Hurricanes, oil spills, and Louisiana politics — the latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Jay Lapeyre, CEO of The Laitram Corporation.
I met with Lapeyre in New Orleans to discuss natural disasters and corrupt politics, leadership, and the state of American manufacturing in our global economy.
The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens.
Rocket Singh takes up negative themes of corrupt in sales, bribery, and conflicts of interest, but the emphasis is on the positive: the sources of self-respect, win-win business relations, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. I responded to the very human challenges of honesty, integrity, necessity as the mother of invention and ingenuity, growing pains, guts, and semi-redemption.
Stating the themes abstractly like that could make Rocket sound saccharine and didactic, but it works as a real movie, with engaging characters, tension, and drama.
In this third Socratic seminar on the Best Arguments against Free-market Capitalism, we take up three arguments: a) the paternalist argument that human beings are incapable of living freely,
b) the collectivist argument that wealth is a social creation (at 11 minutes), and
c) the religious argument that value is not of this world (at 32 minutes).
At Francisco Marroquín University, I led a series of seminars on the Best Arguments against Free-market Capitalism. The format is Socratic, with lively back-and-forth between me and an impressive group of UFM professors.
In first session, we take up the argument that Free-market capitalism is dog-eat-dog. The video’s editor, Luis Barrueto, provides a useful thematic table of contents for the discussion on the right side of the video frame.
Forthcoming: Five more arguments against free-market capitalism.
I am neither Catholic nor Protestant, so I do not have a dog in that fight but rather a cultural history question about the financially bankrupt PIGS or PIIGS countries in Europe.
With the exception of Ireland, all are in southern Europe. Including Ireland, all of them are traditionally Catholic [except Greece, which is mostly Eastern Orthodox, as William W. points out].
Some questions:
1. Is the Protestant-work-ethic thesis — which is thought to encourage diligent labor, saving, and living more frugally — relevant here?
2. Is there something contrasting in Catholicism’s cultural heritage that makes it politically more spendthrift?
3. Are there predominantly Protestant nations in as much economic difficulty?
4. What about the exceptions — predominantly Catholic countries not in the PIGS category: France, Austria, Poland, etc.?
5. If we were to place all European nations along a spectrum from financially strong to weak, what would the distribution of traditionally Catholic and Protestant nations look like?
6. Is there a carryover to economic development in the Americas–e.g., that North America was mostly settled by immigrants from northern-Protestant-European cultures and South America was settled mostly by immigrants from southern-Catholic-European cultures?
Here is a simplified flowchart, developed for my business ethics courses, reflecting my understanding of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis.
Let me emphasize that this is only about the subprime contribution of the overall crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enabled much spillover into non-subprime mortgage sectors, government-set capital requirements and other regulations enabled the AAA ratings of mortgage-based securities that encouraged speculators, and there were plenty of imprudent and unscrupulous characters in the private sector too.
“The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.”
Excellent. My only question: Should that be sad news or empowering news?
the latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Jay Lapeyre, CEO of The Laitram Corporation. 
Here is the 
The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens. 
a) the paternalist argument that human beings are incapable of living freely,
With the exception of Ireland, all are in southern Europe. Including Ireland, all of them are traditionally Catholic [except Greece, which is mostly Eastern Orthodox, as William W. points out]. 
