Business Schools vs. Socialist Magazines: A Market Analysis of Mutual Irrelevance
In which we discover that both Harvard MBAs and Jacobin writers produce roughly the same amount of value for society
By Chad Middlebrow
The Hanoverin Senior Correspondent for Institutional Dysfunction
Last week, our friends at Jacobin published yet another breathless exposé revealing that—brace yourselves—business schools teach people how to make money in a capitalist system. In 4,000 words of stunning investigative journalism, they discovered that Harvard Business School is not, in fact, a monastery dedicated to poverty and contemplation.
This revelation will surely shock the dozens of people who thought MBA programs were secret training camps for redistributing wealth to the proletariat.
The Great Revelation
According to Jacobin's crack team of analysts, business schools are "finishing schools for capitalism's managerial aristocracy." This is rather like discovering that culinary schools are finishing schools for the restaurant industry's gastronomic aristocracy, or that Jacobin itself is a finishing school for Brooklyn's intellectual aristocracy—complete with the same elitist credentialism they claim to despise.
With its usual gravitas, Jacobin reports that MBA students want to make money. One can only imagine the author's shock upon learning that medical students want to practice medicine and law students want to practice law. What's next? Will they discover that journalism schools produce journalists who write for money rather than purely altruistic motives?
The Market Has Spoken (Nobody's Listening)
Here's what our socialist friends at Jacobin missed in their 4,000-word sermon: the market is already making business schools obsolete, just not for the reasons they think.
While Jacobin writers craft elegant moral arguments about capitalism's contradictions, actual capitalists are increasingly questioning whether paying $200,000 for two years of case studies about Jack Welch is a sound investment. Tech companies hire based on GitHub portfolios. Entrepreneurs skip the MBA entirely. Even traditional corporations are discovering that the ability to build spreadsheets doesn't necessarily correlate with the ability to lead humans.
But here's the beautiful irony: Jacobin's moral critique will have exactly zero impact on this trend. Business schools won't close because socialist magazines convinced people they're immoral—they'll close because they're becoming economically inefficient. The invisible hand giveth, and the invisible hand taketh away, regardless of what sideline intellectuals think about it.
The Real Victims
The most poignant voices in this whole debate aren't the Jacobin writers or the Harvard Business School deans—they're in the comments section. People like "Joe," a working socialist organizer who went back to school at 31 for a marketing degree and found it surprisingly useful for his organizing work.
Joe represents the actual tragedy here: a system where you need to spend years and thousands of dollars getting institutional permission to do work you could probably already do. But Joe's not writing weighty manifestos about it—he's too busy actually trying to change things.
Meanwhile, the Harvard MBAs and Jacobin writers continue their elaborate dance of mutual irrelevance. They learn case studies about maximizing shareholder value while shareholders increasingly question the value of MBAs. The socialists write devastating critiques of capitalism while capitalism continues, largely unaware that it's been devastatingly critiqued.
A Modest Proposal
Perhaps both institutions could learn from each other. Business schools could offer more honest marketing: "Come learn to optimize systems you probably can't change, with people you probably won't like, for money you probably don't need." Jacobin could be equally transparent: "Come read elegant explanations for problems you already understand, written by people who've never had to solve them practically."
Better yet, they could merge. Imagine: Harvard Jacobin School, where students learn to critique capitalism while accumulating massive debt to do so. The curriculum would include "Advanced Irony Studies" and "Leveraged Moral Superiority." Graduates could enter the lucrative field of writing grant applications for nonprofit consulting firms that help corporations appear more socially conscious.
The Bottom Line
The real lesson here isn't about business schools or socialist magazines—it's about institutional incentives. Both Jacobin and Harvard Business School need to justify their existence to their respective audiences. Both produce content that validates their customers' existing worldviews. Both operate in competitive markets for attention and prestige.
The difference is that business schools at least pretend to teach practical skills. Jacobin just teaches people to feel smugly superior while remaining completely powerless to change anything they're complaining about.
At least the MBAs know they're in it for the money.
Chad Middlebrow writes about institutional dysfunction from his home office in suburban Cincinnati, where he maintains a healthy skepticism toward both Harvard MBAs and socialist intellectuals. His credentials include an undergraduate degree in something practical and a decade of actually working for a living.
Next Issue: Why Academic Conferences Are Just Comic-Con for People Who Think They're Serious