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Javier E

The Education of Peter Drucker - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...4484

Drucker economic culture capitalism fascism market writing

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "Since I was twenty," Drucker wrote at eighty-two, "writing has been the foundation of everything I have been doing." From the first he showed a mastery of modern English prose. He has that rarest quality in a writer of non-fiction—a voice, a characteristic way of saying.
  • Economic Man limns a crisis of belief in capitalism (and socialism), the causes of which have yet to be ameliorated. Ignoring its specifically European causes, Drucker focuses on the civilizational causes of fascism. We live in that same civilization.
  • Drucker asserted in the book that Economic Man's promise—that a society built around the market (the major social institution of the nineteenth century) could achieve "freedom and justice through economic development"—had failed, and that this had "destroyed the belief in capitalism as a social system." The Great War and the Depression made this crisis of belief a reality for millions. "These catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable laws.
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  • In place of a market society, fascism sought to offer a "non-economic society," with non-economic incentives and satisfactions.
  • From that book forward Drucker has stressed the need for a strong non-economic society to make "inequality appear far less intolerable" and to shore people up against the bottom-line nihilism of the market. His work as a consultant to nonprofit organizations has been in furtherance of that goal. An anti-Utopian, he believed that "the bearable society" is the best we can achieve. Churches and secular voluntary organizations help men and women cope with the meaninglessness of much modern work.
Javier E

America's billionaires take center stage in national politics, colliding with populist ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...liding-with-populist-democrats

rich wealth billionaire tax inequality

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The political and economic power wielded by the approximately 750 wealthiest people in America has become a sudden flash point in the 2020 presidential election
  • The populist onslaught has ensnared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, led to billionaire hand-wringing on cable news, and sparked a panicked discussion among wealthy Americans and their financial advisers about how to prepare for a White House controlled by populist Democrats.
  • With the stock market at an all-time high, the debate about wealth accumulation and inequality has become a top issue in the 2020 campaign
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  • “For the first time ever, we are having a national political conversation about billionaires in American life. And that is because many people are noticing the vast differences in wealth and opportunity,
  • Zuckerberg suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power. Microsoft co-founder Gates criticized Warren’s wealth tax and mused about its impact on “the incentive system” for making money.
  • The poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, Zucman found.
  • At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a “wealth tax” on vast fortunes, with many expressing concern they will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.
  • Steyer has proposed his own wealth tax, but Schultz ripped the idea as “ridiculous,” while Bloomberg suggested it was not constitutional and raised the prospect of America turning into Venezuela.
  • Financial disparities between the rich and everyone else have widened over the past several decades in America, with inequality returning to levels not seen since the 1920s, as the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution
  • David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, told CNBC that a wealth tax would not “solve all of our society’s problems” and raised questions about its practicality. Also appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.
  • America has long had rich people, but economists say the current scale of inequality may be without precedent. The number of billionaires in America swelled to 749 in 2018, a nearly 5 percent jump, and they now hold close to $4 trillion collectively.
  • “The hyper concentration of wealth within the top 0.1 percent is a mortal threat to the American economy and way of life,” Boyle said in an interview. “If you work hard and play by the rules, then you should be able to get ahead. But the recent and unprecedented shift of resources to billionaires threatens this. A wealth tax on billionaires is fair and, indeed, necessary.”
  • “A lot of people in the Wall Street crowd still think the world is top-down,” Wylde said. “They think the people at the top of the pecking order are still making the decisions or driving the debate, as opposed to the new reality of grass-roots mobilization. They don’t realize the way pushback to their criticism goes viral.”
  • Lance Drucker, president and CEO of Drucker Wealth Management, said he has recently heard alarm from many of his millionaire clients over plans like Warren’s to implement a wealth tax on fortunes worth more than $50 million.
  • “Honestly, it’s only been the last month when people started getting worried,” said Drucker in an October interview. “These tax proposals are scaring the bejeezus out of people who have accumulated a lot of wealth.”
  • Some financial planners are urging wealthy clients to transfer millions to their offspring now, before Democrats again raise estate taxes. Attorneys have begun looking at whether a divorce could help the super-rich avoid the wealth tax. And some wealthy people are asking whether they should consider renouncing their U.S. citizenship and moving to Europe or elsewhere abroad ahead of Democrats’ potential tax hikes.
  • he has heard discussions about leaving the country and renouncing citizenship or other legal tax planning moves due to Democrats’ tax plans from several multimillionaires. “As the frustration mounts and tax burdens rise, people will consider it, just the way you have New Yorkers moving to Florida.
Javier E

Summer Reading: How to Shake Up the Status Quo - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...how-to-shake-up-the-status-quo

innovation social books classics ideas creativity entrepreneur

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • what better time to compile a short reading list for anyone interested in shaking up the status quo.
  • mindlessness is a curse that runs through society
  • “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” is a road map for anyone who wants to learn to think like an innovator in any field.
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  • Drucker identifies seven key sources of innovative opportunity, including such things as changes in demographics, perceptions and meaning, as well as industry structures. But the most important, he notes, are unexpected successes, which can reveal new possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is assumed to be and reality as it is, in fact.
  • “Mindfulness” by Ellen J. Langer
  • Langer uses the term mindfulness, which is commonly associated with meditation, to describe a state of being in which one becomes oriented in the present, open to new information, sensitive to context, aware of different perspectives and untrapped by old categories.
  • How do you help people enter this state? One way is to help people reject absolute categories in favor of open-ended frames
  • Framing questions and instructions conditionally — or prompting people to be in the present in other ways — consistently leads to more creativity: musicians play with more energy and nuance; camp counselors provide better feedback to children; children think more critically in school.
  • Once you discover these values systems, you begin to recognize how they play out in society every day: how they shape behaviors in institutions that evolved out of different traditions
  • “Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics” by Jane Jacobs
  • Jane Jacobs is famous for her classic, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” In “Systems of Survival,” she asserts that our ethical frameworks have grown out of the fact that there are two ways that human beings ensure their survival: taking and trading.
  • we possess these two radically different ways of dealing with our needs, we also have two radically different systems of morals and values — both systems valid and necessary,”
  • Jacobs labels these systems “commercial” and “guardian” moral syndromes — the former historically associated with commerce, the latter with the military and government.
  • In the commercial syndrome, Jacobs identifies 15 values, including: “shun force,” “collaborate easily with strangers and aliens,” “be open to inventiveness and novelty,” “dissent for the sake of the task,” “be thrifty,” “be optimistic.”
  • By contrast, in the “guardian” syndrome she finds a parallel set of values like: “exert prowess,” “be obedient and disciplined,” “adhere to tradition,” “deceive for the sake of the task,” “be ostentatious,” “be fatalistic.”
  • “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Peter F. Drucker
  • her analysis helps explain whether institutions that blend value sets —like nonprofits or certain government departments — will encounter cultural obstacles or discover unforeseen opportunities.
  • “Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society” by John W. Gardner
  • Why do once vibrant institutions become calcified as they mature? Why do they lose their creative edge as they become more efficient? “A society decays when its institutions and individuals lose their vitality,”
  • he outlines what societies must do to renew their institutions on a continuing basis. It begins by helping individuals renew themselves: helping them to develop the self-knowledge and spiritedness needed to “to assault the complacency and rigidity of the status quo.” He outlines qualities of mind that are needed for this task: versatility and adaptability, the ability to tolerate ambiguity, the willingness to fail
  • “Instead of giving young people the impression that their task is to stand a dreary watch over the ancient values,” writes Gardner, “we should be telling them the grim but bracing truth that it is their task to re-create those values continuously in their own behavior, facing the dilemmas and catastrophes of their own time.”
Javier E

Owner of a Credit Card Processor Is Setting a New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year - NYTime... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...minimum-wage-70000-a-year.html

minimum wage income happiness research inequality CEO

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.
  • Under a financial overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to require all publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of C.E.O. pay to the median pay of all other employees, but it has so far failed to put it in effect. Corporate executives have vigorously opposed the idea, complaining it would be cumbersome and costly to implement.
  • his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.
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  • The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
  • “The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi
  • Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
  • Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
  • The happiness research behind Mr. Price’s announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as “the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant” — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year.
  • Of course, money above that level brings pleasures — there’s no denying the delights of a Caribbean cruise or a pair of diamond earrings — but no further gains on the emotional well-being scale.
  • As Mr. Kahneman has explained it, income above the threshold doesn’t buy happiness, but a lack of money can deprive you of it.
Javier E

Opinion | Crumbs for the Hungry but Windfalls for the Rich - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-economic-response.html

rich wealthy pandemic relief real estate crisis profit

shared by Javier E on 25 May 20 - No Cached
  • While President Trump and his allies in Congress seek to tighten access to food stamps, they are showing compassion for one group: zillionaires. Their economic rescue package quietly allocated $135 billion — yes, that’s “billion” with a “b” — for the likes of wealthy real estate developers.
  • My Times colleague Jesse Drucker notes that Trump himself, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may benefit financially from this provision.
  • The fine print was mysteriously slipped into the March economic relief package, even though it has nothing to do with the coronavirus and offers retroactive tax breaks for periods long before Covid-19 arrived.
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  • About 82 percent of the Zillionaire Giveaway goes to those earning more than $1 million a year, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those beneficiaries earning more than $1 million annually, the average benefit is $1.6 million.
  • In other words, a single mom juggling two jobs gets a maximum $1,200 stimulus check — and then pays taxes so that a real estate mogul can receive $1.6 million.
  • polls suggest that they don’t appreciate the degree to which Trump and Congress also bungled the economic response — or manipulated it to benefit those who least need help.
  • The United States simply accepted that the pandemic would cause vast numbers of workers to be laid off — and then it provided unemployment benefits. But Germany, France, Britain, Denmark and other countries took the smarter path of paying companies to keep workers on their payrolls, thus preventing layoffs in the first place
  • So the unemployment rate in Germany and Denmark is forecast to reach about 5 percent while in the United States it may already be about 20 percent, depending on how you count it.
  • The United States did a little bit of this, but far less than Europe — yet the United States in some cases spent a larger share of G.D.P. on the bailout than Europe did.
  • t’s not fair to viruses to blame our unemployment crisis simply on the pandemic. It’s also our national choice.
  • At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that money intended to rescue small businesses has often gone not to those with the greatest need but rather to those with the most shameless lawyers.
  • For-profit colleges, which are better known for exploiting students than educating them, have raked in $1.1 billion.
  • AutoNation, a Fortune 500 company, received $77 million in small business funds
  • One provision in the rescue package provides a tax break that benefits only companies with more than $25 million in gross receipts
  • A new study determined that in the two months since March 18, roughly the start of the economic crisis, America’s billionaires saw their wealth collectively grow by 15 percent. And another 16 Americans became billionaires in that period.
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