Sorry, I don’t have a source. I’m also using “line manager” to include engineering managers at engineering or R&D heavy companies, more generally people not in business areas like HR, finance, marketing that are taught in MBA programs, which may not be correct. Checking with my husband, he agrees that probably few people at tech companies (h/w manufacturing) have MBAs, but thinks the head of a large manufacturing organization would have one. At larger companies it may well become a prerequisite, but there are a lot more small companies out there than large ones.

At three non-randomly selected tech companies, among the VPs and above, listed on the corporate website: 2/10 MBAs, 2/5 MBAs, 1/6 MBA. The only CEO MBA was the 1/6 (also the most successful of the three). I see JDs, MSs, CPAs, and undergrad business degrees.

You need foot soldiers—lots of them—and they have to be people who don’t realize the system they’re supporting is keeping them down, because there just aren’t that many genuine masochists.

Which is why the dumbing-down of the corporate media, and the rote/scripted education “reforms” heavily promoted by the business class, are no accident. Mustn’t take any chance on the rubes learning enough to figure out what’s really going on.

Also, even though there probably are fewer MBAs right at the top, you go down a tier or two and they really are for sure ubiquitous, and they play a very prominent role in shaping corporate policies and cultures.

I don’t actually know how many corporate managers have MBA’s, but I would guess the percentage is pretty low below the upper executive level and except in the largest organizations. There are a fair number, I suppose, with undergraduate business degrees, but most line managers still come from the line, and some line managers still get promoted to executive positions. Often they get a lot of their business knowledge comes from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the New York Times, or from employer-sponsored training by consultants.

Which is why books like Malcolm Gladwell’s, which emphasize the contributions of social institutions to success (Bill Gates could not have been successful if he had not had the kind of computer access only rich people could get, athletic success depends heavily on the amount of attention teachers give), are so important.

If Roemer said that, he was wrong. As of 2005, half the total income among those reporting incomes of $10 million cam from capital gains. The remainder broke down approximately equally between wages and salaries; interest, dividends and rent; and business income. So less than 20% were returns to labor even formally.

I’ve put some more detailed numbers up here.

I don’t think “corruption studies” are neglected because the subject is peculiarly intractable or uninteresting. Rather, it is because such research is a political hot potato, likely to lead to trouble with the leaders, funders, and influencers of whatever institution employs such a researcher. Corruption spreads rapidly in a secular society because there are no powerful intellectual defenses against it.

So today’s economists are like the drunkard who is searching for his keys under a lamp post because the light is better there than in the place where they were lost. Our economists can’t find the answers we need because they are using the wrong tools and studying the wrong problems.

Institutionalized corruption has now become the norm. This has nothing to do with any standard economic theory because they all ignore corruption. The fact that no one on this entire thread even comments on the total corruption of the executive, legislative or judicial branches has reached a level that it cannot be rooted out.

The “tea partiers” realize that things are broken. They don’t know what or when. They don’t have nonsense formulas like economists, but they are totally correct. Things are broken.

Anyone who can say anything positive about capitalism is totally refuted by the fact that getting a gallon of gas to the outlying troops in Afghanistan costs over $400. I can get a 5 gallon can delivered through China for $15.00. It is the corruption of all American personnel and rapidly all of the coalition forces that cause the market not to work. There is no market, it is all theft.

There is not really a cost of $1 million per troop in Afghanistan, it is the fact that there is $900,000+ in corruption in that figure.

Welcome to the corrupt world.

The right doesn’t need to “hear” that, chris—they’re every bit as aware of the situation as you are. And they like it that way, and they’re dedicated to keeping it that way. It’s what makes them the right. Everything else is distraction for the rubes.

We’ve had apologists for the rich all along, too. Libertarians prominent among them. If you think the market is intrinsically meritocratic and the best people rise to the top of it, then why should government monkey with it? That’ll only drag down the successful people.

ISTM that this idea was already old when Ayn Rand expressed it at great length. But I suppose in some sense it has to have followed the fall of traditional aristocracies in which birth was everything. Neoaristocracy depends on mythologizing people like Bill Gates to produce the idea that anyone can become a capitalist hero if they’re smart and hardworking enough, which ties into the Calvinism: your success in the market reveals your inner worthiness, and therefore the unsuccessful are the unworthy and must be the ones screwing up anything that is in fact screwed up.

In reality, almost everyone who reaches the top of the economic ladder was born at least halfway up (including Gates, who had quite a comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing). Hard work is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success. But the right doesn’t want to hear that—they’re practically defined by unwillingness to hear that.