Highest and best use
by Tom Sullivan
MIT Sloan School Building E62. Photo by Vitor Pamplona, via Creative Commons CC BY 2.0.
An MBA student at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management considers the self-justifying worldview initiates both bring with them and absorb. John Benjamin experiences such institutions of learning as “committed to a strict blend of social liberalism and economic conservatism.” Advertised as open forums for ideas, Benjamin sees the machine language underlying the readable code as built instead on the assumption that the answers to society’s problems are always more business.
The assumption is not unlike that underlying real estate development’s “highest and best use” — which amounts to whatever returns the most money to the owner/investor. HBU just sound loftier and less tawdry than “makes the most money.” It’s like how the gig economy promotes low-paying, no-benefits jobs as flexible. Or the way “the tyranny of data-driven optimization” in tech mistakes information for knowledge, but optimization sounds cooler. Or the chiropractor who told me the ultimate purpose behind getting spinal adjustments was to make the world a better place.
Benjamin writes:
What’s striking, however, is that what counts as “progressive” here almost never crosses class lines. Not once have I heard a discussion of unions while in business school. The minimum wage isn’t a hot topic either. Our political concerns instead trend upward and toward the symbolic; equal representation is the lodestar. And where this “representing” is deemed to matter is instructive, because while it’s obvious people want to be represented at the top, our focus is on the highest of the high echelons of American business: The most commonly cited stats are those that show alarming female and minority underrepresentation among Fortune 500 CEOs and in high-paying STEM jobs. These concerns seek to redress serious wrongs and biases, but one can’t escape the sense that the metrics by which MBAs measure “progress” can become totemic: our version of wanting to see more representative Marvel superheroes while forgetting about the extras’ paychecks.
Our total ideology resembles what philosopher John Gray has coined “hyper-liberalism,” a “mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signaling self-righteousness,” which lends its adherents, who mostly pick it up in the cloistered world of academia, “an illusory sense of having a leading role in society.” The personal is political, yes, but we’ve also made it the whole of politics, in large part because we keep depersonalized economic issues off the table. To patch over the problems of shareholder capitalism, we lean on cultural signifiers and hope they justify the role business leaders play in the world.
Students become like major corporations that sponsor Pride floats for employees or air heartening commercials of workers’ biracial families, then adopt practices that make those peoples’ lives more precarious. We’re the global fast food chain that makes a showy celebration of International Women’s Day, but still underpays female workers, or the firm that sponsors a “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street while, you guessed it, cheating its female employees. We’re the startups that use trendy empowerment memes to excuse, even valorize, new forms of privation and indignity for contracted workers. Identity politics, in other words, creates the ethical alibi for when businesses mistreat vulnerable people.
Ah, but the Bible says “money answereth all things,” so it’s all good.
The fundamental question is does the economy serve people or do people serve the economy? Business school has two answers: greater innovation or freer markets.
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