Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham

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       FIVE Bastards

      For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.

      – MATTHEW 24:28, King James Bible

      The entrepreneur of these opening chapters seems to be quite some person. He or she needs to be restless and risk-taking, driven and organized, a persuader and innovator and doer all rolled into one remarkable person. You’d think such people would be rare indeed, but you don’t have to be a Carnegie or Edison to make the grade.

      Take, for example, one Michael Mastromarino, formerly the CEO of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Mastromarino’s business involved the sale of human tissue – not exactly the kind of business to satisfy a childhood dream, but a perfectly legal one under US law. Sales of skin, bones, ligaments, arterial valves, and other bits and pieces are needed for a whole variety of surgical procedures. Although it may sound a bit creepy to have a free market operating in such things, there are some perfectly sound arguments in favour of the idea and Mastromarino did well at the business. His firm notched up millions of dollars’ worth of revenue and he himself made over $4 million. A textbook example of a free market solving an issue of scarcity, bringing vital products to those in need of them, at a reasonable cost, and driven by no more than a profit-maximizing firm’s desire to make a buck.

      Alas, the textbook in question would need to be one in psychopathology. Mastromarino had started out as a talented and capable maxillofacial surgeon, whose main claim to fame was a chapter on bone-grafting in the promisingly titled Smile: How Dental Implants Can Transform Your Life. After suffering a painful fall, he started to dose himself with Demerol, an opioid-type painkiller. He got addicted, his professionalism suffered, and he ended up losing his licence and his livelihood. Fortunately, Mastromarino was restless and a risk-taker. As a surgeon, he’d interacted with tissue banks as a buyer – so why not as a supplier? He had the contacts, the surgical expertise, and that entrepreneurial vim and vigour so essential to the enterprise.

      So he set up shop. He found undertakers willing to alert him when they had corpses available. He used his excellent surgical technique to extract good quality tissue, rapidly and without damage. He sold his material to a thoroughly reputable outfit, Regeneration Technologies, Inc. He was in business again. Nothing stood in the way of his success but the lack of raw material.

      Driven and well organized, Mastromarino soon found a way round that particular problem too. He started to offer undertakers cash for every corpse they brought in. In poorer parts of the tristate area – the Bronx, Harlem, and Newark primarily – undertakers found the money too good to resist. Of course, there were problems. Tissue needs to be harvested very fresh, and from corpses that weren’t compromised by infectious disease, cancer, or the like. But that’s where the invention and risk-taking came in. Mastromarino learned simply to forge consent forms, to ignore warning signs of disease and cancer, to operate in rooms that were non-sterile on corpses that weren’t refrigerated.

      As soon as he or one of his operatives got a call from an undertaker, they were there, scalpels flashing, ready to slice and dice. When leg bones were extracted, they were replaced with PVC tubing and the slits stitched up so the corpse would look OK in an open casket. The undertakers made about $1,000 per corpse, the mortuary nurse about $300 plus salary, Mastromarino somewhere between $7,000 and $15,000. Police later stated that some of the procedures had been carried out so sloppily that surgical gloves were found sewn into the cadavers.

      It’s not a story that gets nicer with closer acquaintance, so I won’t go on, suffice to say that Mastromarino ticked every single box on the checklist for entrepreneurs that began this chapter. Risk-taking is only a breath away from dangerous speculation or law-breaking. The drive to build and organize is only a whisker away from a drive to dominate and control. Persua-siveness can also be about lying, creativity about coming up with new and nasty ways to make money or pervert the law. Those entrepreneurial virtues of the first four chapters aren’t actually virtues at all. They’re talents or dispositions which can be put to good use or bad; which can be perfectly judged or wildly excessive. Arguably, the risk-taking aspect of an entrepreneur’s make-up is one which, if unguarded by law and meaningful enforcement measures, will always tend towards the reckless.

      Anecdotal evidence for the All Businesspeople Are Bastards theory isn’t hard to find. D’Arcy was reckless, Carnegie a liar, Rockefeller (once) a perjurer, Vanderbilt a bully, Ford an anti-Semite – the list could be extended almost indefinitely. Even today, when ethical standards in business are far higher than they ever used to be, we look at modern day giants – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their ilk – with a weird mixture of admiration and loathing. We admire what they’ve achieved yet can’t help giving credence to the whispers which tell us that Gates is aggressive, Jobs an egomaniac. We tend to believe those whispers regardless of the evidence, because we find it all but impossible to believe that entrepreneurs can be both successful and nice. The strange result is that while the extraordinary improvement in living standards of the last 250 years has come about very largely because of entrepreneurs and business types, nobody seems to love them for it.

      Some of our ambivalence comes from reasons that have a lot more to do with us than with any sensible estimation of Messrs Gates, Jobs et al. For starters Bill Gates is obviously a very rich man. Humans are perfectly well used to the fact that we’re not all equally well endowed, but the scale of inequalities in wealth runs far beyond ordinary biological diversity. Take speed, for example. I’m 43. I go jogging occasionally, but I’m far from obsessive. Even as a youngster, I was never a particularly fast runner. Usain Bolt, on the other hand, is a sprinter so prodigiously gifted that he can simultaneously win an Olympic gold, break a world record, and fool around ten metres before the finishing line. Yet, viewed in terms of cold mathematics, Usain Bolt isn’t all that much faster than I am. He can run the hundred metres in about ten seconds. I could comfortably run it in twenty. On that simple measure, Bolt is twice as good as I am.

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