infonet-economy

I refer to Ms. Sharon Footerman letter ("Mann's advice to leaders at Davos," January 28 2009) in which Ms. Footerman suggests that your newspaper should give more conspicuous credit to Thomas Mann in light of the fact that your guide to the current summit in Davos has been titled "The Magic Mountain". I will try to follow her advice by adding other works of Mann to the discourse, especially Mann's Nobel-prize winning novel The Buddenbrooks that portrays the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The term "Buddenbrooks phenomenon" made its appearance in the study of economic history at the World Congress on Economic History held in Budapest in 1982 where Theo Barker from the London School of Economics devoted a workshop to it. Since then, the term has invoked many different interpretations. In his seminal work "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" (1995) Francis Fukuyama refers to the Buddenbrook phenomenon in order to describe the limitations of inter-generational growth of family enterprise due to the principle of equal inheritance among the members of succeeding generations. Other scholars simply refer to the "Buddenbrooks phenomenon" in order to signify the human factor in economic processes. Whatever interpretation seems to be the best, there is another work of Thomas Mann that is probably more appropriate as literary guide on recent economic events such as the alleged fraud by US broker Bernard Maddoff, i.e. Mann's short novel "Confessions of Felix Krull. Confidence Man