Gotham Diary:
More and Less
16 July 2014
Although her flight was delayed by the bad weather, Kathleen did make it home yesterday. She had had a wonderful week in Maine, but she was happy to be home. We had a light dinner of gazpacho, steamed shrimp and tapenade toasts. After clearing up, I returned to the second in the series of Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge mysteries. Kathleen wandered in the Web, but presently lost her connection. With surprising calm, I looked into the matter and discovered that the router needed to be rebooted. I was too old and tired to fuss: I just did it.
Then I returned to my detective story. This morning, I lingered in bed an hour later than I’d done while Kathleen was away. This was disappointing, until I acknowledged that it was very comfortable to have Kathleen at home, lying next to me. What had felt like virtue while she was away contained a large measure of bleakness.
***
The first thing that struck me in this morning’s Times remains the first thing on my mind. It was an article, written by Anemona Hartocollis, about Dr Herbert Pardes, the former CEO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the gigantic complex of two of Manhattan’s largest medical centers. Dr Pardes has not drifted into retirement; he is currently the hospital’s vice chairman, and he earns a pretty penny, too, about a million dollars a year. What makes Dr Pardes so valuable to New York-Presbyterian? Longstanding relationships with substantial donors, it seems.
The tax filing said Dr. Pardes, a psychiatrist by background, worked 60 hours a week as executive vice chairman, the same as the chief executive. Ms. Manners said he concentrated on fund-raising and development, public policy initiatives and advocacy for academic medicine.
This all seems very wrong to me. I can’t think why the eighty year-old psychiatrist is putting in sixty-hour weeks, or even how. (How much of that time is spent schmoozing with billionaires?) Nor can I understand why, after a richly-rewarded career, Dr Pardes is not simply volunteering his wisdom.
But let’s not waste time with those questions. Let’s ask, instead, why our current moral climate not only tolerates but encourages such arrangements. A clue may be found in another section of the newspaper, where Eduardo Porter writes about corporate philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy is anything that does not directly swell the bottom line, and it is indefensible according to the Gospel according to Milton, just another form of theft. In 1914, Mr Porter reminds us, Henry Form doubled the salaries of his assembly-line workers, which sounds pretty altruistic until you learn that he wished to cut earnings (and dividends) so as to prevent the Dodge brothers, his shareholders, from piling up enough dough to build their own plant. In the prime of America’s domestic economy, what now would pass for philanthropy looked much more like self-interest.
The corporate health-care plans that boosted American medicine through several orders of magnitude between World War II and 1980 are a classic example of what really ought to be called corporate auto-philanthropy. All workers benefited from these plans, but at the start it was the educated executives who got the most out of them. These men and their family members were examined more regularly, leading to the more frequent discovery of a wider range of diseases. Executives tended to live near advanced medical centers, where they took the latest tests and tried the latest cures. I know this not because I read about it but because I was one of those family members. My executive father could not stop cackling with satisfaction at having gotten away with something morally inarguable. No matter how you looked at it, the provision of health care was virtuous. Of course it couldn’t last. The medical centers grew, but so did the numbers of patients. When all the workers began to make use of their benefits, the costs went through the roof, and the plans were cut back or dropped.
Modern corporate conduct makes me think of a spaceship so poorly designed that it lugs its booster rockets (which in actual aeronautics are jettisoned at the earliest opportunity) along on the entire mission. Shareholder investment is vital to the formation of any enterprise, but as soon as the balance of costs and revenues returns a surplus, it is time to fire the shareholders — with generous severance pay, to be sure. Operating surplus transforms investors into parasites.
Investment is of course required for expansion as well as for start-up, but I am inclined to restrict going concerns to financing their own growth. This seems to be the only way to deal with the circular arguments that surround the conundrum of “growth,” which is taken to be as essential business as oxygen is to life. They are not unlike the arguments about paying the likes of Dr Pardes — everybody else is doing it, so we’ve got to do it, too. The profoundly amoral nature of this line of thinking is overlooked, and the idea of the limited liability corporation taken much too far. Limited liability stems business managers’ exposure to financial failure. It does not bestow freedom from moral responsibility.
Dreaming of this improved moral climate, I cackle with satisfaction myself. Putting a damper on expansion and, even more, on consolidation means creating and preserving more jobs. It implements the humanist virtue of redundancy. Precisely because none of us is necessary, all of us are sacred.
But in the climate that we’re stuck with for the time being, the opposite is practiced: it is held that a few of us, a very small few, deserve to be the highly-remunerated chiefs of a shrinking number of mammoth enterprises — mammoth in value, that is, not in employment. No! As to employment, the more workers you can shed, the better the job you’re doing. The territory may have become metaphysical, but the objectives of today’s large companies is pretty much the same as that of the medieval princelings who were always at some kind of war. After a long march to liberal democracy, the little people are being crushed again.
More billionaires for Dr Pardes to court. Or maybe fewer, but with more billions.
Daily Blague news update: The Age of Cool.