People before Profit

It took me a few months to finish People before Profit, the inspiring story of Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill. A friend recommended it, as (spoiler) at age 70 Bob gave the company to his employees.

From my other readings on economics, I’m concluding that its the inequality of ownership that is the root cause of both wealth and income inequality. I was thus eager to read about a close-to-home example of employee ownership.

Trouble is, this is really just a book about Bob’s life, and the series of struggles that were overcome on the path to building Bob’s Red Mill. The part about employee ownership is in the very last chapter, and it spends far more time talking about the national press than anything else about the ESOP.

If you’ve seen any books that talk about the details of worker co-ops, ESOPs, or any other form of employee ownership, please share the name to @Lunarmobiscuit on Twitter.

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

GDP is not the best of measures but it is what we use to meaure economies. Globally, (in 2023) that totals more than $100 trillion. My post-pandemic work is primarily focused on the bottom left slice of this big pie, in Africa. That continent’s GDP is more than $3 trillion, and even 1 trillion dollars is a lot of dollars, but in comparison to the rest of the world, is tiny. Smaller still as...

Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...

Despite the fact that stock markets have been operating for over 400 years, how exactly they work at the level of individual participate and individual role is rarely documented. Here in the 21st Century most of the accounts are how to make money as an investor, two or three steps away from the actual transactions taking place within the exchange. Which is why it was so fascinating to find and...

If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...