You want to drive social responsibility from corporations, fine -- but do it on your own dime. As every honest banker is taught fairly early on in his or her career, OPM is sacred.
Two points: (1) they have a right and obligation to serve their client's financial interest, as regarded to the money invested in them. They don't have any obligation to serve any other form of their client's financial interest - if you talked to them on the phone in a sad and depressed manner and then they used your money to hire a psychologist to get you out of it, for example, it might be in your interest, but it certainly wouldn't be what you hired them for.
(2) It's their obligation to serve their client's interest, not the society's. If the client would want to help the society as a whole is his decision to make, not this institution's.
But sadly, any institution large enough inevitably forgets these two points and gets too big for it's constituents to enforce them, governments being first and foremost example.
Not in Germany, for example. The german constitution specifically states this:
Art 14, (2) Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.
Can you please provide an accurate translation? I doubt that Google Translate is enough for such an important and meaning-dense thing. I'd like to argue about it, but first I want to understand it.
> Companies are also not required to put clients short term interest before the companies long-term survival. You're not forced to be a client, you're welcome to move to a investment fund that doesn't have such a policy if you think they perform better.
Well, this is a good point that they can do it - my point is that they shouldn't. Just like a single-purpose command line tools are more efficient than a full-blown combine, financial organizations should be dedicated to one single goal instead of trying to balance different points in their complicated mission statements - it just breeds internal politics and actions that serve public image first and real effect second.
If you want to spend your resources on public good, find a good charity.
"Property is an obligation. It's use must also serve the general good."
(From here: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...)
> Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good.
which is more or less accurate.
> If you want to spend your resources on public good, find a good charity.
That's kinda like saying cars should only go fast, if you also want to not die when taking a breath outside, you have to wear a gas mask or deploy nanobots that remove pollutants from the atmosphere.
Public transport is fastest when everybody just uses kung fu to move others out of the way, and when the doors are razor sharp and close on a timer -- if you also want people to not be injured, go to a hospital.
Honestly, when I got this translation it was so absurd that I was completely sure that I miss something here. What does "property" oblige you to? How can state's constitution dictate to what end property can be used?
If I would be living in a country with such a constitution, I would either try to change it, move somewhere else or just consider myself not morally bound by the country's laws as completely immoral.
> That's kinda like saying cars should only go fast, if you also want to not die when taking a breath outside, you have to wear a gas mask or deploy nanobots that remove pollutants from the atmosphere.
I think that for a productive discussion, we need to separate two things: main goal and side conditions. You have a good point that any paperclip optimizer should have necessary side conditions, like "not destroy the world while you're at it". However, in it's decision making process these conditions should be very different from the main goal: they should be simple boolean categories, just something that you have to maintain at all times, not a numeric parameter that you can increase indefinetly - this should be goal.
Thankfully, companies already have boolean conditions like that, they're called laws.
Immediately preceding is the order to always preserve and protect private property.
Those financial interests aren't served by depressions or die-offs. It's a pedant's point, not one that affects any of the points I made.
Shifting the job of promoting social good to FMs also makes it impossible to compare them. They will all be able to excuse their shitty performance by saying that they earned their clients 22 Bonus Society Points this quarter.
Finally: corporate responsibility of this variety is ephemeral. The correct avenue to obtain lasting change in corporate behavior is via government regulation. All private sector brouhaha about social responsibility does is give regulators a dodge: it allows them to say "look, they're self regulating!" and then sit on their hands.