Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero Audiobook (Free)

An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen.

We want to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon kill communities and small businesses. Facebook converts us into addicts while placing our personal data in danger. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, “If a lender is too big to fail, it really is too big to exist,” to millennials, just 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in about Big Business: A Like Letter to an American Anti-Hero big business is at an all-time low. But are big businesses inherently wicked? If business is so bad, why does it remain therefore integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest issue is that people don’t like business enough.

In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role within a balanced, effective, and progressive society. He dismantles common myths and untangles conflicting intuitions. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, just 12 percent of Americans trust big business “quite a bit,” and only 6 percent trust it “a good deal.” Yet Americans as an organization are remarkably willing to trust businesses, whether in the form of buying a brand-new phone on your day of its release or simply turning up to work in the expectation they will be paid. Cowen illuminates the key role businesses play in spurring invention, rewarding skill and hard work, and creating the bounty on which we’ve all come to depend.