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Comment by joeyrideout | Hacker News Reader

The ideology of generating shareholder profit "has caused immeasurable harm"? Really? The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation.

> New policies could ensure that all the stakeholders who collectively generate a corporation’s prosperity then benefit from its wealth.

I don't agree with this slight-of-hand. Employees are stakeholders, sure; they will lose their job if a company goes under, and may not get a promotion if growth at the company stops. But they are NOT owners of the company in equity terms.

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"The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation."

What about things like healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, cost of housecare, and economic movement?

EDIT: Wait, decades? Are you sure? Wasn't the 2008 recession just over a decade ago?

> What about things like healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, cost of housecare, and economic movement?

What do any of these things have to do with corporations?

It sounds like your gripe is with something else.

Healthcare costs, housing costs, and economic movement have a great deal to do with corporations.

Well, let's break it down:

healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, and cost of housecare are all basically just the same thing from different angles: the healthcare industry

The healthcare industry is extremely successful if your goal is to maximize shareholder profit. It's a complete failure if your goal is to maximize consumer value, however.

It has a lot to do with corporations given that corporations actively lobby for policies that have adverse affects on the general public, collude with each other to fix prices/wages, and monopolize industries to push out competition, among other things. All of this due to them carrying out their "fiduciary responsibilities".

The depth of the 2008 recession was still better overall than the heights of previous decades. Things were down a little only compared to a couple years before.

Plenty of market economies with similar corporate structures to ours have not seen out-of-control healthcare or housing costs, and have seen growing lifespans, etc. Indeed, that's true even within the U.S. In Iowa, housing costs are low and have remained stable, and the homicide rate is similar to Belgium or Canada. Unemployment peaked at under 7% in the recession, and is just 2.5% now. Separately, life expectancy for Asians in the U.S. exceeds that for Asians in countries like Singapore or Japan.

Corporations are more or less the same everywhere, but different places within the U.S. have vastly different housing policies, social challenges, etc. It strains credulity to conclude that corporations are somehow to blame for your laundry list of problems, rather than the specific policies that directly address those issues.

I don't see how they're any less related to peace and innovation.

Economic growth. That's in the media in government documents but it's that the measure most citizens should care about

The numbers grew but how much did quality of life increase in the past 20 years in the US? A vast majority of the population are in debt, the middle class has all but disappeared, unprecedented levels of working-but-homeless. But profits dose, hurrah!

>But how much did quality of life increase in the past 20 years in the US?

I have a magic little rectangle in my pocket that can answer an obscure question, get in contact with someone or order me a pizza faster than the president of the united state could get those things done in 1999.

My car tells me when a tire is low. My oven automatically turns off when it's done baking for a pre-selected time. Etc. Etc.

Sure, all that stuff existed in 1999 but it was rare or primitive. Today even someone living paycheck to paycheck has that standard of living. Technology has come down in cost and permeated our lives resulting in unprecedented convenience. It's the difference between the USSR launching the first satellite once at great expense and a private company flinging a car into space because "well we needed a test payload and why not". All this comes with trade-offs and a learning curve but so does every other bit of progress humanity ever made.

Does quality of life include health? These families living paycheck to paycheck, at least in the US, would be totally destroyed if a health related issue came up.

I'm not convinced that convenience or technological gadgetry is a good indicator of quality of life.

All the examples that you have provided are conveniences that are only needed because the general population now needs to work longer and harder to afford cost of living. And what's the point of advanced healthcare when most people can't even afford it? Take a trip out to the US Rust Belt and ask them how technology has improved their lives. Point is, economic growth is nothing to marvel at if only a select amount of people are benefiting.

> The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation.

I think Steven Pinker's case for capitalism is strong; still, it may be that a significant portion of that progress derives from "cooking the books" with regard to externalities like ecology, the social fabric, and quality of life. (The fact that things seem to keep getting better on average also obscures the possibility that we're "leaving money on the table" in terms of how much more life could have been improved, in the absence of rent-seeking, perverse incentives, etc.)

The shareholder model in particular does seem to have two layers of moral hazard: one for externalities to the economy/ecology as a whole, and another for short-termism and fixation on valuations/exits rather than sustainable revenue and relationships. A single owner, even if the worst kind of extractive rent-seeker, at least must take responsibility for their choices (including the potential for pro-social principled choices!), as opposed to getting lost in the crowd of "any other rational actor would make this same choice, so I'm off the hook".

Douglas Rushkoff does a good job of examining the other side of the capitalism=progress coin, without throwing out baby with bathwater: https://rushkoff.com/books/life-inc/

The article is arguing that employees should be equity owners of a corporation because for all intents and purposes that is how things actually work. Take a read, it's an interesting argument.

>The ideology of generating shareholder profit "has caused immeasurable harm"? Really? The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation.

You mean when I was in grade school in the '90s? Because my memories of being a young adult go roughly:

* Dot-com bust

* 9/11

* Jobless recovery and War on Terror

* Rising inequality, low growth

* Housing bubble

* Global Financial Crisis

* Bank bailouts, rising inequality, recession

* Slow-going recovery, rising inequality, falling real wages

* Real wages finally start ticking slightly, slightly, slightly upward after decades

* Rising inequality, low growth

* Trump elected

* Rising inequality, low growth, economists now talking very publicly about corruption and "secular stagnation"

The old factory-oriented way of looking at capitalism is growing ever more obsolete. The newer companies grow by hoarding and controlling de-facto standards, and by selling customers' personal details to slimebags. They are essentially rewarded for evil. If you reward people for evil you get MORE evil.

Why is nobody successfully competing against FaceBook? Is it because everyone has a low IQ except FaceBook? No, it's the Network Effect: you can't get sufficient customers to compete until you get sufficient customers, creating a Catch-22.

Real work and real competition is missing from Big Tech. I'm all for rewarding those who build better mousetraps, but not those who keep others out of the mousetrap business and put the mouse meat into your burger without telling you.

I found this to be a very good read: https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-without-Capital-Intangible...

It's now Hoardism: the first to hoard the IP and market share wins all, the rest grovel for scraps.

Capitalism may appear to be going obsolete only because our society has been corrupted with too much corporatism.

Society has learned the hard way how much our data is worth, similar to how we slowly learned the danger of cigarettes. Demand, unfortunately, remains. So, suppliers will exist to sell what is in demand. Facebook's market share is not invulnerable, however!

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