Great New Tom Wolfe Essay

He revisits the masters of the universe,

"In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are 'evaporated property.' Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as a lament. 'Substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls and the machines in a factory,' he said, 'takes the life out of the idea of property.' The new owners, i.e., the stockholders, lose the entrepreneur’s, the founder’s, will 'to fight, economically, physically, politically, for, 'his' factory and his control over it and to die if necessary on its steps.' Instead, at the first whiff of a problem the shareholders bail out and sell their share of the ownership to whoever will buy it on the stock market..."