Thomas Edison appears in The Bob Zadek Show as a reference point in arguments about markets, government mandates and technological change rather than as the subject of a biographical episode. Across three episodes the host and his guests invoke Edison’s incandescent light bulb, his role in displacing the kerosene lamp, and his place in the history of General Electric. The excerpts contain no account of Edison’s life, inventions or business dealings beyond these uses.
The light bulb and the mandate
Bob Zadek, in the 2011 episode on General Electric, calls the incandescent bulb a classic example of government interfering with the market and of business using government to do so. He says Americans had been buying Edison’s incandescent light bulb for about 100 years, describing it as cheap, providing light, easy to read by, attractive and very cheap. According to Bob, the light bulb manufacturers were disturbed that they could not increase sales; they manufactured far more expensive bulbs, but Americans did not want to buy them even though there were some advantages. Rather than persuade Americans through market mechanisms, Bob says, the industry went to Washington and got Washington to outlaw the purchase of 100-watt incandescent bulbs. He calls this the classic example of businesses realizing they could not accomplish what they wanted in the free market and instead getting government to mandate their more expensive product, which he describes as toxic, producing ugly light, performing poorly and costing ten times as much. Bob names Philips as the manufacturer he believes obtained the mandate, and contrasts the light bulb with compact discs replacing vinyl records and with Apple computers, products he says won through the marketplace rather than through government telling people what is best for them Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
In the same episode, Bob puts the light bulb story to Luigi Zingales as proof of Zingales’s own point that the problem is caused largely by business rather than government, while noting that he is not sure he agrees with Zingales entirely. Zingales responds that he has not followed the light bulb story closely but is not surprised, saying it is typical that businesses try to influence government and that this is most dangerous where they can give a good image to the deal. He compares it to Fannie and Freddie, which he says were created by businesses with the support of the government under the rubric of helping every American own a house, and says that behind such ideas there was dramatic crony capitalism. Bob calls Fannie and Freddie a perfect example, describing a once-private market for mortgage insurance that the government entered with its own player, crowding out private business and insuring mortgages for people who did not deserve it, with money funneled back to the elected officials who regulated it. He also cites Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad, lobbying Congress to increase the federal gasoline tax—which Bob says Buffett justifies as reducing reliance on automobiles but which Bob says is really meant to make trucking more expensive so people ship by railroad Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
Edison and the fate of Standard Oil
In the 2019 antitrust episode with Ryan Young, Edison figures in a different argument. Bob asks whether antitrust legislation has ever accomplished an improvement in the marketplace as opposed to destroying bigness per se and helping competitors but not consumers. Young answers that it is very difficult, and argues impossible, to make that case. He cites the Standard Oil case, which he says centered on a company continually cutting prices and increasing supply, making its product more available and cheaper. Young notes that while the antitrust case was going on there was a major shift in the oil market: the electric light was displacing the gas lamp. Standard Oil, he says, made its name providing fuel for kerosene lamps, and that market was killed by Thomas Edison, with Standard Oil starting to see its market share decline. Then the automobile emerged and demand for gasoline rose, so Standard Oil had to innovate and change its policy to supply what consumers wanted—adapting to consumers, not the other way around. Young concludes that the antitrust case was frankly a waste of time Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
Young goes on to describe other major cases: IBM in the 1960s, which lasted about 13 years before the government dropped it because the technological issue had become obsolete; and the Microsoft case of the late 1990s, mainly over Microsoft including a free browser, Internet Explorer, in its Windows operating system, a browser since supplanted by others downloadable for free using Microsoft’s own browser, ending in a settlement that was neither victory nor defeat. Bob asks about AT&T and Bell Labs, and Young replies that Bell Labs and AT&T were a government-supported monopoly, the only kind of monopoly that can endure, so the government was right to break it up but wrong to have protected and preserved it in the first place—righting a wrong rather than affirmatively protecting consumer welfare Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
Edison and the soul of General Electric
In the 2019 episode with Amity Shlaes on the Great Society, Edison appears as the emblem of what Shlaes calls the old GE. She says companies have souls and that GE’s soul was divided: on one hand a group of Mad Men in the early 60s, cynical, thinking about marketing, wanting to be cool and create slogans, working with government cynically—GE sold turbines to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which she identifies as government from the New Deal. On the other hand, she says, there is the old GE, which was very individual: Thomas Edison, a man alone in a lab, comes up with an idea that changes the world, and that man works better when he is really all alone and does not think about who is going to buy the product, certainly not about the next government contract Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes ties this contrast to Lemuel Boulware, an executive she calls a guru at GE, who created what she calls a little propaganda mill to teach the company’s more than 100,000 workers about the benefits of capitalism. Boulware, she says, mimeographed pamphlets about Hayek and about the work of Henry Hazlitt, who popularized Bastiat and Hayek, and hired an aging actor—Ronald Reagan, then a rock-ribbed Democrat—as spokesman for these capitalist ideas. Reagan, she says, went around the rubber chicken circuit lecturing workers and town halls on the merits of capitalism and the problems of unions, gradually becoming convinced of the ideas, in part by following GE stock and buying some for his son. She also describes GE executives colluding illegally with Westinghouse and other companies to fix prices and charge too much to the TVA; there was a bloody court case, executives went to jail, the stock fell, Boulware retired, Reagan was fired and his television show was canceled. Reagan, she says, remembered all this, went into politics, and the long-shot propaganda effort paid off—sometimes, she says, a project of political or philosophical education does not pay off for 10 or 20 years, or until after your death, but that does not mean the undertaking was not worth it Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Edison across episodes; he is invoked in three separate arguments rather than examined over time. In the 2011 episode Bob Zadek uses Edison’s bulb as the centerpiece of a crony-capitalism argument about the 100-watt mandate, with Luigi Zingales responding on the general tendency of business to influence government. In the 2019 antitrust episode Ryan Young uses Edison’s electric light as the market force that killed Standard Oil’s kerosene business. In the 2019 Shlaes episode Edison stands for the individual inventor within a divided General Electric. No speaker in these excerpts discusses Edison’s own life, patents or companies beyond these references.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biography of Edison: no birth or death dates, no mention of Menlo Park, no account of his inventions beyond the incandescent bulb and the electric light, and no discussion of his business ventures or patents. They do not state the name or terms of any light bulb statute or regulation, nor which body enacted it. They do not say what became of the mandate Bob Zadek describes, or whether it was repealed. Edison’s relationship to General Electric is asserted only through Amity Shlaes’s characterization of the company’s history, and the excerpts do not describe how the company was founded or what role Edison had in it.