Comment by wpietri

The end of the cold war- and a true market due to systemic competition? It gave union leverage, it gave politician a metric "continued existence" and it gave companies something to be or not to be.

Also you are right about this being the norm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

This is what a free market without systemic competition always boils down into.

I think workers in prior generations (largely Silent and early Boomer) told us exactly what deviance was becoming normalized starting in the 70s through the 90s: managers who’d only ever managed, and don’t much care what they’re managing. MBAs and finance majors replacing the people who might not have any degree but did know what actual labor the company did and how the productive (not spreadsheets) side of the business functions, because they had personally done some of it for years.

They’re still around to ask about this stuff.

I think cutting way back on antitrust enforcement starting in the mid 70s accelerated the shift (that part, you may or may not hear from the older workers who watched this happening—though I bet their stories include some M&A activity as inflection points)

I mean, being one half of a duopoly can’t help. Even if an airline wants to buy A320neos instead of 737-Maxes, say, it realistically can’t; there’s a waiting list of years. The 737-Max can be almost arbitrarily bad, and people still have to buy it.

Arguably, this is on the FTC and EC; if the mergers which created Airbus and current-Boeing hadn’t been permitted, the market would look very different, and there’d be less space for making a Terrible Plane; no-one would buy it.

You see this elsewhere; look at the old Soviet/Warsaw Pact car industry, or somewhat more arguably the pre-European-accession British car market (before it joined the EU, the UK was quite protectionist around cars). _Terrible_ products, but people had to buy them because nothing else was realistically available. So, why bother putting any effort into making them good?

> The interesting question then becomes: what is the deviance that has become normalized so broadly?

Welchian management. "Greed is good". It's so infected the American psyche that people believe corporate management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to the point that they legally must put profit above all else. That is not in any way the case, and no law has formalized any such thing. It's a choice, a choice made every day in nearly every company, to create human suffering in pursuit of profit and to eschew any concept of loyalty or ethics.

Jack Welch destroyed GE doing this, and his acolytes destroyed IBM, Boeing, and many other American institutions. His brand of management has now become the only brand of management taught across nearly two generations of MBAs. It is now the normal culture of American corporations.