Sebastian and Me
Sebastian Mallaby, in a Monday Washington Post editorial, has his finger on the pulse of what makes American business a worldwide success But he paints his diagnostic scenario with too wide a brush for my taste. Mallaby’s a bright guy and I agree with a lot of what he says. But he’s maybe not an old enough guy. We codgers suffer less from enthusiasms of the moment.
He posits that ‘the heyday of American business may actually be now.’ Codgerism (the self-described philosophy of we codgers) makes the case that ‘now’ is not a so much a heyday as a heymoment. We’ll see if it lasts long enough to be called a ‘day.’ Even if it does, heyday smacks of something short-termed and unnaturally effervescent, the peak before a decline.
I certainly agree with Mallaby that American business is seen through individual prisms, each of them throwing only a portion of the spectrum on the wall.
Which may be his point, but he makes it unclearly for me.
Mallaby’s heyday dawned in 1995. He writes,
“in the decade …