> Jeff Fisher writes:
> >
>
> But I am no more capable of reading The Nation than I am of The
> Economist. And believe me, I actually gave The Economist more of a
> try than I have The Nation. And the problem I found with The
> Economist was not that their ideology differed from mine or that
> their conclusions were antithetical, but that their reasoning was
> weak (I do not have the exact text to quote here, but they had a
> laughable argument against animal rights/liberation in one of their
> articles that wouldn't have survived Logic 101).
Well, I was looking to emphasize the "critically" part of "reading critically," but I hear you.
Your gesture toward an anecdote reminds me that I kind of decided I loved them when I read an article--a book review, iirc--gutting Ayn Rand and her pseudo-intellectual cult. The Economist has its own reasons for kicking Rand to the curb, but it was nonetheless pretty satisfying to read. But I also remember their chiming in with smug dismay, along with all those other Brit rags, when Derrida was awarded that honorary Cambridge doctorate.
I find it a happy coincidence that Yoshie's post about the Nation on Chavez comes along while we're having this conversation. Meanwhile, I happened on what might prove an interesting case in BW.
By sheer chance, I found myself reading an article on the influence of Peter Drucker in China. Honestly, it was probably Drucker's name in the title that caught my eye. In any event, the gist of the article is that you can make money and be ethical at the same time, but the relatively-newly-capitalism-ed Chinese are missing that part (maybe because they learned capitalism from the likes of Ford and Friedman, rather than Adam Smith or, well, Peter Drucker, but that's a wild guess). There is an effort to deploy Drucker's writings to remedy the situation.
A passage: ===
Earlier this summer, I took part in a symposium at Claremont Graduate University in California, where a group of Chinese entrepreneurs expressed serious concerns that in the eyes of far too many young people in their country, becoming rich and being ethical are somehow mutually exclusive.
The occasion for this gathering, which drew attendees from 10 different nations and all over the U.S., was to discuss the work of the late Peter Drucker, the renowned management philosopher who held that "free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business; it can be justified only as being good for society."
Drucker, who died two years ago at age 95, was no starry-eyed sloganeer. And he sure wasn't against making money. "Actually," he wrote, "a company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable."
And so, through a career during which he authored 39 books, Drucker helped instruct countless executives, including Intel's (INTC<http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?symbol=INTC>) Andy Grove and General Electric's (GE<http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?symbol=GE>) Jack Welch, on how to do just that. He preached the essentials of sound management: marketing and innovation, financial planning, the effective deployment of human and physical resources, and much more. First, Do No Harm
Yet all of it was premised on a notion that, all too often, gets lost in the never-ending race to produce more and more goods at ever-cheaper prices. "The first responsibility of a professional," Drucker explained, "was spelled out clearly, 2,500 years ago, in the Hippocratic oath of the Greek physician: Primum non nocere, 'above all not knowingly to do harm.'" More than anything else, Drucker said, this "is the basic rule of professional ethics."
China, of course, is hardly the only spot around the globe that could stand to be reminded of this. A steady drumbeat of headlines about American executives—accused in the last few weeks alone of insider trading, conflicts of interest, and overcharging customers—makes clear that no nation has a monopoly on scruples.
===
OK, I actually like a lot of what I know of Drucker, and in many ways he seems a throwback to Adam Smith, himself. But what is the director of the Drucker Institute doing in the pages of BW trumpeting Drucker's role "advising" (I have no idea what this means he actually did) two of the great corporate criminals of the last half-century? And this is the thing, isn't it? That in the pages of BW, there will be no questioning the greatness of Welch or Grove, despite the fact that both have horrible records of doing harm precisely first? (Or am I wrong about them?) It would be interesting to see if anyone with a name writes to the editors pointing this problem out. It's also worth noting that the author, director of the Drucker Institute, is also invested in touting Drucker's creds, and so is seemingly uninterested in taking an opportunity like this one, an article in the major business weekly in the US, to suggest that its readers be a little more critical about Welch and Grove. I suspect Bill Gates is an easier target. I guess the thing I find about both BW and E is that I'm much more comfortable reading hacks for the other side than reading hacks ostensibly on my own. I'd rather sort through poor reasoning by the Economist's writers than the Nation's, because, frankly, it hurts less. Well, and in some ways it's easier, because I'm far less tempted to let poor thinking slide. So maybe I'm even a worse offender than Doug, in Carrol's estimation--I'm too smug about lazy leftists *not* to read the Economist or FT. :-) And that probably applies to Carrol, too. LOL. kidding. sort of.
Anyway, the initial question begs a preliminary question: what would an anti-Economist even look like?
This post is getting to long, so I'm going to push the rest of this, which is quite separate from the reply above to ravi, into a separate post.
j