The Latest Economic Hotness is Just a Reaction

Globalization, financialization, MMT, etc. etc. are all just pendulum swings that adherents think are totalizing Grand Answers. Don't drink the kool-aid.

(spurred by a debate in a private channel about corporate control, economic freedom, etc. copy+pasted here ‘cause I don’t write enough in public)

Ebbs and flows of control between Corporate Leadership and shareholders

Corporate execs and boards did have far more relative power than shareholders around Friedman's time. That pendulum has swung back for a while starting with the M&A boom in the 80s where corporate raiders broke up old, staid industrial companies (see: Wall Street and Barbarians at the Gate). Within tech it has swung back again in favor of corporate leadership. The more legible the business over time, the more external money can understand and exert control on the business itself. There are very long cycle-time ebbs and flows of the control of capital (whether kept internal for R&D or returned to shareholders for investment allocation). These wars continue. Carl Icahn made a killing by buying a lot of Apple stock and forcing Apple to do share buybacks. He essentially forced apple to give up control of some of the cash assets. Note that Apple's balance sheet is a vast majority liquid capital like cash, currencies, etc.

Friedman, economic liberalization, and pendulum swing movements

Friedman specifically is often poorly followed by his adherents. He was in favor of a large UBI, for example, in place of means-adjusted, complex social safety nets with an efficiency argument. He was, I also think, reacting to his specific place and time. He also was a very strong proponent of govt regulation when it came to specific economic collective action problems like Externalities. The intellectual economic liberalization movement in the 1970s was a sort of reaction to the 1930s era New Deal progressivism that was a reaction to the 1920s fast-and-loose which was a reaction to...

Why you can't see the cycles without reading a lot of history

Since these cycle times are often on the order of a generation, entire generations grow up swimming in the water of a particular movement, thinking that's all there is. And so a movement they adopt (progressive 1930s, liberalizing 1970s, corporate raiding in the 1980s, globalization in the 1990s, etc. etc. etc.) that feels like a universally good thing only feels totalizing like that because an entire generation doesn't see that they are only reacting to the excesses of the prior wave.