What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:

1.  Creating a Class of ‘Do Good’ Companies: If you’re wondering about the rise of “benefit corporations,” companies that legally must consider the social impacts of their decisions, Jena McGregor offers a nice overview in the Washington Post. McGregor notes, “While few would take issue with businesses holding themselves to a broader mandate, the structure has already sparked questions from some legal experts about the accountability of the new entities and the unintended consequences they may have.”

2.  The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History: Sometimes a clever headline alone merits a reader’s attention, and Peter Drucker would surely have admired this one. In an in-depth story in Bloomberg Businessweek, Susan Berfield reveals an elaborate scheme by a German company to smuggle mainland Chinese honey into the United States. The article also raises troubling questions about how to combat fraud and uphold food safety standards in an ever more complex global market.

3.  The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Equitable Growth: Economist Brad DeLong takes to his blog and nails seven theses of “equitable growth” to the door. These include “maintaining full employment,” increasing immigration and “bigger and better government.” Meanwhile, economist Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute takes issue with what he sees as a failure by DeLong to address wage growth, arguing that “policymakers must explicitly focus on generating broad-based wage growth when discussing income inequality.”

4.  Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we noted that more than 8% of Americans now categorize themselves as “lower class” and asked whether a new proletariat was forming in the United States, reader Maverick 18 suggested that such a number was way too small:

How big is the existing proletariat? It probably includes family income levels up to about $35K-$37K which translates roughly to about one third of the work force. What should be done about it? Probably much more and better directed investment in education and specific job skills training. It should be remembered that the economy needs hamburger flippers too, but if large numbers of workers consider that level of work their life’s vocation, the rich have truly succeeded at their expense.