It is worth listening to what commentators are saying about Steve Jobs today, upon his death, for the sake of thinking about "Steve Jobs," the mythology. According to Matt Bai, "Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making..." Really, Matt Bai? Are Americans really breaking away from large institutions and centralized decision-making? The last time I looked, for example, the U.S. military was an institution that has remained frighteningly large. So too, the decisions to torture people (by the Bush-Cheney administration) and the decisions to use high tech drones to kill people (by the Obama administration)--I think those are very much cases of "centralized decision-making." What am I missing? And to give one more example: when oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months in 2010, BP (formerly Brit...
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