accept it. But, before you get your panties in a knot, let it be emphasized that my suspicions could be wrong and that's okay. Perfect information doesn't exist.
Did I miss where he was pushing for the robots to take over?
It never came due in Jack's time and he looked like an absolute genius. His successor should have been able to defuse the debt bomb over time, but because of the expectations of success that Jack left behind (and some glaring failures of the new CEO) the bomb was left in place and debt continued to pile up.
Of course the bomb went off eventually and the rest is history, GE is not a company anymore.
Aside from the moral issues of Jack's approach (layoffs etc) the true sin is the over financialization of everything in America which I think Jack really set the tone for.
I would highly recommend the book Power Failure with William Cohan. https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/05...
I grew up in a "GE town" and watched it fall into severe neglect as GE's stock price rose. Watched my mother get laid off and pushed into a service company that she and many others referred to as "the bastard child of GE."
I always felt that there was a lot of smoke-and-mirrors behind Welch & the stock price. And I felt that Welch would depart before the check came due. Immelt got hammered, in part, because of Jack's sins--I don't know if Immelt deserved it because I stopped paying attention to GE in the early 2000s.
My opinion of GE was / is not based on some detailed and thorough analysis. It came from observing the disconnect between what happened to my hometown and the stock price.
Maybe we’re at that moment in a pendulum's arc where it pauses and starts to begin its trajectory back in the other direction. I hope we're there because we need to reset.
A Man Who Broke Capitalism – Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33416436 - Nov 2022 (20 comments)
A Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838966 - June 2024 (3 comments)
Can someone summarize how companies were behaving in this golden age, or what characterized them?
