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A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Correspondence and criticism welcome: robert@thebrowser.com This week: Books about business and finance
When a finance company once said to be worth more than $30 billion collapses almost overnight, leaving behind a balance sheet which appears to be entirely illusory; and when the founder of one of the past decade's most lionised start-ups is jailed for having lied about the very existence of her product almost from day one; then it is tempting to conclude that the best business fiction is the fiction produced, on occasions, by business itself. And so it may be. But FTX and Theranos are extreme rogue cases. Fiction has its place in even the most respectable business models. Describing a business, and the outlook for a business, is never an up-down choice between "just the facts" and "smoke and mirrors". There will always be a spectrum of possibilities between the two within which lies the story, the narrative, which the owner or manager or promoter of the business sincerely wants to come true. By any strict accounting this story probably ranks as something like a best-case scenario. It is a story that can come true only if lots of other people — investors, employees, customers — believe in it. To make it come true, the entrepreneur must profess absolute confidence in the story, even when what they truly possess is at best provisional confidence. All of this is within the rules, more or less. The business world recognises the importance of narrative as a productive force. How else, save by telling a persuasive story, can one mobilise people to invest money in something which does not yet exist? Where is the company without a PR department? Economic theory has never formally recognised the role of narrative as such, although recent work by Robert Shiller is pushing in that direction. Economists prefer to speak of "expectations" which shape people's behaviour. But stories and expectations are two sides of the same coin: Stories create expectations, and expectations are stories. The entrepreneur tells a story about a new sea-route to the Indies, a more efficient steam engine, a cheaper motor-car, a quicker way to search the Internet. Perhaps more importantly, the entrepreneur tells a story about themselves — that they and they alone can achieve this thing: "Trust me to do this". If things go wrong, it is mainly the concept of good faith that separates fraud from mere failure. Did the entrepreneur truly believe that things could and would work out all right in the end? All great business frauds, to a first approximation, are the work of entrepreneurs who go on selling themselves, long after they know that their promised product is doomed.
Scandals and crises have generally made for the best and most popular business books, certainly in non-fiction: I think of John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (2018) about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos; Billion Dollar Whale (2018), by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, about the looting of Malaysia's treasury; Money Men (2022), by Dan McCrum, about the Wirecard affair. All three deal with vast frauds. No less gripping are Frank Partnoy's Match King (2009) about Ivar Kreuger; The Smartest Guys In The Room (2003), about Enron, by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean; and The Predators' Ball (1989), by Connie Bruck, about the junk-bond boom of the 1980s. These three books are not about premeditated frauds, but about situations which spiral out of control thanks to domineering animal spirits who think that rulebooks are for losers — another occupational hazard of business and finance. Does the popularity of books about scandal and crisis mean that writers (and readers) are generally hostile to the business world, and delight in proof of its vices? I doubt this, just as I doubt that the popularity of crime novels and true-crime books signals a general hostility to the rule of law. It is just much easier to write and to read about extraordinary things than about ordinary things. People want to know why a bank fails; they do not much want to know why a bank continues in business. Greatly enriched by suggestions from friends of The Browser in the past couple of weeks, here are my lists of recommendable fiction and non-fiction books about business and finance. I hope they draw at least one or two books of possible interest to your attention. I am particularly grateful to CA, RH, SM, BW, KD, DY for suggesting books which were new to me or which had slipped my mind. Good-to-great novels about business and finance:
The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope (1875)
The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser (1914)
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (1956)
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (1957)
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo (1969)
Bonfire Of The Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987)
Single & Single, by John Le Carré (1999)
The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee (2010)
Fear Index, by Robert Harris (2011)
The Book Of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen (2016)
The Every, by Dave Eggers (2021)
Trust, by Hernan Diaz (2022) Good-to-great non-fiction books about business and finance:
Where Are The Customers' Yachts?, by Fred Schwed (1940)
Moral Mazes, by Robert Jackall (1988)
Barbarians At The Gate, by Brian Burroughs and John Helyar (1989)
The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck (1989)
The Informant, by Kurt Eichenwald (2000)
The Smartest Guys In The Room, by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean (2003)
Match King, by Frank Partnoy (2009)
Zero To One, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters (2014)
Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight (2016)
Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou (2018)
Billion Dollar Whale, by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope (2018)
Kochland, by Christopher Leonard (2019)
Money Men, by Dan McCrum (2022)
In the balance of this letter I want to discuss three novels drawn from the list above. As with the political world, the business world presents particular problems for novelists, the main one of which is that most business life is a matter of process and routine. The first law of business might be summarised as: "No surprises". You fix on a goal; you build a consensus among those around you that the goal can be achieved; you achieve the goal. If you fail, at least you did what you said you would do. The first law of fiction, on the other hand is the exact opposite: "There must be surprises". Whatever the crux of the story — a friendship, a marriage, a person, a hope, a memory — it should turn out, on closer inspection, to be other than it first seemed. How to reconcile these contradictory demands? These three novels do it in different ways. Ayn Rand gives us counterintuitive views of business and morality which are surprising quite regardless of the underlying plot. Sloan Wilson moves the surprises to one side, so that they lie in the tensions between the hero's past life in wartime and his present life in business. Dave Eggers depicts his chosen business as having a secret agenda which the hero must uncover.
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (1957) Atlas Shrugged is by far the best-selling business novel of all time, and one of the best-selling novels in any genre. In it, Ayn Rand reimagines the business world as an allegorical world animated by her own beliefs. Atlas Shrugged is the Pilgrim's Progress of capitalism, with a much simpler moral code. For Rand, selfishness is good and altruism is bad. Selfish people are strong and purposeful; they know what they want; they get things done. Altruistic people are weak and confused; their desires are remote and diffuse; they squander their resources. Governments and criminals alike are "parasites" and "looters" who prey on society's wealth-creators. The various characters in Atlas Shrugged act out these stereotypes in a setting reminiscent of Depression-era America: The mighty Taggart railroad empire is heading for bankruptcy because its public-spirited boss, John Taggart, is too soft on workers and suppliers, governments and competitors. His brilliant sister, Dagny, can see how to save the corporation by riding roughshod over John's sensitivities, but the nice guys will not let her. It is easy to ridicule Rand. With the passage of time much of her writing has come to seem crankish and just plain wrong. Inequality has been rising our societies for the past fifty years, which must be accounted a triumph of selfishness, and yet the world is not obviously much the better for it. What can we say in defence of Rand? First, perhaps, that her exalting of "selfishness" is no more than a simplified and exaggerated version of Adam Smith's argument in favour of "self-interest" which we can find in the Wealth Of Nations and which is part of the bedrock of mainstream economics: By pursuing his own interest [the individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Second, that if individual selfishness really is the best strategy for human flourishing, then it becomes indistinguishable from altruism — a conclusion which helps us to reconcile Rand's philosophy with mainstream moral philosphy even as it leads Randians into something of a paradox. Third, the greatest business scandal of our day, the collapse of FTX, seems to be the work of the world's most energetic promoter of altruistic philosophy, Sam Bankman-Fried. We might reasonably contend that Bankman-Fried was merely using altruism as a cover for his selfishness, but somewhere in here Randians do have a point. All the same, I can only call Atlas Shrugged a "striking" novel, or an "exceptional" novel, rather than giving it unqualified praise. It deserves a place in the history of ideas rather than in the canons of Western literature. I can, and do, read ten or twenty pages of it with interest from time to time, before hitting some purple patch and turning to something else. It is not a book for reading through. I do still think that Ayn Rand was to something — namely, that if you approach business as an heroic undertaking, and entrepreneurs as true heroes, then you can hope to write a business novel which will be an epic of modern times, a moral saga to rank with the Odyssey and the Arthurian legends. Rand herself was not a good enough writer to pull this off, but I give her points for trying.
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (1956) If you take The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, and combine it with David Ogilvy's Confessions of An Advertising Man, you have all the ingredients needed to make Mad Men. The workings of Madison Avenue are all there in Ogilvy; the slices of American life are all there in Wilson. Like Mad Men's Don Draper, Tom Rath, the man in the suit, is adjusting to the demands and opportunities of 1950s corporate America, while wrestling with occasional flashbacks to his years in military service when he was required to be a very different sort of animal. Don Draper stole the identity of a colleague slain in a dugout to get himself shipped out of Korea. Tom Rath killed 17 men in close combat, a memory that he finds difficult to share even with his wife, and of uncertain relevance to his current work in public relations. You could imagine Ayn Rand and Tom Rath taking against one another at first sight. Rath does not want great power or wealth. He wants adequate comfort and leisure. He wants to support his family well, while still having time to spend with them. He finds that he can do one or the other, but not both. To support his family he must succeed in business, and to succeed in business, or so he deduces from those around him, he must become a workaholic. To judge by Rath's experiences, being a workaholic executive in 1950s America was somewhat different from being a workaholic now. "Long hours" did not mean hunching over your computer at home until 2am. "Long hours" meant staying out late most nights drinking with your boss, or drinking with your colleagues, or drinking with your customers, or drinking in your hotel room on a sales trip. Arguably a more entertaining form of "working", but no less frustrating for a person like Rath who just wants to be at home with their kids. The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, for all its underlying sadness, is a light, endearing, often very funny book. Who could not warm to this exchange? Tom felt her forehead and found it was dry and hot. He searched through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and returned carrying a thermometer.
“You’re sure that’s the one you’re supposed to put in your mouth?” Betsy asked suspiciously.
There is nothing else quite like The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit in modern fiction, as far as I know. But literature is full of Tom Raths, loners who cannot quite settle down in the society available to them. They cultivate a bland exterior to conceal the vertigo within. They are at their noblest in the novels of Joseph Conrad, at their seediest in the novels of Graham Greene. Reflecting on this last point provokes me to think that perhaps there are two basic types of people in the universe of books: The restless people who want a quieter life, and the quiet people who want a more restless life. The restless people who want a quieter life are the heroes and anti-heroes of classic fiction; the quiet people who want a more restless life are we, the readers.
The Every, by David Eggers (2021) In much the same way that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1905) sought to expose the horrors of America's early-20C meatpacking industry, so The Every seeks to expose the horrors of America's early-21C googling industry. The optics, obviously, are very different. The Every plays out on a corporate campus of nerds controlled by an elusive trio of amoral geniuses. No visible harm is being done to people or animals. Everybody on campus seems to be happy and well paid. There is a whiff of sulphur around the amoral geniuses, but nothing which calls their genius into question. The Every might even be called an office novel, although the campus is more like a theme-park than it is like a cubicle farm, and The Every is more like a cult than a corporation. The drama in office novels tends to derive from contradictions between the ways that people present themselves inside the office and the lives that they live outside the office. Then We Came To The End (2008), by Joshua Ferris, is a classic of the genre; so, too, in a more demanding way, is The Pale King (2011), by David Foster Wallace. The Every is no exception, save that the stakes are a touch higher than they might be in an office where the main action is a covert flirtation or a squabble over whose milk it is in the fridge. We see The Every through the eyes of Delaney Wells, a dissident low-tech idealist who has joined the company to destroy it from within. Who in the chirping cohorts around her might be a latent rebel willing to join her cause? Who might be a covert agent of corporate management, willing in extremis to eliminate her? The Every, like all of Eggers's novels (I think particularly of Hologram For A King), is clever, and understated, and charming to read. I wonder if, from Eggers's own point of view, it might even be too charming. I doubt that anybody ever said, after reading The Jungle: "I want to work in a Chicago stockyard". But after reading The Every I felt quite envious of the happy workers on its campus. It is not easy to resist a world in which the good things in life are all close to hand, while the bad things that you might just possibly be doing to others are, at most, a distant quasi-philosophical abstraction.
My thanks to friends and readers of The Browser for their continuing flow of excellent recommendations for novels set in the world of politics. I look forward to sharing and discussing those recommendations next week — Robert
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