RECOMMENDED READING
Power Failure
The Left of the Right
The Nerd Trying to Turn the GOP Populist

Wall Street has never been particularly popular in the American imagination, but the recent growth of conservative populism threatens to erode its position even further. A case in point is a new think tank, American Compass, run by Oren Cass, a former policy director for Mitt Romney. One of its first major projects—“Coin-Flip Capitalism”—concludes that investment funds, like private equity and venture capital, are socially wasteful.

A primer on Coin-Flip Capitalism, published in May, reviews the returns of various funds over the past decade and concludes that “most fund managers are generating the results that one might expect from an elaborate game of chance—placing bets in the market with odds similar to a coin flip.”


The report laments that “the nation’s top business schools have sent nearly thirty percent of their graduating classes into finance,” where these people “invent, create, build, and provide nothing.” Barack Obama has made a similar point, writing in the Economist that “too many potential physicists and engineers spend their careers shifting money around in the financial sector, instead of applying their talents to innovating in the real economy.”

Continue Reading at Wall Street Journal
Recommended Reading
Power Failure

Oren Cass reviews Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, Tyranny, Inc., in First Things.

The Left of the Right

Matthew Continetti on the New Right and American Compass’s role in the realignment

The Nerd Trying to Turn the GOP Populist

New York Magazine on Oren Cass’s quest to make Republicans heed the interests of their working-class base.