Many news outlets have published stories lately describing this destructive force, a force so powerful that it controls the livelihoods of 5.8 million employees. That’s how many people work in the thirty-five thousand companies private equity firms own in the United States. And some of those articles angrily mock what looks like the ineptness of executives, who buy a company, say they’re going to improve it, then ruin it instead. It seems like repetitious failure. But when private equity executives trot out the line that they are going to improve a company, understand that what they mean is: improve it for their own interests. And when ministrations result in the company’s collapse, understand that that’s private equity working as intended.

“We assume the finance capital is there to create opportunities for capital more broadly to succeed, and I think that is a rather complacent assumption to make in relation to the way finance and business have been structured in the last twenty, thirty, forty years,” Matthew Watson, author of The Market and Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World and a professor of political economy at the University of Warwick, told me over the phone in December.

“If we put a conventional framework of understanding business success and business failure onto private investors, we probably can’t really understand how it is they continue to survive and prosper in the modern economy. We have to move that frame of reference to understand how they can prosper from other people’s adversity.”