Sublime

industry has

But from the 1970s onward, power shifted. Households now invested their savings through large and powerful intermediaries such as pension funds and mutual funds. The rules that had been set up to protect individual savers against the greed or incompetence of corporate executives were now leveraged by professional agents with billions of dollars of

If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption, and the employ

Dan Kahan’s explanation is the cultural cognition hypothesis. People respond to a message based not on the evidence behind it but on the cultural identity it signifies.

key corporate advisers—investment bankers, consultants, mergers and acquisitions law firms, and anyone who can claim a “finder’s fee”—can earn a king’s ransom by being “helpful” in a major deal.

For American taxpayers, the Savings and Loans debacle was a hugely expensive lesson in the perils of ill-considered deregulation.

In particular, courts refuse to hold directors of public corporations legally accountable for failing to maximize shareholder wealth.