The Best Business Writing 2014
Brenda Jubin | Nov 19, 2014 05:13AM ET
For three years now Columbia Journalism Review Books has been publishing what the book’s editors (in this case Dean Starkman, Martha M. Hamilton, and Ryan Chittum) consider to be the best business writing of the year. This year’s collection contains 31 articles on topics ranging from the criminal—“Dead End on Silk Road” and “London’s Laundry Business” (and no, it’s not about laundering clothes but rather dirty money and dirty reputations)—to the political—“Washington’s Robust Market for Attacks, Half-Truths” and “He Who Makes the Rules.” There are articles on taxation—“Amazon’s (Not So) Secret War on Taxes” and “How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers"—as well as on unhealthy business—“Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business” and “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” The section on creative destruction has five articles, that on frenzied finance has seven. And there is, of course, the requisite set of articles on Silicon Valley.
I’m not sure how many of these articles made their way into books. I know that Kevin Roose’s “One Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society” was recycled in his Economic Policy Institute , a union-oriented organization: that “from 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period. The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 29.9-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 295.9-to-1 in 2013.”
This isn’t the place to parse economic data. Suffice it to say that CEOs are making much more, workers are treading water, and shareholder value is rising. Goals are no longer balanced.
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