PanThe New York TimesDavid Gelles describes unbroken capitalism’s exemplary big companies in the 20th century that treated employees fairly and focused on long-term growth — such as G.E. after the New Deal and the enormous unionization it enabled, economic fairness increased significantly along with prosperity in the United States, as \'corporations, workers and the government enjoyed a relatively harmonious equilibrium,\' and \'worker pay grew in tandem with worker productivity\'...In the 1980s, as American culture and politics were suddenly celebrating money and robber-baronism with a new go-go giddiness, \'Welch was tapping into profound changes in the zeitgeist,\' Gelles writes...While Gelles’s basic takes are all correct, they’re also relentlessly basic, in the new, pejorative sense: unsurprising, unoriginal, conventional wisdom conventionally expressed, passable in thousand-word pieces of journalism but not at book length...Gelles’s portrait of Welch is derived from previously published biographies, which he credits...After 200 pages of a lot of ham-handed critique, Gelles devotes most of his last 30 to a fairly ham-handed celebration of the chief executives of Unilever and Paypal and the other \'lonely voices in the business world\' — in particular the founder of the billionaire-convening World Economic Forum in Davos — who \'call for a more holistic approach to capitalism\'...Gelles doesn’t begin to suggest how or if any of those reforms might come to pass, because nowhere has he closely examined the entrenched and powerful political foundations of the system his book is about.
