A nice piece on corporate hubris from the New York Times. Not that we in Australia can laugh – the collapse of Ansett and FAI among others hit corporate sponsorship of sport pretty hard.
All this is a reminder of how deep the worship of business has gone in the last twenty years or so. Just about everything, from sporting stadiums to university buildings has a corporate name attached. MBA programs have proliferated despite the fact that, even during the boom, most of them were worthless. Senior teachers, who used to have titles like “Subject master” are now called “Executive teachers”. The bursting of the bubble has undermined all of this, but social changes like this take a long time to develop, and an equally long time to unravel.
Still, people are starting to ask questions that were once unaskable. For example:
Does the Government Have a Role in Stabilizing the Economy?
A decade ago, anyone in Australia who asked this question was automatically accused of the dreadful crime of “pump-priming”. Today, Keynes is coming back into fashion.