The Man Who Broke Capitalism (book review)

The Man Who Broke Capitalism (book review)

the many meanings of “shareholder value”…

 

 

Book review:

The Man Who Broke Capitalism:

How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland

and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—

        and How to Undo His Legacy

 

by David Gelles

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022

264 pages

 

Gelles has written a dreadfully important expose of the evolution of the disastrous idolatry of “maximizing shareholder value” and funneling more and more of America’s corporate wealth to the relatively small cadre of executives and directors and financiers who took advantage of it to line their own pockets and deny economic success to just about everyone else.

Of course, Gelles doesn’t say that Jack Welch was the only one who did it. For my taste, the title of the book is a distraction from the truth: America’s financial elite have misappropriated the industrial wealth of the country.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism concludes with a broadly detailed array of governmental policies that would remediate the disaster that Jack Welch and the Chicago school of economists and so many others created to be a substitute for the notion that a corporation is a creature of our society, and is best understood as a conduit for creating goods, creating wealth, and widely distributing both.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: Ethan Frome

it’s about not being satisfied with less…

by Edith Wharton

click here

Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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