Una nueva sección en business and management from Economist

Aquí (con el inconfundible estilo de Economist: combinación afortunada y en las medidas exactas de lo cínico, astuto y brillante)

Extracto de apertura:

"THERE is something about business that prevents most people from seeing straight. The rise of modern business provoked relentless criticism. Anthony Trollope featured a fraudulent railway company in “The Way We Live Now” (1875). Upton Sinclair dwelt on “the inferno of exploitation” in Chicago’s meat packing industry in “The Jungle” (1906). Muckraking journalists denounced the titans of American business as “robber barons”.

A striking number of business people accepted this hostile assessment. Friedrich Engels used some of the profits of his successful textile business to support Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed gravedigger of capitalism. Henry Frick’s last message to his fellow steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, was “Tell him I’ll see him in hell, where we both are going.” Many of the greatest business people threw themselves into philanthropy to try to win back the souls that they had lost in making money. Anti-business sentiment is still widespread today. For many environmentalists, business is responsible for despoiling the planet. For many apostles of corporate social responsibility, business people are fallen angels who can only redeem themselves by doing good works..."

Extracto de posición:

"Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.” But Schumpeter knew far too much about the history of business to be a cheerleader. He recognised that business people are often ruthless monomaniacs, obsessed by their dreams of building “private kingdoms” and willing to do anything to crush their rivals..."

Y en este extracto nos alineamos 100% con Economist:

"Schumpeter’s ability to see business straight would be reason enough to name our new business column after him. But this ability rested on a broader philosophy of capitalism. He argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”..."

¡Qué buena noticia para hoy viernes el anuncio de esta nueva columna! Esperaremos ansiosos la publicación de sus contenidos cada semana :-)