Slim pickings for the best business books of the year

2023 has not been a bumper year for business books. Photo: Bloomberg

This has not been a bumper year for business books.

The biggest sellers have been unsatisfactory biographies. Walter Isaacson's 'Elon Musk' told the story of the billionaire with professional aplomb but nevertheless left me even more bored with the man than I had been already. Michael Lewis's 'Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon' left me loathing the "hero," Sam Bankman-Freid, so much that I had to stop reading it. 

Fortunately, there were other books that enlightened and entertained — and triggered.

'The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism' is Martin Wolf's magnum opus and cri de coeur. Wolf has had a ringside seat at the capitalist circus for decades, as the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and a fixture at Davos and Bilderberg. But he's become increasingly disillusioned with what's going on under the big top.

His book presents a disturbing picture of a system that has lost the ability to police itself, with business insiders growing fat on rent-seeking and politicians too dependent on big donations and too caught up in short-term political cycles to do anything about it. A capitalist democracy is in danger of degenerating into a rigged plutocracy. Wolf's sometimes data-heavy prose is enlivened by numerous references to the classics, the subject that he first studied at Oxford University before deciding to devote his life to the dismal science.

The biggest business question hanging over us all at the moment is the meaning of AI. Will it bring the end of human civilisation—surely a pretty big question—as some of its enablers (and all of its detractors) warn? Or will it provide the capitalist economy with the productivity boost that has eluded it for so long? 

'Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity' by two leading MIT economists, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, was the most intriguing of several attempts to wrestle with the subject.

What sets the two professors apart is their insistence that you can only understand the potential impact of a new technology if you study it in the light of previous technological revolutions and in the context of dominant power relations. 

The benefits of innovation have frequently been captured almost entirely by dominant elites, most tragically in the case of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which entrenched the institution of slavery by making it easier to separate the cotton plant's fibre from its sticky green seeds. Their history is sometimes a bit crude—my hackles rose at the idea that medieval cathedrals represented nothing more than examples of the extraction of surplus value by the landed elite.

But they established two points beyond doubt: The first is that we cannot understand where AI will take us unless we pay attention to the distribution of power as well as the internal logic of the technology; the second is that the tech elite will probably bring out the worst in AI – unless the rest of us can somehow push back.

At 816 closely written pages, 'The Corporation in the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise' by Richard N. Langlois is the undisputed winner of the heavyweight champion of the business book world. Langlois, a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, emphasises the extraordinary mutability of the corporate form. 

In the post-war years, everyone believed that giant US multidivisional firms such as General Motors and DuPont represented the end of history in so far as corporate design was concerned: Their size gave them global reach and staying power while their structure (several divisions under one roof) allowed them to produce different goods for different markets. Alfred Chandler, the great historian of these companies, pronounced that they were not only inherently stable but provided a stable base for American society in general.

The 1970s and 1980s saw these companies picked apart by a host of hostile forces—institutional investors determined to get the best returns, foreign companies such as Toyota that could produce a better combination of price and value, and entrepreneurial firms that learned how to delegate decision-making to front-line workers. But though Chandler was wrong about the durability of these companies, he was right about their broader role: The unpicking of these organisations accounts for much of the instability that has plagued US society over recent decades, when economic growth has been coupled with growing popular discontent.  

'For Profit: A History of Corporations' by William Magnuson is a lighter read than Langlois in every sense of the word: a highly readable romp through the history of the corporation from the Roman Republic to Silicon Valley. Magnusson, a professor of corporate law at Texas A&M University, brings his story to life through particular companies: The Medici bank during the Renaissance is used to explore trust, for example, and Exxon Mobil is used to explore globalisation. 

Magnuson's belief that companies have a duty to promote the common good explicitly rather than as a consequence of profit-seeking is not to my taste: This was the regime that governed corporate life up until the liberal revolution in the mid-19th century and it gave us such public-benefit companies as the East India Company, which plundered India, and the Royal Africa Company, which dealt in slaves. But the book is nevertheless stuffed with fascinating examples and rollicking stories.

Yascha Mounk's 'The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time' is not a business book by any means. Rather it is a book about the dissemination of ideas. But it should be essential reading for any businessperson who wants to understand what is going on. I suspect that many businesspeople simply adopted these mantras out of a desire to go-along to get-along without really thinking about them. Now that they are discovering that they can destroy careers it is belatedly time to start thinking.

A professor at Johns Hopkins University and a proud product of multiculturalism, born in Germany of Polish parents and educated in England and the US, Mounk recognises that many western societies, not least the US, have treated some groups abysmally. Simply doing nothing is not an option. But he argues that identity-based policies frequently reinforce the problems that they are meant to solve: dividing children into race-segregated affinity groups, as is fashionable in some American schools, reeks more of the old south than a modern multicultural society. 

He also draws a helpful distinction between "race conscious" and "racism conscious" policies: policy makers should do their best to undo the legacy of racism by addressing housing discrimination, for example, but they should not deliberately divide people into racial identity groups or judge individuals on the basis of their race. 

"The goal of the country's most influential institutions, from corporations to philanthropic foundations," says Mounk, "should be to foster integration and inspire an emphasis on the identities that compatriots drawn from different ethnic (and religious and sexual) groups share with each other."

'The Identity Trap' is an eloquent plea for universal liberal values in an age of populism and partisanship—and one that sensible business executives ought to read with care.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and is published by a special syndication arrangement.