Again last week, BusinessWeek sent me a subscription renewal notice. And again, the notice went into the shredder.
I won’t toss my issues after the notice. BusinessWeek holds to pretty high editorial standards. (I read widely enough to know this.) Having said that, the business press still refuses to see the naked emperors all around it, and my intro six-month subscription to BusinessWeek proved that it’s no exception.
Specifically: BusinessWeek continues to profile business matters while ignoring the shaky economic foundations upon which those matters depend. And annoyingly, BusinessWeek continues to blame individuals, institutions, governments and anybody else they can pick on safely. While I particularly loved the repeated use of the term “former masters of the universe” to describe fallen Wall Street titans, I know that such lines of attack deflect attention away from the real problem – our continued reliance on a faulty understanding of economic reality and the ripples between that faulty understanding and society at large.
Now, I’m not so deluded as to suggest that we humans know everything. People still die of cancer, homes get swept away in floods and wars continue to ravage faraway lands, and there ain’t much we can do about those things. But basic economics? Let’s consider a few of the elements BusinessWeek studiously avoids in its pages.
Consider externalities. When a company can externalize a cost, it can create a good or service for a lower price and compete more effectively. It’s one thing when that externality doesn’t hurt anybody. In our world, the externality often happens so far away that it can’t hurt a firm’s customers.
(Before you read on, please forgive my penchant for rhetorical questions.)
How much longer will that hold true? If the butterfly’s wings in Singapore causes a killer tornado in Kansas, could the SUV pulling up to an American pump cause human suffering in places where the fuel comes from? Ever wonder how select retailers get their everyday low prices? And whether their methods might cause the dominoes to crash down on the economic bubble we enjoy in the West?
How about the still largely unquestioned mantra of growth being good, contraction bad? Few people take the thought to its logical extreme, so let’s use an analogy from the world of nature. The one organism that continues to grow throughout its life span is cancer. The problem: cancer eventually kills the host that feeds it, thus killing itself.
How about self-regulating economies, presented as idealized models of commercial gain for all? Investment-banker acquaintances of mine still try to explain to me the value of that related concept, self-correcting markets. I remember studying these on demand-supply graphs back in business school (University of Toronto). What those simplistic graphs did not speak about are what an actual “market correction” looks like. Current circumstances make me believe the term is too gentle to serve as much more than an understated euphemism.
Many businesses ignore externalities, push for “self-regulation” and, even now, accept self-correcting markets as part of their plans. Should businesses perhaps reexamine what they do in light of these and other now-discredited economic myths? Such realities might be tough for them to swallow.
That’s where BusinessWeek could come in – by looking at the environmental problems that threaten commercial endeavors instead of cowering from the complexity of such analysis. That analysis may take imagination, intellectual freedom from known constraints, a willingness to take criticism from less creative minds – and perhaps the sheer guts to stand up to certain advertisers.
It would also take the courage to propose concepts that may seem, at first blush, anti-business. Imagine an America dedicated to energy conservation, and the long-term effects of that dedication. Imagine huge retailers who decide to set bars for minimum human rights standards that manufacturers – not countries, but manufacturers – must meet. That bar, rising over time, would affect decisions to locate plants, for instance, which in turn might force the hand of countries with “low labor costs” to clean up their acts. In the long term.
I propose that BusinessWeek’s readers are ready for this kind of analysis and blue-sky thinking. Is BusinessWeek itself ready for such change? I doubt it – that doesn’t seem to be in the mandate. Besides, I presume plenty of other readers still find value in BusinessWeek as it is.
But the worship of short-term financial gain, while perfectly understandable, has never been so obviously inadequate as a guiding principle, if for no other reason than the fact that the drive for gain corrodes the supports that people need to continue to make such gains. Nagging and, dare I say it, inconvenient truths like this will continue to eat away at BusinessWeek’s credibility as long as the magazine ignores them.
Where does a reader go from here? Adbusters is a neat mag. Maybe the Economist? Some scholarly journal? Anything, as long as the writers do not fear the complexities that affect the ecosystem businesses depend on to thrive in the long run.