While I found this ahistoricism jarring, I was most alarmed by the throwaway notion that CEOs and other business leaders wielding their economic power to shape public policy are harmlessly well-intended, if occasionally clumsy. I have no doubt that the early-twentieth-century eugenicists, who commanded support from the elites of the day, were well-meaning. They, too, thought that the practices they espoused would address an existential threat and otherwise held “progressive” views firmly rooted in “the science.”

Moreover, if today’s superrich are the white hats, then who are the bad guys? Any consumer of mainstream news and information has been inundated with stories about exigent “threats to democracy” and the rise of illiberalism in the West.