The author's argument could more accurately be summarized as "making good business decisions requires a different skill-set than making good economic policy dec

The author's argument could more accurately be summarized as "making good business decisions requires a different skill-set than making good economic policy decisions." The article is not very tightly written, but the reasoning boils down to: economic policy requires reasoning about an immensely complicated closed system in which the gains of any individual actor are uninteresting. In contrast, business strategy requires reasoning about a relatively simple system in which the gains of an individual actor are all that matter. Economics requires system-level thinking, business requires individual-actor level thinking. By analogy: think of a poker table in a casino. Being a good business person is making good poker decisions as a player from hand to hand. Being a good economist is creating the conditions for a healthy poker game with many winners and losers. I think the author is right to a certain extent, but they could have written a much shorter article if they'd started from the observation that good business decisions and good economic decisions optimize very different objective functions. For some reason the article starts with some kind of limp examples of hypothetical things business people might say when confronted with economic policy questions and kind of dithers around about why business leaders don't write great business strategy books. We don't need to put words in anyone's mouth or operate at such a flimsy biographical level to observe that business and economic decision making are fundamentally different in kind. Note that the author is not saying anything about whether or not good business people make good politicians, which is a fundamentally different question (I can want to vote a successful local business person into a house seat because I think they will be an effective political leader without thinking that they should work in the Fed.)