USA Inc: Woke vs greed

It's been 14 years since Goldman Sachs was vilified as a "vampire squid" by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

"Organised greed always defeats disorganised democracy," he concluded then. Yet organised greed lives on, a seemingly intractable aspect of human nature, as three new business books make clear.

The age-old swing of the pendulum between greed, excess and regulation is the subject of Taming the Octopus by Kyle Edward Williams. Inevitably, greed and scandal breed regulation, which in turn provokes proponents of the free market to decry government overreach.

Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from more speculative investment banking during the Great Depression only to be relaxed by the Clinton administration more than six decades later.

In Williams's telling, the freemarketers may engage in tactical retreats but always re-emerge, perhaps because they can fall back on the rigorous logic of economics, divorced from the messiness of the real world. Williams, a historian and editor, offers a brisk and even-handed overview of corporate regulation. He isn't the first ―and surely won't be the last-to conclude that "the corporate octopus is an institution incapable of being tamed." Behind the Startup by Benjamin Shestakofsky, began life as a PhD thesis with the premise that its author would go to work at a San Francisco start-up and write about it, on condition that he not name the company or its employees. The start-up, which he calls AllDone, aims to be the Amazon of service providers, matching customers with mostly small, local businesses.