Politics is weird, business is normal

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the concluding bit:

As for 2017, I have been concluding that I should raise my relative opinion of business and lower my view of government. I’m still waiting for millennials — a relatively left-leaning generation — to reach a similar position.

Sometimes we forget about companies, in part because it is the business of business that we don’t notice it too often for the wrong things. And don’t forget that most of the weird stories about Trump or politics refer to a pretty small slice of our world, further amplified by social media.

In a war between the boring and the weird, don’t be surprised if the weird commands the most notice. But the normal and the boring have enormous powers of inertia on their side, not to mention human goodwill, and they are doing better than it might at first seem. So if you think America is falling apart, give the corporate world another look.

I believe that right now we are all too entranced by the “news of the weird.” On the side of business, there are problems with productivity growth and perhaps excess monopoly, but arguably those are about the most normal problems you could have.  I suspect the world of American business is these days a bit too normal, and could use a marginal dose of some more Elon Musk.

As you might expect, they came up with a good photo for the column.

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