The ‘Sustainability’ Business: A Gathering of Rent-Seekers

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The Economist Group, publisher of the Economist, has been hosting its seventh annual “Sustainability Week,” with one day in London and three others on virtual platforms.

The event’s website offers a revealing glimpse into the ecosystem that “sustainability” has created — an ecosystem that contains true believers, to be sure, but is also one in which opportunists can take advantage of the pathway it offers to power, profit, and prestige — or at least a job.

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Let Them Eat Lentils

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Some “foods” have no place on a plate — anchovies, capers, and lentils, to pick out but three. Don’t @ me.

It was thus dispiriting to read the now-infamous article by Teresa Ghilarducci in Bloomberg, in which she argues that one way of combating the effects of inflation might be to turn to . . . lentils:

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Bloc Trade: Russia, China, and the Limits of Globalization

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Another week, and more bloodshed in Ukraine. How the Russian invasion will play out remains anyone’s guess, but one result seems increasingly likely. What began as an imperial gambit may well end up with the imperialist transformed into the junior partner, or even satellite, of a greater superpower still on the rise.

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Our Enemy’s Enemy

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After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Winston Churchill had no qualms about entering into an alliance with Stalin, whose regime he understood all too well: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Similar thinking does much to explain the enlistment of former (and not so former) Nazis by the Western allies in intelligence work against the Soviets after 1945…

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The Staff of Life

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It was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”

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Bad Trade: How Complacency Helps Putin — and Xi

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A week or so ago, I wrote about the way in which the complacency fostered by a quasi-religious belief among Western elites in the inevitability of a curious, universalist vision of progress had “presented Putin with at least a moment of opportunity — and China with rather more.”…

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Larry Fink, ‘Emperor’?

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We live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.

Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….

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The CEO as ‘Lawmaker’: A Corporatist Manifesto

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On Monday, the Financial Times ran an article by Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever (a company that, as he mentions, was recently in the news over its pursuit of objectives seemingly unconnected to its bottom line). A forceful, if unpersuasive, argument for stakeholder capitalism, it is an interesting and unintentionally revealing read. Above all, it demonstrates how, whatever BlackRock’s Larry Fink may claim, stakeholder capitalism is intrinsically political. Indeed, as it is an expression of corporatism, that is — or ought to be — a statement of the obvious. Corporatism, regardless of the form it takes, is an ideology revolving around an idea of how society should be organized. That is the very essence of politics…

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President Biden can’t blame inflation on price-fixing

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The buck may have stopped at Harry Truman’s desk, but today’s eroding dollar is having trouble finding a berth in Joe Biden’s Oval Office.

For much of last year, the president insisted that inflation was temporary. (To be fair, the Federal Reserve claimed something similar.) But with prices likely to continue rising at a brisk pace for some time — in December, inflation reached levels not seen for 40 years — Team Biden is changing its tune, and, as administrations in a political mess tend to do, it’s looking for someone to blame.

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