This is the first Persuasion article I have read that I can say I was shocked to see here. The unrestrained language was certainly a giveaway, but in general the tone of the piece was like nothing I have ever seen here.
I honestly don't know anyone who "valorizes" CEOs as a group, and the only place I can see it coming from is a person whose worldview about corporate America comes from the darkest parts of the very extreme left. There are CEOs who are unlovable, and CEOs who are incompetent. But who is it, exactly, that is viewing them as heroes?
Some CEOs are excellent (I've worked for a couple) and deserve praise for their far-thinking work, which is, in fact, quite hard. Is there room in the author's world for those of us who admire them?
I won't even get into the author's unfortunate attempts to diagnose and psychoanalyze CEOs. I have been a Persuasion subscriber from its start, and hope never again to see an article like this, which is not, in my opinion, persuasive at all.
Totally agree, David. I couldn't do more than skim this *very fast* after the first few lines, skipped to the comments to see if anyone thought this guy had something worthwhile to say. I was debating whether or not to continue my subscription to Persuasion, am increasingly thinking I made the wrong decision.
There are plenty of people who view certain CEOs as heroes (Musk is the one that comes to mind immediately), but they are rarely valorized for being a CEO. They are valorized because they say things that people like...or even better, say things that people's enemies hate.
I was working at General Electric when Jack Welch took it over. I thought that GE was the greatest corporation that had ever been created in the United States. I was proud of both the quality and the range of the products that we made, and of the fact that WE made them. But Jack Welch wasn't interested in making products, he was interested in making money. He juiced the stock price with short-term measures -- a lot of this article could have described him -- and by effectively liquidating the company. He retired as the most respected businessman in America, and managed to get out just before the whole house came crashing down. What he managed best was his exit, for himself anyway. That was real virtuoso work.
There are a lot of good CEOs out there, I'm sure. I consider Warren Buffett to be one of them, and I could name others. But for every CEO who wants to be another Warren Buffett, it seems that there are a hundred or a thousand or more who want to be another Jack Welch.
As long as that's true, cautionary tales like this serve a useful purpose.
This was a disappointing article. I'm not sure what it's a response to; if it was a response to all those articles out there saying that valorizing a murderer is really a bad thing, then I think it's non-responsive. If it's a screed on CEOs that could have been written by any vaguely progressive or leftist outlet, well, it's certainly that. Boring, uncomplicated, and one-sided.
Wow! Shalom is an excellent humorist with a useful take on many absurdities in this world, which is why I subscribe to his Substack and was gladdened to see his essay here. However, I've been thinking about canceling my subscription to Persuasion because I seldom read what seems like so much rehashing of hash. The comments here suggest I'm in the wrong company, among people who cannot tolerate a different viewpoint, let alone acknowledge the writer's skill in presenting that viewpoint.
Re the denials that we valorize CEOs .... We're about to be governed by an executive branch stuffed to the gills with them. Let's see how well that goes ....
I totally agree we get an awful lot of rehashing of hash here. I don't mind the Pozzo's viewpoint at all. I mind the lack of depth. For humor, try Nellie Bowles at The Free Press. Also has a refreshing viewpoint.
When I read the comments on this article, I realise with great dismay that as a reader of Persuasion I am obviously in the company of completely humourless ignoramuses. I prefer criticism of social reality, when it comes in the guise of cheerful science, to talk dressed up as science. When I translate the word liberalism into my mother tongue, I breathe the air of freedom. And nothing is more opposed to freedom than the dark seriousness of medieval scholasticism. I am deeply grateful to Shalom Auslander for his cheerful reflection on the sad truth of the new, blithely spreading feudalism. And I am also very grateful to him for encouraging some readers to make public in their comments their lack of humour and thus their short-sightedness and artistic illiteracy.
For me, it was more of an issue of the writing being from the sanctimonious, smug, scold school of John Oliver and Samantha Bee. I say this as someone on the left who strongly believe in a role for the state. Maybe its just my age but I find the "good guys" vs "bad guys" humour really boring and uninteresting. Perhaps if I were 20, I would have LOL'd this piece.
So, maybe antisocial, narcissistic, and/or psychotic. But let’s not forget about the banality of evil. Once I spent a morning listening to quarterly corporate earnings calls, then lunched with my sister who had retired as an equities portfolio manager for a major endowment. She oversaw some $2B in investments. As you might imagine, she got up close and personal with any number of CEOs. I ranted to her about how ill-prepared and uninteresting the CEOs had been on that morning’s calls. Well, she said, you have to remember that most of them didn’t get to where they are by making, building, or inventing something. They got there by managing up in a vast bureaucracy.
Rant to the choir, scold everyone else. A good article for not Persuasion. Nice Manichean framing of Luigi Raskolnikov as our hero/not hero ? ..... Maybe modern day Raskolnikov really is a revolutionary or just some upper middle class schmuck that did too much micro dosing of LSD and came up with some piss poor justification for what is otherwise can be better understood as a psychotic break.
Because we cant be very much against the ridiculous wealth and power inequality and amoral nature of the big gravity of single minded bureaucracies tasked to "make money for share holders" yet also be repulsed at vigilantly murder at the same time?
Why are so many people wanting to cancel Shalom? True, this is a rant, a screed, a polemic, a jeremiad. One could fairly say that he gives us A Modest Proposal without Jonathan Swift’s depth. Just as surely, the problem of the worship of the rich is better dealt with by Adam Smith in A Theory of Moral Sentiments. But why insist on removing him from Persuasion?
Business schools do turn out intelligent and hard-working people who have had every sense of ethics and social responsibility eradicated from them. The problem with worshiping the rich has been discussed since Socrates at least. We are human and continue to make the same mistakes.
Although I agree that a fine rhetorical skill alone is not enough and is a pillar of why nothing gets better, not being open to the views, or rants in this case, of others is another one. We need our Thomas Paines to tear down the self-important fools that too often rule us, even as we leave it to others to do the hard work of building something better. I am sure that many Persuasion readers are far more knowledgeable than Shalom when it comes to business, economics, science, and medicine. However, his voice merits being heard, even if he should work harder at understanding the domains that he criticizes.
This is unlike other pieces I see in Persuasion. It’s a rant, and kind of a dumb one. It’s not an argument; it’s not thoughtful; it’s annoying. Please get back to worthwhile content.
I'm going to echo the sentiments here that this is not Persuasion at its finest. Just two quibbles among many.
1. The only thing that hyperlinking to a single study proves is that you don't understand statistics. I can find individual studies that prove that aliens exist and that telepathy is totally a real thing. I can find hundreds of studies that "prove" that global warming is not occurring. A study is a measurement with noise. Aggregate them and you can get a pretty good sense of an effect. Look at one in isolation and you can get pretty much anything. Cherry pick a subset of studies (as in the global warming example), and you can "prove" that it's all an illusion.
2. I haven't read the Goldman Sachs report, but on its surface “Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?” is a valid question. Biomed companies are businesses and they need to fund their operations and satisfy their shareholders. If one-shot cures aren't profitable, no matter how much you complain, they won't research them. In order to rectify the situation, we would either have to publicly fund the research or provides subsidies to make it attractive to biomed companies. But we won't know if this is necessary unless we know the answer to that question.
Why is it that those of us who support Persuasion have no real input? Sure, we can comment. But no one up top even claims they're listening. How does that make a community? Why are we excluded and someone like Shalom allowed to post rants that go to (as I think Yascha said) about 80,000?
Apart from the interviews/conversations Yascha Mounk still broadcasts, Persuasion seems increasingly to consist of random articles of varying quality, plus Yascha's building his personal brand in his own posts. I've wondered, too, who gets to write for Persuasion, other than some of the editorial staff. Anyone who submits? A thread seems to have been lost, a line of thinking that had clarity and purpose.
This article is crap. It seems written by someone unwell... on the verge of being institutionalized. Making generalized claims of any class of people, CEO, etc.. is sign of mental midgetness and class bigotry.
One thing about most CEOs... they have lived a life as a non-CEO... a worker. One thing about those that denigrate CEOs... they have never been and likely will never be a CEO because they lack the required capabilities to do that job.
I think for many afflicted with CEO derangement syndrome, they are chronic losers that hate everyone they do not measure up to. Or they conflate corporations as being their mommy instead of being simply a business that only pursues profit and owner returns.
What a genuinely poorly-written article. I’m disappointed in Persuasion for greenlighting this. It fails at its attempts at humor, and, what’s worse, fails much more at a reasoned or persuasive argument. There are still great pieces of writing coming from Persuasion, but they’ve let some stinkers out recently. This is certainly the worst from them yet.
I’ve never known a CEO, and as I’ve spent my life in independent education, I’d hardly be in any position to judge the validity of this article. With one part of it, though, I am in full agreement - the assessment of Donald Trump. I’ve never rid myself (not that I’ve tried very hard) of the thought that he, along with his buddy Elon, views the US Government of little more than a shiny toy with which to amuse himself regardless of the effect his actions have on anyone but himself. He initiated his second campaign largely on the assumption that getting re-elected was his best chance to stay out of jail. And in that goal he has certainly succeeded.
Now, with a second term awaiting him and the prospect of it being his last (absent a Supreme Court fiasco to allow him a third), he has even less incentive to concern himself with all the ‘little people’ who will bear the brunt of whatever games he chooses to play with his toy this time around.
This is the first Persuasion article I have read that I can say I was shocked to see here. The unrestrained language was certainly a giveaway, but in general the tone of the piece was like nothing I have ever seen here.
I honestly don't know anyone who "valorizes" CEOs as a group, and the only place I can see it coming from is a person whose worldview about corporate America comes from the darkest parts of the very extreme left. There are CEOs who are unlovable, and CEOs who are incompetent. But who is it, exactly, that is viewing them as heroes?
Some CEOs are excellent (I've worked for a couple) and deserve praise for their far-thinking work, which is, in fact, quite hard. Is there room in the author's world for those of us who admire them?
I won't even get into the author's unfortunate attempts to diagnose and psychoanalyze CEOs. I have been a Persuasion subscriber from its start, and hope never again to see an article like this, which is not, in my opinion, persuasive at all.
Totally agree, David. I couldn't do more than skim this *very fast* after the first few lines, skipped to the comments to see if anyone thought this guy had something worthwhile to say. I was debating whether or not to continue my subscription to Persuasion, am increasingly thinking I made the wrong decision.
There are plenty of people who view certain CEOs as heroes (Musk is the one that comes to mind immediately), but they are rarely valorized for being a CEO. They are valorized because they say things that people like...or even better, say things that people's enemies hate.
I was working at General Electric when Jack Welch took it over. I thought that GE was the greatest corporation that had ever been created in the United States. I was proud of both the quality and the range of the products that we made, and of the fact that WE made them. But Jack Welch wasn't interested in making products, he was interested in making money. He juiced the stock price with short-term measures -- a lot of this article could have described him -- and by effectively liquidating the company. He retired as the most respected businessman in America, and managed to get out just before the whole house came crashing down. What he managed best was his exit, for himself anyway. That was real virtuoso work.
There are a lot of good CEOs out there, I'm sure. I consider Warren Buffett to be one of them, and I could name others. But for every CEO who wants to be another Warren Buffett, it seems that there are a hundred or a thousand or more who want to be another Jack Welch.
As long as that's true, cautionary tales like this serve a useful purpose.
This was a disappointing article. I'm not sure what it's a response to; if it was a response to all those articles out there saying that valorizing a murderer is really a bad thing, then I think it's non-responsive. If it's a screed on CEOs that could have been written by any vaguely progressive or leftist outlet, well, it's certainly that. Boring, uncomplicated, and one-sided.
Wow! Shalom is an excellent humorist with a useful take on many absurdities in this world, which is why I subscribe to his Substack and was gladdened to see his essay here. However, I've been thinking about canceling my subscription to Persuasion because I seldom read what seems like so much rehashing of hash. The comments here suggest I'm in the wrong company, among people who cannot tolerate a different viewpoint, let alone acknowledge the writer's skill in presenting that viewpoint.
Re the denials that we valorize CEOs .... We're about to be governed by an executive branch stuffed to the gills with them. Let's see how well that goes ....
BTW, one of the links to an article about psychopathic CEOs features a photo that sure looks like our felonious soon-to-be RePresident: https://fortune.com/2021/06/06/corporate-psychopaths-business-leadership-csr
I totally agree we get an awful lot of rehashing of hash here. I don't mind the Pozzo's viewpoint at all. I mind the lack of depth. For humor, try Nellie Bowles at The Free Press. Also has a refreshing viewpoint.
When I read the comments on this article, I realise with great dismay that as a reader of Persuasion I am obviously in the company of completely humourless ignoramuses. I prefer criticism of social reality, when it comes in the guise of cheerful science, to talk dressed up as science. When I translate the word liberalism into my mother tongue, I breathe the air of freedom. And nothing is more opposed to freedom than the dark seriousness of medieval scholasticism. I am deeply grateful to Shalom Auslander for his cheerful reflection on the sad truth of the new, blithely spreading feudalism. And I am also very grateful to him for encouraging some readers to make public in their comments their lack of humour and thus their short-sightedness and artistic illiteracy.
For me, it was more of an issue of the writing being from the sanctimonious, smug, scold school of John Oliver and Samantha Bee. I say this as someone on the left who strongly believe in a role for the state. Maybe its just my age but I find the "good guys" vs "bad guys" humour really boring and uninteresting. Perhaps if I were 20, I would have LOL'd this piece.
So, maybe antisocial, narcissistic, and/or psychotic. But let’s not forget about the banality of evil. Once I spent a morning listening to quarterly corporate earnings calls, then lunched with my sister who had retired as an equities portfolio manager for a major endowment. She oversaw some $2B in investments. As you might imagine, she got up close and personal with any number of CEOs. I ranted to her about how ill-prepared and uninteresting the CEOs had been on that morning’s calls. Well, she said, you have to remember that most of them didn’t get to where they are by making, building, or inventing something. They got there by managing up in a vast bureaucracy.
Rant to the choir, scold everyone else. A good article for not Persuasion. Nice Manichean framing of Luigi Raskolnikov as our hero/not hero ? ..... Maybe modern day Raskolnikov really is a revolutionary or just some upper middle class schmuck that did too much micro dosing of LSD and came up with some piss poor justification for what is otherwise can be better understood as a psychotic break.
Because we cant be very much against the ridiculous wealth and power inequality and amoral nature of the big gravity of single minded bureaucracies tasked to "make money for share holders" yet also be repulsed at vigilantly murder at the same time?
Why are so many people wanting to cancel Shalom? True, this is a rant, a screed, a polemic, a jeremiad. One could fairly say that he gives us A Modest Proposal without Jonathan Swift’s depth. Just as surely, the problem of the worship of the rich is better dealt with by Adam Smith in A Theory of Moral Sentiments. But why insist on removing him from Persuasion?
Business schools do turn out intelligent and hard-working people who have had every sense of ethics and social responsibility eradicated from them. The problem with worshiping the rich has been discussed since Socrates at least. We are human and continue to make the same mistakes.
Although I agree that a fine rhetorical skill alone is not enough and is a pillar of why nothing gets better, not being open to the views, or rants in this case, of others is another one. We need our Thomas Paines to tear down the self-important fools that too often rule us, even as we leave it to others to do the hard work of building something better. I am sure that many Persuasion readers are far more knowledgeable than Shalom when it comes to business, economics, science, and medicine. However, his voice merits being heard, even if he should work harder at understanding the domains that he criticizes.
I expected the author to run out of straw long before running out of juvenile interjections; and, sure enough, he did. Who venerates CEOs?
Count me among those who were deeply puzzled to find this on Persuasion, which is usually the most grown-up of Substacks.
this is by far the best response. well said.
This is unlike other pieces I see in Persuasion. It’s a rant, and kind of a dumb one. It’s not an argument; it’s not thoughtful; it’s annoying. Please get back to worthwhile content.
I'm going to echo the sentiments here that this is not Persuasion at its finest. Just two quibbles among many.
1. The only thing that hyperlinking to a single study proves is that you don't understand statistics. I can find individual studies that prove that aliens exist and that telepathy is totally a real thing. I can find hundreds of studies that "prove" that global warming is not occurring. A study is a measurement with noise. Aggregate them and you can get a pretty good sense of an effect. Look at one in isolation and you can get pretty much anything. Cherry pick a subset of studies (as in the global warming example), and you can "prove" that it's all an illusion.
2. I haven't read the Goldman Sachs report, but on its surface “Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?” is a valid question. Biomed companies are businesses and they need to fund their operations and satisfy their shareholders. If one-shot cures aren't profitable, no matter how much you complain, they won't research them. In order to rectify the situation, we would either have to publicly fund the research or provides subsidies to make it attractive to biomed companies. But we won't know if this is necessary unless we know the answer to that question.
Meshuganism indeed.
Why is it that those of us who support Persuasion have no real input? Sure, we can comment. But no one up top even claims they're listening. How does that make a community? Why are we excluded and someone like Shalom allowed to post rants that go to (as I think Yascha said) about 80,000?
Apart from the interviews/conversations Yascha Mounk still broadcasts, Persuasion seems increasingly to consist of random articles of varying quality, plus Yascha's building his personal brand in his own posts. I've wondered, too, who gets to write for Persuasion, other than some of the editorial staff. Anyone who submits? A thread seems to have been lost, a line of thinking that had clarity and purpose.
This article is crap. It seems written by someone unwell... on the verge of being institutionalized. Making generalized claims of any class of people, CEO, etc.. is sign of mental midgetness and class bigotry.
One thing about most CEOs... they have lived a life as a non-CEO... a worker. One thing about those that denigrate CEOs... they have never been and likely will never be a CEO because they lack the required capabilities to do that job.
I think for many afflicted with CEO derangement syndrome, they are chronic losers that hate everyone they do not measure up to. Or they conflate corporations as being their mommy instead of being simply a business that only pursues profit and owner returns.
What a genuinely poorly-written article. I’m disappointed in Persuasion for greenlighting this. It fails at its attempts at humor, and, what’s worse, fails much more at a reasoned or persuasive argument. There are still great pieces of writing coming from Persuasion, but they’ve let some stinkers out recently. This is certainly the worst from them yet.
Twenty years in the corporate world? Got no problem with capitalism? What's wrong with you?
I’ve never known a CEO, and as I’ve spent my life in independent education, I’d hardly be in any position to judge the validity of this article. With one part of it, though, I am in full agreement - the assessment of Donald Trump. I’ve never rid myself (not that I’ve tried very hard) of the thought that he, along with his buddy Elon, views the US Government of little more than a shiny toy with which to amuse himself regardless of the effect his actions have on anyone but himself. He initiated his second campaign largely on the assumption that getting re-elected was his best chance to stay out of jail. And in that goal he has certainly succeeded.
Now, with a second term awaiting him and the prospect of it being his last (absent a Supreme Court fiasco to allow him a third), he has even less incentive to concern himself with all the ‘little people’ who will bear the brunt of whatever games he chooses to play with his toy this time around.