Charles Street Chats: Q&A with David Lingelbach
Dr. David Lingelbach, a professor of entrepreneurship in The University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business, is using some of his own history and experiences to redefine oligarchs and understand their impact on our society.
Behind the Chat
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Q: When and why did you first become interested in studying oligarchs?
A: I started out thinking about these people in the early to mid 90s when I was living and working in Russia. I met Vladimir Putin early on in that experience, and then started running a bank in Russia and had some of these people as my clients. It became very clear that I had to really understand how they thought in order to, frankly, make money, avoid losing money, and really also to keep my staff safe. I mean, these were people who were and are ruthless people. That's where I really started thinking about them from a very practical perspective.
That process kind of went to sleep for a while, and then when I became an academic, my interest started to reawaken because I sensed that they were becoming somewhat important and other people weren't studying them very much. That's when I began to become more rigorous in thinking about how they do what they do. As an entrepreneurship professor, we had various theoretical perspectives that we could apply to start to get a handhold on their decision making and their thought processes. So I started applying some of those and then started doing research in the field re-engaging with these people around the world.
Q: How has your perspective changed over time about who these oligarchs are and how they operate?
A: I try to take a very independent and objective view of them as an academic, and one of the consequences of that is you don't really think about oligarchs as necessarily bad or good. You just think about them much like you would think about cancer. An oncologist doesn't look at cancer as a bad or good thing, it's just that it is. The more research I've done, the more aware I've become of the fact that these people do bad things in the world, but that also it is possible to learn from them.
One of the most subtle and interesting things of our research is to see that they're sort of masters of uncertainty. They are people who lean into surprise and create opportunities, and with that and other strategies, they are able to generate lots of wealth and power. That is becoming more and more a factor in the world, so I want to see how they do what they do, not so that more people become oligarchs, but so that more of us are more comfortable with the world in which we live and are able to kind of take advantage of uncertainty.
Watch: David explains why understanding oligarchs matters
Q: How does what you know about entrepreneurship advance your understanding of oligarchs?
A: One of the key insights of the research we've been doing is that oligarchs are entrepreneurial. They're not necessarily entrepreneurs, but they are entrepreneurial in that they all take advantage of opportunities whenever they can, and they have a formal thought process that enables them to take advantage. Putin is a great example of this. He really has to be seen as an opportunist who is leaning into the surprises that he himself is helping to create, and the Ukrainian war is just the latest chapter in this story for him.
This is the thing that most people on the west really don't understand about Putin. What we see as bad—that it all looks like Putin is on the verge of being deposed or that Russia is on the verge of losing the war—from his office, it looks entirely different. It looks as though these are new openings, new possibilities that are being created for him, even in a situation where he is resource-constrained and where Russia is a falling power in many ways.
Q: Putin is a well-known example. Help us understand who oligarchs are and how they gain their power.
A: I like Aristotle’s definition of oligarchs, which is, to paraphrase, “the wealthy few who govern us.” In the book that that I'm writing with my co-author, we've updated that definition to talk about oligarchs as people who secure and reproduce wealth or power, and then use one to get more of the other. So they operate this sort of the nexus of wealth and power, which makes some really interesting actors in the world today. While there are not millions of these people around the world over time, there are quite a number, including here in the United States.
I think many Americans really don't understand that America is really an oligarchic republic. We were always taught that this is the epicenter of democracy, and that's partially true, but we're also one of the epicenters of oligarchy and have been since our founding. I think a lot of Americans would be really interested to know that George Washington, for example, is an oligarch. Before Donald Trump was elected president, George Washington was the wealthiest president we had. He was an accomplished businessperson, and actually an entrepreneur who started several businesses. Washington’s wealth gave him the freedom to pursue a life as our first president that many other people would not have had. He is just one of seven U.S. presidents that have been oligarchs and so that I think that's really interesting.
The oligarchs that I think are the most interesting are not the ones that are in office, but the ones that work behind the scenes. A great example here in the U.S. is Charles Koch. He's what we call an agenda-setting oligarch. His money has profoundly shifted the political debate in the United States to the right, and has been doing so in a programmatic consistent way since the 70s. As big as Koch’s influence might be an even bigger influence has been people like Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. People like Page are examples of what we call ideological oligarchs in the sense of ideology as a way of thinking. There's not a day that goes by that most people with access to the internet aren't using his product and really, the way they think is being shaped by that product. That is the deepest kind of power.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here's David's answer.
Little things, like DiPasquale’s or the American Visionary Arts Museum. Big things, like the respect for quirkiness and never giving up. Baltimore is its own thing, and I love that.