Economist Tyler Cowen begins his engaging and valuable new book, Big Business, by declaring that “we live in an age when the reputation of business is under siege.” That's been true for at least 50 years. Recent books with “big business” in the title tend to decry how health care became a monolithic enterprise; allege that big tech companies feed a new age of “addiction”; describe how Big Food conspires against wellness; lament how college basketball turned into a machine; and argue that multinational corporations aided the rise of twentieth-century fascism and modern conservatism.
Mass culture has tied business to the whipping post for decades. A 1991 study, “Watching America,” found that while television networks portrayed two-thirds of all corporate executives as good guys until the early 1960s, a majority of CEOs represented on prime-time TV by 1980 were felons. “TV businessmen,” the study concluded, “constitute the largest group of murderers aside from professional gangsters.” Today, even a “conservative” outlet like the Hallmark Channel, which specializes in wholesome family movies, is likely to pit menacing big-business types against plucky independent bookshop owners, family farmers, or chefs struggling to serve organic food in a wasteland of corporate mush. No wonder, then, that big business is one of the least trusted of American institutions, ranking lower than labor unions, public schools, or even, in perhaps the biggest insult, the media.
But Americans don't practice what they profess to believe. Consumer tracking surveys tell us that 95 percent of American shoppers spend money at Wal-Mart every year, though the retail giant has been derided as a downtown killer, exploiter of workers, and anti-union powerhouse since the mid-1980s, when as a young reporter I covered the company's implausible rise. Close behind is McDonald's, where nine out of ten Americans make purchases every year, despite a drumbeat of criticism about the quality and nutritional value of the chain's food. Similarly, a recent analysis of consumer data ranked Facebook as America's most hated company. Yet more than half of all Americans use it, and that number appears to be growing, albeit modestly.
Cowen has noticed the contradictions. Much of his book reminds readers just how valuable business (which often means big business) is to our lives, explaining why we patronize some of the biggest corporations even while we cast them as villains. “First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs,” he writes. To accomplish these things in a world of intense scrutiny, businesses have worked hard to gain our trust. In one of the more provocative portions of a persistently provocative book, Cowen argues that businesses are on average more trustworthy than individuals—in other words, than many of us. IRS statistics, for instance, show that corporations are less likely to cheat on their taxes than individuals. While we deride big retailers like Wal-Mart, they incur tens of billions of dollars every year in losses from consumers and their own employees.
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