Good intentions and purpose cannot cover up for bad bosses

As a child Adam Davidson was raised to believe that any work to do with business should be avoided. In his new book, The Passion Economy, the journalist and podcaster offers an optimistic vision of people making money while working at things they enjoy — their passions. He describes his 1970s upbringing in a subsidised artists’ housing project in New York’s Greenwich Village, where “money was the opposite of art, the opposite of passion”. His parents had escaped the stifling world of factory work that had been his grandfather’s lot. But Mr Davidson suggests that this sort of sharply divided 20th century experience lies firmly in the past: “Now, more than ever before, business and art, profit and passion, are linked.”