Thank you for contributing an interesting paper. I don’t really have a comment, but I do have two questions that may help readers such as myself understand your paper in the context of this conference.

The first four pages focus on the argument that economic theory has had a large influence on the way that financial markets function. What then are the implications of your argument for the regulation of financial markets? Are you simply arguing that economic theory has contributed to the building of financial markets (p.1) and therefore, since we have experienced a crisis, we should be looking to financial economists to repair the damage? Or are you arguing that we should turn to the practitioners who have ‘translated’ these economic theories? Or am I altogether mistaking the implications of your paper for this conference’s theme of regulatory reform?

Secondly, pages 4-6 make a clear-cut argument that the material taught in business schools is much to blame. Although I do not have any personal experience as either a teacher or student in a business school, nevertheless I suspect you are overstating the influence that higher education could have on business practices. Imagine the counter-factual. Imagine that we could radically reform business school education to include business ethics—something that many business schools have done since 2008—and then take a large step further and reframe all of the school’s course content to emphasize social capitalism and the ideas of this conference’s problematique. I suspect that the rewards of such monumental effort would be rather slim; on-the-job training in corporations, inter-firm market competition, and organizational hysteresis would mean that corporations would continue to behave more or less the same as before. Note that I am NOT claiming that social change is impossible; rather, I am suggesting that corporate behavior is structured less by two years of higher education in management and more by market and institutional rules (e.g., see Neil Fligstein, 2001, The architecture of markets : an economic sociology of twenty-first-century capitalist societies, Princeton University Press).

On the other hand, some nice corroboration of your anti-MBA argument is Karen Ho’s (2009) Liquidated (Duke U Press)which would add to your list the importance of organizational culture in investment banks and the cultural attitudes created by investment banks’ recruitment practices.

Aaron