If I were forced to write a column in the style of "Donald Trump's election revealed ___ about the American electorate", I would most likely fill in the blank with something like "an inability to identify a good businessman" (1). I drifted toward this idea at the end of "Moneyball Joe Flacco", wondering if the efficiency fetish that is built into free-market thinking has come at this irretrievable cost, but I stayed away from it after deciding that, much like my other Big Ideas, this one likely applied to few rather than most, at best.
Still, there is something to think about in the discarded idea. If a big chain moves into a community and wipes out a few of the smaller businesses, those business owners move on to something else. Even if the new businesses create enough new jobs to offset the first-order economic effect - perhaps they are able to employ some of those aforementioned (now former) owners - the result of centralizing the economy around the big-money winners surely has some slow-moving, long-lasting consequence. At the very least, it decreases the diversity of business owners from a strictly mathematical perspective - instead of a cohort of small business owners who are embedded in the local community, there is the one person in charge of the big business who often sits in some far-flung headquarters; the neighbor who might have otherwise been an entrepreneur becomes a middle manager. Over time, the average American - who makes up a majority of the electorate - is going to reinforce a certain idea of what a successful business person looks like, acts like, talks like, simply by association with the sort of person who they see "succeeding" in their own community, who they never actually see in the community; he's on TV.
Footnotes
1) I generally disagree out of hand with this type of statement - I tend to think most of these so-called "revelations" were obvious to anyone who thought carefully about the issue prior to the "revealing" event; I include the thought presented in this essay among them.
