Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an all-American Town by Mirta Ojito and The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

In Hunting Season, Mirta Ojito tells the horrific story of the killing of an Ecuadorian immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, in Patchogue, Long Island at the hands of a group of brutish teenagers. It is a small-town story with international reverberations. At first blush, it is an investigation of American intolerance for the other run wild. Lucero was a poor, hard-working man, searching for a better life. His attackers are themselves lost souls, largely unknown to one another prior to the evening of Lucero’s killing. Each kid seems to lack the basic human understanding that there is something wrong with beating up a man simply because he is a ‘beaner.’ Patchogue is or was a community where the blood sport of attacking random Latinos goes unremarked. It is a dreadful story Ojito presents, and Patchogue appears as a dreadful place.

So what has happened in Patchogue? What does the killing of Lucero constitute? The knife-wielding 17-year-old points to his Latina girlfriend to demonstrate his open mind. Another attacker is both Puerto Rican and black -- the kids embrace him as their friend. Our American experience with racism -- and hence hate crimes -- largely involves victims from established and permanent communities (including the native community). Nativist violence may fall into a different category. The Patchogue 7 conceded they identified and attacked Lucero because of his ethnicity -- but there seems to be more that drew Lucero into their trap. They also understood that Lucero was a foreigner -- and likely one with a shaky immigration status. Lucero’s vulnerability invites this community reprisal.

Post-Financial Crisis Spiritual Reading: the 2013 FT/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book Award

The readers of business books are a fragile lot. They’re uncertain of their talents and the scope of human possibility, confused as to direction (they’re largely not one-percenters). Their anxieties lead them to seek reassurance - from authors who project an understandable and manageable world. It is little surprise that business books resemble spiritual books - they are marked by a confident if not omniscient tone, they judge the unrighteous, they show us the way. The six finalists for the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award extend these comforts.

For more of this essay, see "Post-Financial Crisis Spiritual Reading" at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

On November 18, the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was awarded to Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

See my Attraverso review of The Everything Store here.

And you can find below links to my reviews of the five other finalists:

• Neil Irwin, The Alchemists
• Iain Martin, Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data
• Anita Raghavan, The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund 
• Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

Brad Stone’s treatment, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, is the talk of the business press this week. Jeff Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos, posted a ‘one-star review’ of the book on the Amazon site. In it, she expresses concerns about the book’s ‘factual inaccuracies’ and ‘narrative tricks.’ While she certainly had a better view of the recounted events than did Stone, her objections seem quibbling. This is a thoughtful and well researched book, with a surprisingly balanced tone: Stone neither praises Jeff Bezos nor does he bury Bezos.

Stone’s book is both a CEO biography and a corporate history. Bezos is the exception that proves the rule; he is the visionary founder who wasn’t pushed aside for a professional ('adult') manager. And given Bezos’ continuity at the helm of Amazon, one can fairly charge much of Amazon’s success -- and its bullying behavior -- to Bezos.

Stone’s book is a prosecutor’s dream -- it is a catalog of unfair business offenses (were such behavior disciplined today). There is a zone of indeterminacy involved in most bargaining: between the terms a party would accept and the better terms a party might exact (before driving the other party away). Bezos is shown to consistently drive for the very best outcome in Amazon’s dealings -- where the greater part of the joint benefit falls to Amazon and a bare minimum is left for the ‘cooperating’ counterpart. Perhaps this is to be admired; we’d all like to be ‘tough bargainers.’ But Bezos (as depicted by Stone) doesn’t pull punches. He is capable of ‘refusing to deal.’ He applies price pressure against smaller firms. He levers Amazon’s immense power against competitors and partners.

Euro Money as Euro Language

This is the first of a series of reflections on the social meaning of the Euro.

Investigations of the social character of money often feature an analogy to language. Like words, money forms intelligible signs. Money, like language, is a critical medium of social exchange. Money, like language, is constitutive of identity: the particular kind of money we use, in part, makes us who we are. And money, like language, is both stable and unstable over space and time.

The architects of the European Monetary System (EMS) anticipated that the Euro would serve as an institution around which a European consciousness could be built. The Euro (at least in its material forms) functions like the EU flag or the EU passport to construct a new identity that plays on commonplace nationalist expectations. That is, when we see flags or passports or money, we have been acculturated to expect national sponsorship. The European Union thus displaces the traditional state in presenting itself through these institutions; if not precisely declaring itself to be a state, the European Union is, at a minimum, asserting that it is like a state for various intents and purposes.

But notice the peculiarly assertive case of the Euro. The EU flag often flies alongside the traditional flags of the EU Member States. The EU passport is formally issued by the respective member states: while it prominently features “European Union” on its harmonized cover, it also bears the name of the relevant member state. The EU passport in fact overstates the EU nature of the document. A passport begs the admission of a members state’s nationals into another state’s territory; it is only secondarily evidence of nationality (and in the case of EU passports, evidence of the bearer’s status as an EU citizen). Through flags and passports, the EU and the relevant EU member state co-occupy a space in the EU citizen’s imagination that had been occupied by the state alone.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Making It Happen is the story of the crash of RBS (née Royal Bank of Scotland), momentarily Britain’s largest bank. Iain Martin tells a peculiarly Scottish story in Making It Happen (Martin himself is a Scot): the expansion of RBS was driven by a blend of Scottish pride and insecurity. He takes us through the life history of the Royal Bank (though RBS, as of this writing, is not yet dead). The bank is founded in 1727 in the aftermath of an earlier Scottish financial misadventure, the Darien enterprise: a failed outpost located in present-day Panama. Chastened by this experience, the early masters of the Royal Bank of Scotland exercised prudence of a Presbyterian kind (caution and care) in growing the bank, yet remained open to innovation (such as the use of the joint-stock company) that the English ignored. RBS quietly prospered in Edinburgh, and then the financial world shifted. In short: the Scottish economy was too small to support independent Scottish banks, and so, for RBS to survive, it would need to vault itself to a much larger scale (first UK-wide and then global). Two absolutes are then fixed for RBS: the bank must remain independent and it must be directed from Edinburgh. And this is where the Fred Goodwin story starts.

Fred Goodwin is (if nothing else) devoted to Scotland and hence to building RBS as a Scottish national champion. Goodwin did this is a fairly straightforward way -- he bought other banks (including quite large banks) and proceeded to meld them into the RBS structure. Gains to RBS shareholders -- prototypical raider profits -- resulted from the ensuing ‘rationalizations.’ Goodwin’s fame at slashing employment earned him the nickname ‘Fred the Shred.’ Those who were lucky to remain employed remained exposed to Goodwin’s brutal management style -- such as the daily “morning beatings.”

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In has been a major event; it’s been well received and thoroughly discussed. The book and the debates it stimulated appropriately returned attention to the ongoing gap between success promised and achieved by women in the corporate world.

Sandberg is herself an over-the-top success story. She has held top positions at both Google and Facebook. She, at least, is a take-all winner, one who managed to burst through the glass ceiling. But she remains aware of the many women around her who fail to speak up, who make unneeded compromises and veer off track. And she’s aware as well of those women damaged by unrealizable ‘have it all’ fantasies. Her prescription (which she makes clear is not intended for all) is to “lean in” -- to remain ambitious both for one’s personal career and for establishing a more equal world.

Lean In, Sandberg writes, is not a memoir, nor a self-help book, nor a career management primer. Maybe, she admits, it’s a manifesto. So perhaps it is not unfair to look at Lean In from a scientific perspective: what is Sandberg’s understanding of how one can effect social change? Sandberg herself is a prominent vertex in a social network that famously connects Google and Facebook (the ongoing migration of high tech talent from Google to Facebook, the smaller and more cool company, is partly inspired by Sandberg’s at-the-helm example). She can and does span these communities, as well as those built around Harvard, TEDTalks, and whatever Larry Summers happens to be doing (she describes Summers as a mentor). And no doubt her connections lead elsewhere, to centers of power unrevealed in Lean In. The trick then for Sandberg is how to maximize the influence that comes with such auspicious positioning.

The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

Forgive me for being thick: after reading Anita Raghavan’s book I had to think a moment in order to name the billionaire’s apprentice. The apprentice has to be Rajat Gupta -- himself a humble multi-millionaire -- who services the only billionaire in view: Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon hedge fund. Raghavan recalls Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice in her title to capture Gupta’s doomed adventure. But it is the sorcerer Rajaratnam, and not his apprentice, who brings Galleon crashing down; Gupta is destroyed in the process.

So what did Gupta do? The government taped a compromising phone call by Gupta to Rajaratnam where
Gupta reports the confidential discussions of the Goldman Sachs board (Gupta was then a Goldman director). Gupta was only one of Rajaratnam’s many sources, and it is not clear that his information was that useful. (Rajaratnam argued that he traded on a ‘mosaic’ of information; no one item served as the basis for his actions).

It is hard to dispute that Rajaratnam regularly traded on inside information.  But was all (or most) of Galleon’s fortune built on inside information? I asked the same question in my review of The Buy Side, a tell-all by Galleon-insider Tyler Duff. My question is scientific in spirit, not legal.