Virtual vs. real: 'Tiny Tower' as model for Bain Capital?
Romney’s Bain games
By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: August 7
My evidence for this is the ease with which she has embraced “Tiny Tower,” a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.”
My daughter’s 12 businesses include a casino, a bank, a doughnut shop and a soda brewery. But in this game it doesn’t matter what type of business she operates — only that she operates it with maximum efficiency, firing and evicting her “bitizens” at will and benefiting from the help of “VIPs” to bring her more business and accelerate construction.
The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output. Tiny Tower functions, in other words, strikingly like Bain Capital did under Mitt Romney.
I thought of the similarity as I read a powerful report by Bloomberg News this week on Romney’s adventure with Bain in the Italian yellow-pages business. The news service revisited Bain’s experience in the privatization of the Italian phone directory Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, which generated $1 billion in profits for Bain (and $50 million to $60 million for Romney) when Bain’s investment group sold the company for about 25 times the original purchase price two years after buying it.
(More here.)
My evidence for this is the ease with which she has embraced “Tiny Tower,” a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.”
My daughter’s 12 businesses include a casino, a bank, a doughnut shop and a soda brewery. But in this game it doesn’t matter what type of business she operates — only that she operates it with maximum efficiency, firing and evicting her “bitizens” at will and benefiting from the help of “VIPs” to bring her more business and accelerate construction.
The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output. Tiny Tower functions, in other words, strikingly like Bain Capital did under Mitt Romney.
I thought of the similarity as I read a powerful report by Bloomberg News this week on Romney’s adventure with Bain in the Italian yellow-pages business. The news service revisited Bain’s experience in the privatization of the Italian phone directory Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, which generated $1 billion in profits for Bain (and $50 million to $60 million for Romney) when Bain’s investment group sold the company for about 25 times the original purchase price two years after buying it.
(More here.)
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