Business took on the trappings of being a profession only in the early Seventies. Before that, as Schumpeter said, a businessman was an entrepreneur, someone who used native skill and intelligence to put together the elements of business (finance, marketing, organization, production and R&D) without necessarily quite understanding the generalities of what was being done. An entrepreneur could start out as a telegraph operator, like David Sarnoff, or as a poor immigrant from Scotland, like Andrew Carnegie, and become what was known as a self made man, different from the early entrepreneurs of mid nineteenth century America only in that the scale of the enterprises grew from being a shop built around some patentable idea to a possibly horizontally or vertically integrated monopoly like U. S. Steel or Standard Oil.

By the Nineteen Seventies, though, there were institutions that surrounded business that made it one of the evolved professions. There was a level of expertise that could be transmitted as formal academic knowledge, supposedly through MBA programs, and so business was no longer a seat of the pants operation, a suitable entry point for an immigrant out to make himself a living by opening a small supermarket or small job garment manufacture, the latter requiring only enough initial capital to rent a few sewing machines and a loft. The model for the new knowledge based businessman was Robert McNamara, one of the whiz kids of the World War II Pentagon who used the discipline of cost accounting to plans the future allocation of a company’s money and therefore determine a company’s direction. He had been President of Ford Motors for ninety days before he was tapped to be John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and applied quantitative techniques to the procurement of weapons and the waging of a war.

A second feature of a profession that became prominent in business in the Seventies and Eighties was its movement from a bureaucratic structure in which one was responsible only for what one had been delegated to do by superiors, and so allowing even a high level executive to say he was doing only what he had been told to do, to a campus like environment in which each of the prima donnas of computers (and, later, of investment) did what they did on their own, only irregularly supervised as they generated revenue producing gadgets and programs. Investment house environs are apparently more like sales boiler rooms than campuses, but the idea is the same: do what you do and it will make money for both you and those above you. Profits are made in fees charged for trades in exotic financial instruments and also by applying stock trading programs and seat of the pants hunches to the purchase and sale of various financial instruments, the employer acting as your angel. You survived and prospered if your own skills were up to those of your colleagues within your company and your competitors in the company down the street. You were the equivalent of a Nineteenth Century doctor who hung out his shingle in the Old West and practiced medicine as best he could, on his own, and therefore required to be ingenious in his ministrations, even if sage enough to deny there was much he could do for an infected patient but sit through the illness with the patient, while the investment professionals wear posh suits and suspenders when they do battle with the guy at the next desk and spend their off time praising their own skills at guessing right.

Perhaps most important, business took on the prestige of being an institution that was somehow engaged in a fundamental function of society, and therefore something of a public trust honored by the society by being allowed some degree of self-regulation, just as are the medical and legal fraternities. (That clergy could not be trusted with their own altar boys was a significant scandal because it was a shock that this august profession required the intrusion of the secular powers to make sure that it lived up to its oaths.) Business was, for a while, what made American go round and the people engaged in business had a developing code of ethics that made them like doctors and lawyers in that their business practices were aligned to making sure that business continued to serve the public interest. New Deal measures had become institutionalized and regarded as a necessary part of what had become known as the “mixed model” of free enterprise: entrepreneurship guided by regulation rather than free enterprise left on its own or, as in Europe, at least partly nationalized or otherwise controlled by the state, those systems also charging very high taxes so as to provide services, such as education, that were provided to everyone who was eligible as a matter of right.

Movies of the Fifties like Executive Suite lauded Bill Holden as the production guy who saw that the furniture business would not do well if it did not invest in research and development and succeeds in besting the financial people for control of the company when Fredric March, the old patriarch, finally succumbs to the stresses of age and being too long on the job. By the Nineties, that had changed again, and greed, as was notably remarked in Wall Street, had become a good thing, the heroes of banking portrayed by Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker, his memoir of life in the investment racket, as having guts of steel as they played with other people’s money, admirable for their cool even if hardly attractive figures in any other respect. Memoirs and biographies of the period portrayed the titans of the new media conglomerates as visionaries. My students of the time read Donald Trump’s self congratulatory autobiography to find a model of what they wanted to become: fabulously rich (and gauche) because they had the courage of their avarice.

The image of business as an enterprise has abruptly changed in the past month rather than gradually moved into its next iteration. People I know wonder why we are not stringing up or tar and feathering the denizens of Wall Street, rather than praising them for the mathematical skills and iron nerve they bring to the business of trading stocks and other forms of securities. It happened so quickly not so much because the market took a turndown or credit froze up; it happened because the Wall Street types seemed so brazen in their greed; they had no concept of the public interest but were simply out to feather their nests, and as the AIC junkets showed, not very remorseful about their conduct. Getting bought out by the government was just another day at the very plush office.

They were acting like pre-professionals in dire need of the regulation that Alan Greenspan, this week, for the first time in his career, thought might really have been necessary, he surprised to discover what New Dealers had known for seventy years: that economic life does not regulate itself to do the public good. Greed is not moderated by the rationality of long term self interest. John Kenneth Galbraith was wrong. Corporate rationality, alas, stretches only to performance at the end of the current quarter, and it is difficult to find institutional arrangements so that a board of trustees will look beyond that. Insulating boards from stockholders does not make them consider the long run good of either their corporation or the nation.

Perhaps we should go back to the short list of professions: the clergy and the military, which were well established by the eighteenth century; law, which was professionalized by the end of the eighteenth century; medicine, professionalized only at the end of the nineteenth century, and high level academics, which performs the task of developing the ideas that filter down to inform a population, the place that creates both science and humanistic culture, which also had become institutionalized during the course of the nineteenth century, what with the development of graduate schools and peer review, tenure to protect freedom of inquiry, and at least the beginnings of a salary scale for life long professors. The esoteric was organized to serve humanity while business was organized only so as to become larger and less reliable in its service of providing economic growth. The old Parsonsian idea that most occupational activity is selfish rather than guided by an idea of public service is therefore worth reviving.

Perhaps the most significant indication that business is not a profession was provided last week by The New York Times. It reported that an analyst working for a credit rating agency wanted to know the actual values of the mortgages that had been bundled into securities so that he could establish the credit worthiness of these securities. He was told that he had been hired to rate securities and was to find a way of doing so, presumably by looking at trend lines on their sale values rather than on what was backing them up. People in the business might indeed say that was enough because these were speculative instruments, people betting on whether they went up or down. But the same could be said of any instrument, such as a dollar bill or a share in General Motors, where it is also relevant to know if an economy or a corporation is performing well and provides an underlying value. The idea that business could simply disregard the value and concern itself only with the market rate of a financial instrument, that finance people would just cover up what they knew about the nature of what they were selling, burying it in the bowels of their computers, shows a lack of concern with economic rationality long before the stock market engaged in “irrational exuberance” and, after that, the spasmodic fits that were brought on by a lack of confidence, whatever that might mean. It would be as if doctors prescribed drugs without even apparent evidence that they had some efficacy, never mind whether they had been sufficiently tested to justify use as therapies. Sure, there is corruption in drug testing; but the idea that there are scientific standards that may get violated is not subject to question, while whether there is any need for government regulations to make sure that what are traded are inspected commodities is now open to question.

Trade in the age of the Silk Road allowed merchants to check out the goods that they were buying. Otherwise, you wouldn’t close the deal.Why not arrange for some way to inspect securities that are up for trade? If you can’t inspect the merchandise, you are no longer engaged in economic life, but something else, something akin to magic, which is no longer a profession because clergy have, for the most part, abandoned that as the appeal of religion, preferring an appeal to faith and morality and the efficacy of rituals. Business has not yet moved, nor may it ever, beyond entrepreneurship, a merchant on the road biting into a piece of money to see if it is real, not able to trust a fellow businessman about anything beyond the politesse which lasts for the duration of the immediate transaction. The phone is put down, and you don’t know what you have bought. Or at least that seems to be the way it is in the highest realms of finance. There is much more economic rationality than that in the diamond business and in wholesale produce, where you can examine the gems and the grapefruits you are buying and trust those you deal with to honor their side of the bargain to deliver what you have purchased. That doesn’t make trade in gems and grapefruits a profession, just a well organized market of the sort that Wall Street clearly is not.