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Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

  • Book
  • Apr 9, 2019
  • #Economics #Business
Tyler Cowen
@TylerCowen
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
Hardcover
4.4/5 53 ratings
Hardcover Kindle Audiobook Paperback Audio cd
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3.66/5 317 ratings
2 Recommenders
2 Mentions
An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen. We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communitie... Show More

An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen.

We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communities and small businesses. Facebook turns us into addicts while putting our personal data at risk. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, "If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist," to millennials, only 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in big business is at an all-time low. But are big companies inherently evil? If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don't love business enough.

In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, only 12 percent of Americans trust big business "quite a lot," and only 6 percent trust it "a great deal." Yet Americans as a group are remarkably willing to trust businesses, whether in the form of buying a new phone on the day of its release or simply showing up to work in the expectation they will be paid. Cowen illuminates the crucial role businesses play in spurring innovation, rewarding talent and hard work, and creating the bounty on which we've all come to depend.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 272

ISBN: 1250110548

ISBN-13: 9781250110541

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Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart · Aug 14, 2021
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  • From diff.substack.com
Tyler Cowen bites many bullets in this book, arguing that big businesses are more efficient than small ones, that they're no less trustworthy than people (and—credit to Mitt Romney—they are made out of people). The book is a good intuition pump; it doesn't suggest that we should have policy preferences in favor of big companies, but does show that there are important tradeoffs in making the biggest companies smaller.
Jason Furman @jasonfurman · Aug 3, 2023
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Catching up on some economics books, this time @tylercowen's Big Business. Overall excellent and surprisingly balanced, he lists many of the downsides of big business but puts them in the context of all of the many benefits they provide.
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