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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

> Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance.

Another week, another swipe at successful people. It’s really interesting to see academics who have never built a business, hired employees, etc deflate and downplay the value of hard work.

How many reports like this until everybody is ready to give the wealthy a bath? Or better yet, hand over economic independence to our loving, caring government? Time will tell.

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> Duke’s American Tobacco Company (ATC) moved to the cutting edge of this process when it repelled legal challenges to its monopoly by drawing on new notions of corporate personhood in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment [...] Though the amendment referred to “persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which suggests human persons, lawyers attempted to use the amendment to shield corporate “persons” from state regulations. With the ATC’s win in court, the corporation claimed an enhanced legal personhood, protection from states, and status as a private rather than public entity. Unrestrained, the ATC rapidly gobbled up companies across the United States and the globe, catapulting Duke to spectacular wealth and power

To be fair, this is corporate legal shenanigans, not scrappy, innovative, hard work.

Yeah...no. Increasingly fewer people are buying this narrative anymore. Hard work is something everyone can get behind, but cheating is just cheating even if it has a veneer of legality behind it we all now know how easy it is for people of means to make the laws that work best for them.

As evidenced by the current college admissions scandals. Success in a capitalist culture does not arrive from good intentions, merit or luck. Wealth affords favorable PR.

> academics who have never built a business, hired employees,

You don't seem to know much about what academics do. A large part of their work consists of project planning, obtaining funding, hiring people to do the research work, advertise the results to get other people to contribute and so on. Only junior academics can really focus on the research. From a certain level of seniority, many academics are really research managers. It's very much building a business.

I think you're stretching a bit here.

Without personal financial risk, there is no comparison between the two. I've seen up close how unbelievably perilous it can be to risk your personal fortune (sometimes a meager one at that) on an entrepreneurial venture.

Don't kid yourself. If running a business was easy and without downside, everyone would be doing it. Lots of folks try their hand at business only to find out that they don't have the will to ride out the very tough times.

Comparing a person who is trying to build a business on a (possibly) new and unproven innovation to a (likely) tenured professor is worthy of a chuckle.

Do you know how hard it is to get tenure? You have to work extremely hard for a decade and beat the best. If you don't manage to get tenure then you're left with nothing. In fields like computer science this isn't so bad, because there are good opportunities in industry. But in the arts, pursuing a career in academia means taking a big risk.

I'm not saying that building a business is easy. But neither is building a career in academia. It takes many of the same skills.

I actually do know how hard it is to get tenure. My point still stands.

Very few academics declare bankruptcy when their businesses fail. Very few academics pour their life savings or retirement funds into their academic career only to walk away with less than nothing and owing money they might never be able to repay.

Comparative skills is one thing. Comparative risk is another.

Getting tenure in academia involves going a decade or longer with very minimal savings to begin with, getting paid way below industry standards for the amount of education and experience you have, and not getting tenure in a lot of universities results in you being let go if you were on a tenure-track. I'd rather have the savings to blow on a risky venture that could succeed than the majority of my young adult life be spent underpaid and overworked to get the ability to write grants all day and deal with administrative tasks.

In the USA, you've got that choice.

Let's try and understand that this isn't a race to see who has it worse. My point is that an academic in the arts isn't likely to possess the understanding of entrepreneurship and its challenges any more than an entrepreneur is to understand the challenges of a career in academia.

The difference is that one isn't pointing at the other and trying to blame them for all of society's ills.

Plenty of people point at academia and blame them for our problems, and plenty of people think academics are useless to society. I'm personally in the STEM area so I can't really comment on the arts.

I'm not blaming successful people for being successful, I applaud people who build products and create jobs. Thinking outside the box and innovating is great, but when your innovation is in the field of evading the intended consequences of regulations, that's not the kind of success I value.

I wrote a snarky and unconstructive reply to you, but though I don't think I was wrong, I deleted it to try to be more constructive.

In this thread, you began by replying to a comment ultimately making the point that the OP commenter brushed off academics unjustifiably. Your reply suggested that the relevant comparison was between a professor whose position is secure and a startup founder in the early throes of trying to gain traction and stability. This was the clear essence of your point -- that somewhere somebody suggested, through such a comparison, that running a business is easy, and that this is wrong.

That comparison is obviously not relevant, especially since the slightly broader context is this article about "capitalist cowboys", i.e. people like James Duke. Duke was born into money and the tobacco business. He did not risk everything for his business. If his cigarette company went completely under, he would not have been destitute. People like Duke are relevant for comparison.

The reference in OP's comment is a common one, to "academics" at large, and is uselessly disparaging. Beyond user "lower"'s point about the skills needed in academia being comparable to those needed for business, we should note that many academics, especially in business schools, have themselves literally been successful in industry and business (read outside of academia). This is a proven way of getting a faculty position at a business school.

I think your point doesn't stand. But you are right that starting and having a business is a nuanced, often risky... business.

We're splitting hairs here.

The original article used a straw-man to impugn capitalism. That's hardly fair. For every bad faith player there are a thousand farmers (all small businesses IMHO), restaurant owners, inventors, and others who start a business to serve the public with a good or service and are willing to risk their time and money to do it. Lots of those folks don't make it and lose their investment for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it's because of bad management; sometimes the economy; sometimes illegal action by a competitor. Such is life.

In this discussion, we have to be careful of choosing our examples to suit our argument. The original article seems to be blissfully unaware of survivorship bias when she rails against capitalism.

Economics isn't a morality tale. It doesn't care who is "good" or "bad", just who is able to provide something the market needs at a price it's willing to pay.

I know this outrages a lot of people butI would argue that there is more hazard entrusting that determination to government (as the author seems to suggest as a solution) than letting consumers decide for themselves.

I used to use Uber. Now I use Lyft. That was a choice I made when I learned of their management culture. You might care; you might not: it's YOUR choice.

Capitalism isn't the best solution to our scarcity problems but nobody has come up with a better solution yet. Ideas are great but you can't eat ideas. You can't sleep inside of a conjecture.

Capitalism wins because it works in spite of the imperfections in implementation.

Capitalism captured by monopolies is not capitalism because there is no competition and thus no real price seeking mechanism. Monopolies have pricing power.

If you love capitalism you should be the strongest advocate against legal structures that allow for the creation of monopolies.

To what is Capitalism opposed, here? The original article didn't impugn capitalism, it impugned deregulation, corruption, and a culture of faux-hero worship that reinforces these. It impugned bad capitalism.

It was the opposite of unaware of survivorship bias; the whole point is that such biases (and others) explain why capitalist-cowboy heroes are seen as heroes, instead of actual outstanding acumen and brilliance.

This is part of why I think your original point doesn't stand; you are defending something that wasn't attacked. I care about this mostly because of the framing of the OP, in which capitalism is somehow put in opposition to "academics", which is spurious.

I disagree.

For one thing, this is an article written by a history professor who is pitching her book: " Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism"

The term "corporate imperialism" is your first clue. I spent some more time perusing her other writing and I'm not impressed. She's got an agenda here and that's to take a specific example of corporate power run amok and extend it to other areas. THAT is what I was pushing back against.

There are a litany of other examples that would have served this subject better (oil, sugar, hell, even bananas) because the connection between production of a commodity item and the effect on the economy and society would be much clearer.

In this example, she's focusing on cigarettes as the central player. The problem is that cigarettes aren't a commodity; they're branded. You could easily make the case that Heinz Ketchup doesn't deserve their position as market leader because they control so much of the market that nobody else stands a chance. That kind of backing into a theory of history is what I'm talking about when we discuss survivorship bias. If there hadn't been a monopoly, she'd have nothing to write about. Nothing in the article serves to identify how to prevent a monopoly from forming in the current day nor does she cite any examples of markets where it's nearly impossible (despite their best efforts) for someone to achieve and maintain a monopoly because the pace of innovation constantly forces an evolution of the market.

So, to sum up, I think she's reaching. I don't find her account useful as a prescriptive when trying to understand if monopolies are bad (however they are formed) or if there are ways to prevent a monopoly from forming when a competitor has a product so good that nobody else can come close.

As a book of the history of cigarettes and jazz, sure, whatever.

A tenured professor has already achieved their goal. There's a very real comparison to be made between a startup founder and a young, tenure-track faculty member trying to make their mark on the research community.

You're correct that academics too often dismiss the "soft skills" needed to successfully run a business. But it sounds like you're also dismissing the legitimately hard work that goes into a successful academic career.

I'm not dismissing the hard work that goes into either. What I'm saying is that the risk profile isn't close to being comparable.

A young tenure-track professor isn't at risk of losing their degree if they fail to achieve tenure. It's also unlikely that they might owe thousands (or hundreds of thousands) to the IRS or state tax authorities for which they could very well be personally liable for. That's not a figurative example. I actually saw this happen with a small ISP.

I recall a news story about a congressman who left public service to try and run a business (something not technical) and he was dumbfounded by the practical affect of the laws that he helped pass and how unwieldy and challenging it is for an entrepreneur to actually succeed when faced with the never-ending cascade of regulations and approvals needed to actually open. The gist of the article is that he didn't appreciate the reality of business ownership until he tried it. Then he saw the light.

I would encourage any academic that thinks the only way to succeed in business is to cheat to give it a try themselves. Something as simple as an ice-cream shop can be a real eye-opener in terms of regulatory complexity, financial disclosure, and employment law.

These are all ad hominem attacks, and invalid on their face. Any member of society has a right to criticize the structure and rules of society. The argument they put forward should be evaluated on its face without regard for who is delivering it, or whether their background, experience, profession, and any other context supports the argument.

It's unfortunate to see how deep this myth of entrepreneurship runs, and I think this sentiment really highlights the issue.

In the statement above, successful people are literally conflated with the stories being told by these business schools. In my opinion, the majority of successful people (and, surely, some of those are entrepreneurs) do not fit into the mold fetishized by the business schools in this piece. Indeed, that type of alleged "super entrepreneur" strikes me as very rare.

I believe successful people in general have no need to feel attacked by this article. It's those who have accrued bizarrely large amounts of wealth by leveraging someone else's innovation through legal cleverness and rent-seeking that should be (somewhat) concerned.

>> Another week, another swipe at successful people.

I don't remember ever seeing "swipes" at successful scientists, doctors, nurses, midwives, school teachers, etc etc whose hard work has tangible benefits for the entire community. It is obvious that the article is targeting people who are successful at being "egotistical assholes" that "succeed" by harming everyone else's prospects.

I don't find anything strange in that. I find it strange that this is not a more widely adopted attitude.

Of course you haven't seen swipes at these kinds of people. All the professions you mentioned are strictly hierarchical and highly regulated, and rewards to them come much the same as they come to schoolchildren - due to the benevolence of a higher authority.

When someone succeeds as a doctor, people are hardwired to think "they deserved it" because of the very human drive to seek a hierarchical tribal structure, while when a businessman succeeds without going through what is seen by polite society as the "proper channels", they are vilified for not respecting the structures of authority, regardless of them contributing to society or not.

It is a very widely adopted attitude. I'd say over 90% of human beings find the professions you mentioned to be the most "respectable" of all, while businessman are seen as the lowest of the low. Policemen also used to be treated that way, but they've fallen out of favor a bit.

I find it sad that people who don't feel the need to cringe and submit to their supposed "betters" get treated as troublemakers who wish to destroy the harmony of society, except at the highest levels of business achievement (which are in turn disproportionately lionized)

You're saying that e.g. doctors don't work hard, or that the work they do is not inherently worthy, so their value is granted to them by a higher authority?

I am not saying they do not work hard or that their work is not inherently worthy. All I'm saying is that society tends to value professions based on how much they fit into and uphold the idealized social hierarchy, and that is much more relevant to the social appreciation of a profession than "hard work" or "benefit to society"

I don't understand why you say this and where the claim about "upholding an idealised social hierarchy" comes from.

Is doctors' work beneficial to the community? Is teachers'? Firefighters'? Nurses'? If it is, what is the purpose of assuming some other reason that this work is appreciated?

> Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance.

Sounds pretty innovative to me.

Nothing innovative about being a self-serving chode. Lying, cheating and stealing all require effort, while refraining from those does not. People choose to be dicks, and that's nothing to celebrate.

You come across as completely dismissing the existing relationships between corporations and government (revolving door appointments, lobbying, being chosen to craft legislation, pre-drafted pro-business legislation ALEC, etc) and the role those relationships play in choosing the winners and losers in the market.

If in reality hard work was the only measure of whether or not a business will succeed then it would be fine to claim that this article is attempting to "donwplay the value of hard work". But that's not at all the reality of how systems interact in our quasi-capitalist country.

Anecdotally, numerous friends who are ideologically conservative lament the state of corporate influence over government regulation. They believe that a handing over of economic independence to our loving, caring government has already happened but it's a proxy for the corporations who have the most influence. Which removes the ability of the free market to choose the winners and losers.

Let me propose a third option: there is a top tier of success, whether in business, government or academia, which often, if not always, requires one to be a corrupt and/or cutthroat PoS. The universe usually rewards this behavior, at least materially.

It's certainly possible to be significantly successful in any of those areas by being a hard working and ethical human being. But the kind of person who is hellbent on being in the top 0.01% (a Fortune 500 CEO, a top-level bureaucrat, the head of a prestigious academic department/institution) is someone who, to some degree, values their personal success over the suffering of others.

This is how you get Monsanto, Communism and $100k+ in debt for a BA in English.

What dogmatically anti-academic, anti-government and anti-capitalism arguments miss is that the fault is in sociopathic behavior, and not the arena that a given sociopathic individual excels in.

Understanding why people succeed, and how the rules of society contribute to such success is a valid criticism not a “swipe at successful people”. And all members of society have a right to examine the consequences of the rules we mutually create; business owners are not a special class of citizen that has superior right to examine society. I say that as a business owner with 500 employees.

If the rules of society have been used in unexpected ways and created unintended consequences, why not examine them and evaluate a better alternative. If some one is talented they will successful under different rules.

Your last sentence ignores so much reality. China has lots of large successful businesses and clearly ignored “economic independence”. Commerce is merely one arm of multiple vectors of state objectives.

Time will tell if America, with its libertarian, government hands off ideal will prove to be the most effective system.

Let’s be clear. There is nothing free about a market dominated by monopolies. There will be less successful people, less new business formation, less innovation, and less wealth creation over time if monopolies and dualopolies stifle competition.

I generally tend towards Hayek in thinking that the market is an amazingly useful creation, and one that we tinker with at our peril. But on the other hand, there are some that become successful whist contributing nothing to the greater good - no innovation, no efficiency - and just succeed at being better hoarders of wealth.

> academics who have never built a business, hired employees

When I see this type of argument made I often think a. as if someone else wouldn't have come along and created/serviced the market sooner or later, yet we heap praise upon the person that happened to get there first and b. the wider benefits are really just happy side-effects - if a business's costs could be lowered by automating all tasks and employing zero staff, wouldn't it be compelled by capitalism to do so?

If it's employment we want, we can just follow Keynes and employ people to bury money and dig it up again..

What academics are you talking about?

Well the author's bio is

Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism

Way too many to list. Read the article itself, there are links and references.

Anti-free market thinking pervades academia, despite the fact that free markets have generated an unprecedented level of material wealth. Markets feed, cloth, and employ academics who haven't the faintest idea where the money comes from.

No one disputes the fact that monopolies capture an undue amount of wealth. But to launch a general attack on entrepreneurship is fatuous and offensive. I'm sitting here are my desk living that life right now, creating a product that, down the road, will indirectly make that smug academic wealthier. Maybe he should spend five minutes in the business world. He might learn something.

I like the idea that anti-free market thought pervades academia so deeply because people who succeed in academia tend to see the modern school with its strict hierarchical structure as the ideal model of society, missing the fact that they only find it such because they thrived within it.

The stories by Horatio Alger were fables, they don't depict reality.

Why did you quote that line, of all the lines in the article?

What does "swipe" mean to you?

Who is subsumed by this weird monolith of "successful people", and how is it that academics avoided being included?

Why is "downplaying hard work" something you think this article does?

Do you seriously think that claiming many "prominent heroes" did not succeed because of personal brilliance is the same as the claim that personal brilliance is never a factor in [business] success?

Whatever "economic independence" means to you, why do you think you have it? Do you think everyone has it?

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