First act: Brash young(ish) hedge fund guy takes over iconic American business, forces through closures and layoffs, makes lots of money for his friends.

From the moment he bought into what was then called Sears, Roebuck & Co., he also maneuvered to protect his financial interests. At times, he even made money. He closed stores, fired employees and ... carved out some choice assets for himself.

All seems to be going well. But now the second act: He gets too attached, and instead of passing the drained but still functioning business onto some other sucker, imagines he can run it himself. But managing a giant retailer is harder than it looks. Getting on a videoconference a couple times a week and telling the executives that they're idiots isn't enough to turn things around.

"We've now had basically 5 flat years. If you look at labor force participation since the 4th quarter of '13 until now you've really had an oscillation that is basically a sideways movement in the face of a significant downward trend"

2014 Fed staff paper https://t.co/2FUJ2v55ri pic.twitter.com/1BzgitrcNH

— Sam Bell (@sam_a_bell) 26. September 2018

pic.twitter.com/gQQKr2lunF

— Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) 26. September 2018

DICTION CORNER

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

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Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The business of "global management consulting" has always existed in a realm of nebulous amorality. In a recent interview with Isaac Chotiner at Slate, Duff McDonald, a financial journalist who wrote a book on McKinsey, spelled it out neatly:

In their typical strategy work, they gave advice and made no representations about implementation. So if a strategy that McKinsey offered someone went horribly wrong on the implementation level, their response was always, "We have nothing to do with this. We simply gave them some ideas."

The genealogy of this attitude--or this affect of having no attitude at all--dates to the birth of management consulting at the start of the last century, to the work of the former engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who dreamed up the idea of "scientific management." Taylor was himself an engineer, and like so many of our own contemporary gee-whiz tech boys, his "scientific" was less about a rigorous method of inquiry than about replacing "Should we?" with "Can we?" in a model universe free of social consequence.