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May 12, 2022Liked by Erik Dolson

I went to business school in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like that. We did talk about Welch, of course, but not as any kind of hero - just an example with plusses and minuses. People tend to think of B-Schools as places where normal people are perverted into sociopaths, but it's not the case. They teach (or try to) good, solid, defensible practices. The sociopaths who come out of business school (and I knew a few of them) were that way when they went in - and they went in to learn to hone their sociopathy to a razor's edge. One key benefit I got from B-Skool was learning to ID those people and avoid them.

But the rest of this is spot on. Capitalism as we practice it carries perverse incentives - one being that a company that ignored Wall St. and planned for long-term stability that was sustainable would be sued by someone who would see it, buy stock, and then sue because the management was negligent in its fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value in the immediate term.

The "inflation" we see today is not classic inflation - it's simply raising prices past what the market will bear and finding out just how much you can gouge people for before your profit starts to fall again. There is *no* true sense of community in America today - there are those grabbing all the money they can and stuffing it into a flight bag a la the unlamented ex-President of Afghanistan, and those standing around wondering what's happening and coming to the conclusion that it must somehow be Joe Biden's fault.

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