I think that Russell Muirhead’s hard-to-excerpt post at City Journal on the future of wealth and work is pretty good. It’s short and I recommend that you read it in full. A few things he says are a bit misleading. So, for example, this:
Last year, General Motors employed about 200,000 people. After making 10 million cars, it earned about $42,000 in income per employee.
GM’s net revenues are about $42,000 per employee. Its gross revenue per employee are about $750,000. Do you know which auto company has the lowest net or gross revenue per employee? Tesla.
I’m not sure what conclusions one can draw from his observations. One clear possibility is that our politics is hopelessly muddled. How can it be otherwise when people who think of themselves as championing the future are actually conservatives desperately trying to preserve the past?
I think the conclusion I’d draw from it that we shouldn’t be propping up either General Motors or the Blackstone Group. We’re doing both. Also, GM doesn’t need Blackstone but Blackstone does need GM. In other words you can still make stuff without a huge, fantastically wealthy financial economy but you can’t have a huge, fantastically wealthy financial economy without making stuff.
