I work for one of the world’s largest multinationals, in a position that makes my job description basically “business” - I work on issues touching finance, marketing, logistics, etc. I am also someone who spent most of their working life outside of the business world. So I would like to give some examples of things about business that I have found surprising.
"Quiggin thinks he’s only writing about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling."
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Review: First Bank of the Living Dead
HT: MarginalRevolution.com