Keeping America Great with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet recently sat down at Columbia University with a crowd of MBA students for a program called, "Keeping America Great." An unofficial transcript is available here, but I wanted to point readers to one very important question posed by a member of the audience:

QUESTION: My name is Brian, first-year student here at Columbia. And I run a business school right now and seems to me a lot of the villains in the full credit crisis were business school graduates. To what extent do you guys think that business schools like Columbia were in some sense responsible for what transpired in the credit crisis?

GATES: Well, remember that capitalism has been massively successful, you know. Standard of life, medicine, all these great things have come out of it. And business schools play a role in training people to think about value, leadership. There's wonderful skills that are taught at great schools like this. And so the fact that, yes, we have had a crisis and we have dropped back, maybe we wasted two or three years net because of the things that were done wrong, that doesn't say that business schools aren't performing a great service, you know. The case studies of this crisis will be taught here for decades to come. And so at least we'll get that benefit out of the pain we went through...

"Capitalism has been massively successful," Gates says, dodging the question almost entirely. The late Gerald Bracey suggested we look at what is (and isn't) taught at America's B-schools to understand the financial conundrum we've gotten into. Looks like Bill missed that all-too-important Bracey memo.

The supercapitalists minds of Bill and Warren, however, fail to acknowledge that not all forms of capitalism are the same. Consider this excerpt from a recent DemocracyNow! interview of John Perkins, a self-described former "economic hit-man" and author of a number of highly-recommended books:

But I think what’s—you know, what’s really important about all this is that in this period of time, since the 1970s, and really beginning very strongly in the 1980s, we’ve created what I consider a mutant, viral form of capitalism. Earlier on the program, you showed the statistics of 37 percent of the people in the survey not believing that capitalism is working. I don’t think the failure is capitalism. I think it’s the specific kind of capitalism that we’ve developed in the last thirty or forty years, particularly beginning with the time of Reagan and Milton Friedman’s economic theories, which stress that the only goal of business is to maximize profit, regardless of the social and environmental costs, and not to regulate businesses at all—regulation is bad, all forms—and to privatize everything, so that everything is run by private business. And this mutant form of capitalism, which I think is really a predatory form of capitalism, has created an extremely unstable, unsustainable, unjust and very, very dangerous world.

But, in the minds of supercapitalists like Gates and Buffet, capitalism only exists in one form, and that one form is the best we can do. You wont find nuanced thought about capitalism coming from two men with a combined net worth approaching $100 billion. For that much money you can be awfully blind about the issues facing real people and no one will raise to challenge your beliefs - particularly not at Ivy League B schools.