Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.

The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries , was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people.

By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.

Governments can can send inspectors to companies. Governments can put legal requirements in place to disclose information that consumers and workers and other interested people need. Non-governmental organizations don't have that legal power and to me, that's what imposes substantial limitiations on how far we can go with trying to keep corporations accountable though non-governmental measures.

A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.

As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.