In Defense of Business Careers

Eleven hundred seniors, or fully two-thirds of the graduating class, will go through on-campus recruiting this year. All but a few are pursuing careers in business. A significant handful are plagued by doubts about the integrity of their career choice, having been bamboozled by some peers into believing that they are "selling out." Many on this campus paint investment bankers, management consultants and indeed the entire capitalist business system as socially irresponsible, and plead with seniors to take up "responsible" careers that will benefit the 1.3 billion chronically poor of the world. I would like to echo this impassioned plea to ask yourselves what kind of career will really improve the world for these people, and for others.

Poverty and destitution are indeed huge problems. Why take a toothpick to clear them, when what is really required are sledgehammers and bulldozers? The best intentioned "social worker" in a non-governmental organization would be lucky to count even one person he has truly lifted out of poverty. A single industrialist like Henry Ford, by starting the first assembly line and doubling workers' wages to $5 a day, started a trend that empowered millions and created a whole new middle-class in America--even while creating a new customer base to buy his Model T's and amassing a huge personal fortune.

To what does America owe its prosperity? Why are so many more Angolan girls malnourished and so many more Bolivians homeless than are Americans? Precisely because the capitalist business system in America is well-designed and works efficiently. Joe goes to a supermarket in America, for a relatively low price buys vegetables in a tamperproof package with nutrition labels, comes home and pops it in his microwave and enjoys a healthy meal.

In an impoverished country like India, Hari goes to the roadside vendor, pays more money for fewer vegetables because there simply aren't enough to go around, returns to his shanty and puts them on the makeshift clay oven which uses cowdung cakes for fuel, has the oven blow up on him, salvages the remnants, eats them and promptly falls sick since the vegetables were rotten in the first place due to poor quality controls in agricultural production and no food packaging industry to speak of.

There are no quick fixes to solving endemic problems in living standards. It requires the constant inflow of many thousands of the best and the brightest (what we at Harvard purport to be) dedicating themselves to the systems that will develop the seed varieties and better production techniques to grow more food, develop the packaging to guarantee its freshness, build the roads and the trucks to distribute it efficiently and design the technologically sophisticated ovens to cook it. Business people all over the world are driving all of the these functions.

Consultants and investment bankers are providing perhaps the most crucial services in this system--at the highest level where the most brainpower is required, they are conceptualizing, designing and facilitating the systems that others will execute. Some of us are learning now in order to go out later and do the same in other geographies, to provide the 900 million residents of India and Africa a chance to rise above their sub-human destitution. Those who remain in America are ensuring the continued quality of life of the 250 million here.

There might arise, however, an interesting question of motive. The guilt-mongers would have us believe that no matter how beneficial the ends, a self-interested profit motive is morally compromised and somehow socially irresponsible. Quite the opposite. Self-interest is the easiest and most efficient means of coordinating, through Adam Smith's invisible hand, this vast, well-oiled machine that provides for all of us. As a philosophy, this free, consensual give-and-take for mutual benefit should be the only one acceptable to us. Any alternative, either morally or autocratically coercive which dictates who should give and who should take and when, is not only unacceptable but has been proven to not work very well.

Certainly, self-interest needs to be regulated. Improvements in laws and guidelines are necessary to ensure that business interests do not exploit the weak or impinge on the environment, both of whom are unable to negotiate their own terms. A few people with toothpicks, often from privileged institutions like Harvard, have been afforded the luxury of fine-tuning these margins of the system, to keep the stray negative elements in line. I would beg them not to take the vast positive mass of that system, which enables this luxury in the first place, for granted.

The rest of us still need to pick up our sledge-hammers and get to work, so that tomorrow there will still be clothing and food and so that we can still afford to pontificate on the finer points of environmental regulation.

A final determinant in many Harvard students' choice of a business career is the pursuit of excellence. Every age is remembered, if it is remembered at all, for excellence along a certain dimension. We might remember the Romans for their military might, the Renaissance for its superlative art and architecture, the Enlightenment for its philosophy. A millenium hence, the only thing for which our American century will be remembered (with the possible exception of theoretical scientific advances in atomic physics and molecular biology) is the perfecting of a nuanced, sophisticated capitalist business system that has lifted large masses of humankind, now doubled in number from a mere 50 years ago, to unprecedented heights in living standards.

For the first time in history, there are more haves than have-nots in the world population. The capitalist business system that brought this about is our art form. It is no surprise then that some of the most talented and motivated young people today are eager to test their mettle, to step forward along the path that will push them furthest towards excellence. Why shirk these bigger challenges, why dodge our weightiest responsibilities, why go the toothpick route?

These, then, are the simple and powerful reasons for a career in business. Many proponents of so-called "responsible careers" on this campus would have me justify my career choice to a homeless Bolivian man. Since I just got behind the wheels of the bulldozer that will likely build that man a bigger, better, more efficiently constructed home financed at lower cost, I can justify my career very easily. Can those with the toothpicks do the same? Kaustuv Sen '99 is an economics concentrator in Eliot House. He is also The Crimson's reader representative.