Why the rich like Trump
Janan GaneshFinancial Times
Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, is supporting Donald Trump, says Janan Ganesh. Other billionaires and entrepreneurs will follow suit. Why? “Don’t always look for the material motive. There is such a thing as sincere wrongness.” The first reason is they “struggle to understand fanaticism”. In commercial life, “all actors are negotiable, even if their price is high”. They might never come across someone totally committed to an abstract doctrine (socialism), or a cause or individual (Trump). This “blind spot for zeal is why corporations were such sitting ducks for woke” and why oligarchs once thought Putin was their “pliable instrument”. The second is that the self-made rich overrate contrarianism. Dissent is core to financial success: you wouldn’t buy an asset or set up a business unless you thought everyone else was missing a trick. But this does not transfer to public life. In business, get a call wrong and you might lose your shirt. But misjudge a proposition in politics and the consequence might be “societal ruin”. When contrarianism strays into politics, the result is not just “undergraduate insolence”, but “cavalier action and the mispricing of risk”. “The tail event in politics isn’t financial oblivion. It is oblivion.”
“Levelling up” never happened
Alex NivenThe New Statesman
Whatever happened to “levelling up”? asks Alex Niven. At the start of the decade, the Tories won a landslide on the back of a promise to “spread opportunity” across the UK. It even seemed, for a while, that something might come of it. If it were not for the “destroying angel” of Covid, the government of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings might have made good on its “tentatively statist vision” and created a “sort of British Gaullism”. Reinvestment in front-line public services and “populist industrial strategy” could have channelled money and resources into the English regions through a series of Johnsonian grands projets. This might have led to “the biggest revival of our infrastructure since the Victorians”, as Johnson himself promised. It failed to materialise. And none of the main parties has picked up the issue in the current election campaign. Meanwhile, the wound the policy was supposed to salve continues to fester. The north remains “severely disadvantaged” and its transport system in disrepair. Many regional cities and towns still have not recovered from the austerity of the 2010s. The UK remains “one of the most spa
