Business magazines

...The size of employment has little correlation with the size of the revenues or profits, and it should come as no surprise that out of the fifty most profitable companies only fifteen make the cut for the fifty biggest employers and only thirty-eight of the top fifty employers are in the Fortune 100 for revenues...

...Not to defend Eisner's indefensible pay package, but if risk is to be compensated and being a "steward" isn't, where does that put the average productive worker...

...The charticle, though, is not merely a political comment—it's included as part of the magazine's annual Investment Guide...

...The Fortune 500, the magazine's annual index of the largest companies, has become synonymous with having made it...

...Dripping with faith in neoclassical economics' natural superiority and political neutrality, each magazine reaffirms the idea that economic laws are inevitable and irresistible...

...With no more state interference to rail against, these magazines now exist largely to massage—and sometimes stoke—their affluent readers' anxieties about the brave new world of downsizing, Brazilianesque wage disparities, and the management culture of "permanent revolution...

...Choosing to look at household poverty statistics instead of the much more depressing child poverty statistics (one in five) makes it easier to equate what's happening to the bottom of society with the irksome annoyances, like obeying laws and paying taxes, that the top must endure...

...Still, Fortune claims bigger is better for everyone: Today, of course, every CEO talks about creating shareholder wealth—it has become part of the parlance of business...

...The moral we are to draw is that "per capita GDP correlates very closely with . . . freedom rankings...

...Forbes annually tracks executive compensation...

...FALL • 1997 107 Magazines The assumptions behind the chart exemplify the Forbesian philosophy: what's good for the free market is good for everybody, and what's bad for the free market should be avoided at all costs...

...But their sincerely-held beliefs in the market's perfection have put these magazines in an interesting bind...

...Not much has changed in the past eightynine years...

...A look at the world's premier business glossies—Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week—reveals a culture that Limousin would have admired...

...it alone rests upon a basis that is indestructible and positive, and its laws are immutable, whatever the variations of opinion...

...Of course, Business Week said that in the spring of 1987, too...

...Fortune continually justifies it with the notion that a single man's managerial acumen ensures the success or failure of a company...

...This kind of cheering for a failed system, for an expansion that has been hard on everyone who still works for a living and harder still on those who can't, has gotten us into this mess...

...Economics," writes associate editor Dyan Machan, "is not about fairness...

...The best explanation we have is that a new business cycle is determining America's destiny...

...They approach this project from very different angles: Forbes with euphoric triumphalism, Fortune with boys'-club hero worship, and Business Week with earnest hand-wringing...

...In a recent article on landmines in Cambodia, Business Week takes pains to paint two makers of landmine components, Motorola and Hughes, as socially responsible businesses, and mentions the U.S...

...The magazine embodies big business's nostalgia for the stability and certainty it knew during the Fordist era...

...With Forbes, "freedom pays...

...Eleven percent of America's families live in poverty...

...Just one and a half of those five hundred CEO's, by the way, are women...

...It's time the rest of us realize the business press, in praising the powers of the market, has little to tell us about the visible hand that is now in our pockets...

...Fundamentally fascist," and "a smokescreen for socialism, where the government substitutes its will for that of the owner...

...The ranking is done by revenues, "still the purest measure of importance," not profits or market value of companies...

...Business Week is far less dependent on its readers' fantasies of massive wealth or "riding the Microsoft rocket...

...Sure, Business Week sometimes hypes fancy sports cars, but it will also publish a charming essay on the joys of Junkers...

...And this from the same issue: "Of course many investors are glum because they can't see enough oomph in the economy to overpower interest-rate and dollar woes....the long-awaited pickup in profits from leaner and meaner companies is starting to materialize...

...The notsosubtle hint...

...Last year's special Executive Compensation issue—an annual feature devoted to ogling the salaries of business warriors—predictably whined that CEOs are unjustly criticized for their fat paychecks...

...Well, there's no law that says an economic expansion must end—though it's always happened before...

...An aptly titled feature, "These Are the Good Old Days" (June 9, 1997), praises ours as the best economy ever: All the economic indicators point to continued expansion— at least through this year and maybe even the next...

...In the course of the debate, Durkheim challenged the immutability of economic laws...

...q 110 • DISSENT...

...It even found a few kind words for France's recent return to socialist leadership: "The French electorate is being rational in opposing the anti-growth, austerity measures forcefed to Europe by an arrogant political and bureaucratic elite sitting in Bonn, Paris, and Brussels...

...government only once—as a leader behind a business reponsibility law...

...Globalization and high technology are changing the business cycle in unforeseen ways...

...And focusing on the booming Dow as an indication of value in the economy makes it easy to forget that one of the reasons a stock's price jumps in the first place is the stock market's approval of mass-layoffs...

...Banking on dictators and sweatshops is good business, and our American habit of intervening in labor markets with "costly" anti-discrimination laws isn't...

...Sustainable development...

...A cover from an issue 10 years ago asking the jittery investor "How Worried Should You Be...

...It makes no bones about its evangelical view of capitalism: in each issue it sets an aphorism from Malcolm or B.C...

...And most American individuals and companies still have legitimate economic complaints, such as toohigh taxes or overly restrictive regulations...

...And like the hard-working American middle class, Business Week is a terribly anxious creature...

...Michael Eisner, the thirdhighest paid man in America, doesn't: "Yes, Disney shareholders have profited handsomely since Eisner took over in 1984, but isn't Eisner more of a steward/exploiter of assets than a creator/ builder of assets...

...One recent "charticle" ranks 115 countries in order of relative economic freedom...

...Forbes tastefully alongside a reader-submitted Biblical quotation...

...Those glamorous CEOs who "cared passionately" about the stock market value of their firms are driving the spectacular gains in the stock market value of the country's largest firms...

...Yes, options are often abused, and CEOs can become too obsessed with their stock price...

...But all three have been left with the task of helping their readers not to feel guilty or distressed in this, the best of all possible economic worlds...

...But the real income of families in the bottom tenth of income distribution fell almost 16 percent in the same period...

...it's about productivity...

...Not surprisingly, personal responsibility and trickle-down prosperity are the only solutions acceptable to Forbes...

...Laws that subordinate life, liberty, or property to vague notions of 'the common good' inevitably lead to injustice...

...Forbes loves the rags-to-riches story: every issue seems to feature a new North Dakotan centimillionaire we've never heard of, a modest fellow who owns only one suit, eats at Red Lobster, and grows two billion pounds of potatoes every year...

...Will he . . . restore growth and glory...

...and that is the extent of their agitation...

...How much risk did Eisner assume in taking command of this gold-standard brand...

...Now that CEOs are shareholders, they're working harder to please the stock market, willing to slash a firm's payroll and long-term growth prospects in order to pocket profits off the company's stock performance...

...looks very similar to a cover this spring, "Strong Growth, Little Inflation, Low Unemployment: How Long Can This Last...

...Nor should they...

...Were the men of corporate America more attractive, you could mistake Fortune's covers for a male version of Glamour: close-ups of smooth-faced white models...

...If Forbes is about the cult of growth, Fortune is all about the cult of heroism behind the company man—like its Time Warner cousin People, it says glowing things about celebrities and finds heroism in the ordinary Joe who's just trying to earn a coupla million bucks...

...But the magazine's only true religion is that expounded by the former, not the latter...

...The value of things," he said, "in fact depends not only upon their objective properties, but also upon the opinion one forms of them...

...Government statistics may not capture rising productivity," Business Week informs us, "but healthy corporate profits at a time of little pricing power do...

...In its own blinkered way, FALL • 1997 • 109 Magazines Business Week appreciates the need for a social contract and for prosperity to be broadly distributed...

...Mired in a half-baked form of socialism...

...In its hour of triumph—with Washington having granted nearly all of the Chamber of Commerce's policy wishes—the business press is left alone, as it were, with the tiger it has helped to unleash...

...Frbes is easy to hate...

...Information technology is replacing autos and housing as the driving force in the economy, while global markets influence capital flows, price and wage pressures, and profits...

...The Business Week answer in both cases is the same: "If a Correction Comes, It May Be Short and Sweet" (April 6, 1987) ends, "if the market rally shorts out, it won't take long to get the power flowing again...

...The problem is that Business Week, no less than Fortune or Forbes, urges its readers to believe that "in this strangest of times" everything will work out for the best, so long as the free market is allowed to work its magic...

...On paper, the gap in financial circumstances between citizens in the middling ranks and the very, very wealthiest person has never been greater—yet psychologically, the gap does not seem so large, simply because now we nobodies get to tag along too...

...Every few months seems to bring a new cover package on wage disparities or chaotic job markets...

...As an account of economic changes, this is unobjectionable...

...Tellingly, though, Forbes declines to endorse each and every CEO salary...

...For us, CEOs who are really entrepreneurs make the best case that they deserve their riches," like Green Tree Financial's Lawrence M. Coss, who earned over $100 million last year alone...

...Public school education...

...But the magazine's Fordist nostalgia is entirely toothless...

...Russia, El Salvador, Tanzania, Peru, and the Dominican Republic would all be good places to put money...

...But the chart as a whole hardly seems to correlate with GDP: Malaysia, the Philippines, and Mauritius are all in the top ten...

...No serious post-Keynesian reform is feasible, and no American institutions cause serious harm...

...The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the new EEOC Guidelines on Psychiatric Disabilities...

...Still, we're far better off with executives caring about creating shareholder wealth than not...

...An essay on the U.S./Mexican border describes atrocious conditions in maquiladoras, but a column by the University of Chicago's Gary Becker explains complacently that "financial inducements" will solve Latin America's child-labor problem...

...It is the Dow, the S&P 500, and NASDAQ that are telling us old assumptions should be challenged in the New Economy...

...Anything that smacks of collective action is derisively mocked as "socialism...

...Like Sports Illustrated, Business Week roots for its favorite teams and cheers for goodoldfashioned sportsmanship and a wholesome notion of fairness...

...Such problems are simply given a gloss that makes them seem surmountable (particularly if the economy continues to grow: "While inequality has certainly widened during this expansion, there is hope, at least, that this rising tide is finally beginning to lift all American boats") rather than an inherent part of the new economy: Not that it's a perfect economy...

...The freedom chart's only "A+," Hong Kong, does indeed have the world's highest GDP per capita...

...In "Bill Gates: Richest American Ever" (August 4, 1997) the deluded rosy outlook continues: Anyone can ride alongside Gates in the Microsoft rocket too, if not as an individual shareholder, then through mutual funds...

...He lost...

...And rare is the CEO who doesn't 108 • DISSENT Magazines have a big stake in his company-40 percent of senior management compensation now comes from options . . . compared with about one-quarter in 1984...

...Alfred Chandler, a Harvard business historian, saw the difference between the free-wheeling market and those who manage it: "In many sectors of the economy the visible hand of managment replaced what Adam Smith refered to as the invisible hand of the market...

...There is little pricing power for corporations and hardly any for unions...

...Business Week is the friendly, hard-working American middle-class business magazine...

...In this strangest of times, all the evidence indicates that it pays to err on the side of growth...

...They implore Brussels (and the Federal Reserve) to adopt "pro-growth" policies...

...This corporate-liberal slant is precisely what makes Business Week the most maddening of the lot...

...The reporter in the Bulletin de la societe d'economie politique summed up the debate this way: "Political economy occupies the first place among the social sciences...

...A "monopoly held by the teachers' unions and the educational establishment," bloated with unnecessary "educrats...

...He] faces the toughest challenge of a charmed career...

...Business magazines can hardly be blamed for not sharing the left's ideas about justice...

...If an economy this strong isn't helping everyone, there's likely to be a good reason: A study by Rand Corp...

...After that...

...According to this analysis, General Electric's 1,155 percent increase in stock market value over the last fifteen years owes more to the leadership of CEO Jack Welch than to the thousands of jobs sacrificed to the market gods or to the mutual funds of the baby boomers bidding up the prices of blue chip stocks in the hopes of eking out a retirement...

...economist Lynn Karoly, for example, found that those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution saw their wealth rise 11 percent between 1973 and 1993...

...So while large numbers of investors are dwelling on the negatives, the bull market has plenty of room to run...

...Guatemala, Indonesia, and Uruguay place ahead of all the Scandinavian countries...

...Volatile stock prices and a crash in the price of metals and bonds preceded one of the worst stock market crashes in history...

...Many others have suffered a decline in real income since 1989...

...The New Deal may have been fine for its time, but what we must understand, Business Week tells us again and again, is that "the rules have changed": [B]ig changes in the dynamics of growth are turning the tenets of conventional economic wisdom on their heads...

...In its pages, companies cease to be organizations, transformed instead into arenas for a star's whims, and business reporting is reduced to gossip: "His success, in part, is innate: He's the kind of guy who sets a goal and reaches it...

...However, in their pages we can see opinions of the value of things—not merely investments but a currency of political values— being formed...

...Their dogmatic wisdom helps to explain why even in this undeniable boom—with unemployment edging under 5 percent, and real profits up 14 percent—American workers expect (and receive) smaller and smaller shares of corporate profits...

...The main reason: Changes in technology have left behind those without skills to adapt...

...Without growth and jobs, the people of Europe aren't going to buy into the concept of One Europe...

...The state of Hawaii...

...There's a section on "Social Issues," and the "Workplace" section is likely to feature union news...