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Why has business education failed business? Why has it fallen so much in love with finance and the ideas it espouses? It’s a problem with deep roots, which have been spreading for decades. It encompasses issues like the rise of neoliberal economic views as a challenge to the postwar threat of socialism. It’s about an academic inferiority complex that propelled business educators to try to emulate hard sciences like physics rather than take lessons from biology or the humanities. It dovetails with the growth of computing power that enabled complex financial modeling. The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole. If you wonder why most businesses still think of shareholders as their main priority or treat skilled labor as a cost rather than an asset—or why 80 percent of CEOs surveyed in one study said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results— it’s because that’s exactly what they are being educated to do.

It's not far-fetched to suggest there is a "deep state" in Washington. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at the nexus of the Pentagon and arms manufacturers and coined the phrase the "military-industrial complex." Today's observers also point to the collusion of corporate interests and D.C. power brokers as the true guiding hand in American politics.

The Trump White House already seems to be at war with what it would say is the "deep state:" thousands of federal government bureaucrats faced with the awkward reality of working for a president who campaigned loudly against Washington officialdom and promised to "drain the swamp" when in power. This week, almost 1,000 American diplomats signed a dissent memo against Trump's executive order on immigration, prompting White House press secretary Sean Spicer to icily declare that "career bureaucrats" can "either get with the program or they can go." And Trump's public spat with Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama appointee who sought to defy his immigration order, ended with him firing Yates in an angry, chilling memo that claimed she "betrayed the Department of Justice."