My new Taki’s column asks if there’s a middle way in economics between disruption worship and Thomas Piketty’s defense of Carlos Slim:

Harvard historian Jill Lepore set off a furor last week by writing a New Yorker article making fun of Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s buzzword “disruption,” that talismanic term so beloved by the Forbes 400. Christensen, whose website informs us he’s “the architect of and the world’s foremost authority on disruptive innovation,” has responded with Donald Sterling-quality umbrage:

I hope you can understand why I am mad that a woman of her stature could perform such a criminal act of dishonesty—at Harvard, of all places.

Lepore, unfortunately, doesn’t quite grasp the key fact about technological “disruption”: It only pays off if it helps you grab some degree of monopoly power.