On the weekend that next year’s Rhodes Scholars are announced, Elliot Gerson, American secretary of the Rhodes Trust and executive vice president of the Aspen Institute, writes in the Washington Post that he is greatly disappointed that a few Rhodes Scholars have gone into business.

Yes, you read that right. He’s disappointed that even a few Rhodes Scholars have chosen to go into business:

For more than a century Rhodes scholars have left Oxford with virtually any job available to them. For much of this time, they have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service. They have reached the highest levels in virtually all fields.

In the 1980s, however, the pattern of career choices began to change. Until then, even though business ambitions and management degrees have not been disfavored in our competition, business careers attracted relatively few Rhodes scholars. No one suggested this was an unfit domain; it was simply the rare scholar who went to Wall Street, finance and general business management. Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.

Apparently Gerson believes that our best and brightest can accomplish more good for the world in such fields as writing, law, and bureaucracy than they can by creating, innovating, and improving lives in the world of business — the arena that not only provides all of us with more comfortable, more interesting lives, and has lifted billions of people out of the back-breaking labor and short lives that were the human condition for millennia, but also makes possible the luxuries of the Aspen Institute, which was founded by Walter Paepcke (1896-1960), chairman of the Container Corporation of America, and is supported by successful businesspeople and their heirs today.

Of course, it’s not clear that business needs Rhodes Scholars. Think of the businesspeople who have revolutionized our world in recent decades: Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison, David Geffen, Ted Turner, and Malcom McLean, among others, either never attended or never finished college. Sam Walton, Bill McGowan, and Fred Smith did finish college but weren’t Rhodes Scholars. In the Washington Post Jay Mathews notes that the chief executives of the top 10 U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies attended Pittsburg (Kan.) State, Texas at Austin, University College Dublin, Texas Tech, Texas at Austin, Dartmouth, Kansas, Gannon, Georgia State and Central Oklahoma, not the usual sources of Rhodes Scholars.

But the elite hostility to business — a holdover from Europe, perhaps, where aristocrats looked down on “trade,” or an unconscious echo of Marxism — is unseemly and harmful to both general prosperity and the individuals who are influenced by it to avoid productive enterprise. It crops up in President Obama’s commencement addresses sneering at students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy” and in Michelle Obama’s urging hard-pressed women in Ohio, “Don’t go into corporate America.” It’s nice that some people, like senators’ wives, can make $300,000 a year in “the helping industry,” but it’s business that produces the wealth that allows such nonprofit generosity.

Gerson and the Obamas are disparaging the people who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. That work deserves at least as much respect as “scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service.”

Rhodes Scholars and the Business World is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Regulators at the SEC and politicians on Capitol Hill seem to have short memories when it comes to executive compensation.  When the SEC years ago decided to make the compensation of top executives public information, it had the all too predictable result of actually increasing average compensation levels.  Once a top CEO knew what other CEOs were making, he could argue for a pay hike based upon being “underpaid”.  Of course regulators were “shocked” by the resulting “race to the top.” 

Similarly Congress was shocked when after deciding to heavily tax salaries over $1 million, that companies shifted away from direct cash pay and toward options and increased bonuses in the form of shares. 

And soon Washington will also pretend to be shocked and outraged that the current anger over Wall Street bonuses is leading firms to reduce bonuses, but increase base pay.  As illustrated in today’s Wall Street Journal, companies like Morgan Stanley have increased their base pay from $300,000 to $400,000.  Even Citibank, essentially a ward of the US government, is increasing its base pay to $300,000 for employees that were previously eligible for bonuses.

The real harm in this is not that Wall Street employees are getting paid more in cash, but that less of their compensation will be tied to their performance, and the performance of their firm.  A flat salary, regardless of how hard you work, will encourage shirking. Perhaps even worse, is that more upfront cash, and less long-term stock options, will shift Wall Street’s focus even more toward today, rather than tomorrow.  So much for Washington fixing the short term focus of Wall Street, but then one shouldn’t be too surprised given the even more short term focus of Washington.

Washington Push on Executive Pay Has Unintended Consequences is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Barack Obama now says the economy isn’t as bad as we thought.  Reports the New York Daily News:

President Obama said Thursday the nation’s economic woes are not as dire as they seem and said his economic policies will get the country back on track.

“I don’t think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say,” Obama told CEOs at a meeting of the Business Roundtable in Washington.

“Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy,” he said. “They’re not as bad as we think they are now.”

Does this mean we can cancel the “stimulus” bill and reverse all those bail-outs that were promoted as necessary to save us from disaster?

Now He Tells Us! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog