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Comment by HEmanZ | Hacker News Reader

"the purpose of all human life is to build financial structures to increase the wealth of the shareholder class."

I have never met a single person at any level of any organization or otherwise who has expressed this sentiment. This characterization is a strawman.

Usually the idea that shareholder wealth maximization is central comes with a whole bunch of other economic ideas. Like that long-term wealth is what matters, not wealth tomorrow. And that corporations aren’t the center of all life or meaning for everyone involved, just a way to generate stuff. And that in order to generate more wealth you need to constantly provide more goods for more people at lower cost.

These distorted strawman characterizations of capitalists are just outrage porn, they don’t help move the world forward at all.

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I've heard it my entire working life, from coworkers at every step of the chain. Engineer wants to build something they think will be good & useful & help the company, and someone backhands them with "how will this make us/the company money?", sometimes followed up with "we're here to make money".

It may not be the exact same statement, but it's very close in spirit. This should be beside the point; we should do things that are good because we can, not just because they make us money, but I usually tend to see there being a ton of potential for the engineer's idea to help make money.

I think we have such different understandings on how economics work we couldn’t have a intelligent conversation about this. Maybe that’s why this topic generates so much heat in some and confusion in others.

I dont think you've made your case very clearly for anyone. And you'be accused a lot of people of being difficult & problematic. Without having tried to make yourself understood.

I like a bunch of the gist of what you are saying, but I feel like most capitalism is bad capitalism, that the short-sightedness's prevalence is almost always outrageous & deserves the hate it attracts.

Organizations have extremely short reward loops. People come and go & dont try to do the right thing for next year, much less the next 5 years. Markets & investors punish poor quarterly reports. Maybe there's an idealized version of capital where folks can play it smart, but it doesnt seem to be happening on this planet.

> we should do things that are good because we can

If I hire you to fix my car I’m not paying you if instead you fix the neighbors car

ah yes, the beautiful zero-sum view of the world, where no one does anything positive ever unless the blood price is paid. thank you for your shitty shit view.

looking at it the other way, a repair shop could just, like, add some washer fluid for free. or clean some wipers to help the life. good repair shops do, because they understand some small benevolent acts cost next to nothing. not everything needs to be a brutal & cold calculated exchange, priced at every point. good is allowed. sometimes it costs intensely little.

i've heard this condescending bullshit used to browbeat & bully countless ideas that would make everyones lives vastly easier within an org. i dont think a mutual benefit ought be required to do a little good; sometimes the price of doing good is just tiny. but the organization/managerial class thinks their contribution is eliminating small nicenesses, without really coming to understand how much it hurts everyone to eliminate niceities. without understanding that often the price is near zero. orgs have a vastly overinflated sense that they, by preventing people from doing good, are helping the org. it causes immense internal dissonance, is unbelievably time wasting & harmful to have the org stepping in to low level shit- basically free activities- & intervening, and it rarely does good.

> ah yes, the beautiful zero-sum view of the world, where no one does anything positive ever unless the blood price is paid

I didn’t say that. We put rules on corporations to protect shareholders. Nothing prevents shareholders from taking profits and giving them away.

But we don’t want the execs deciding to give away the shareholders moneys for them.

This is also where taxes come in. While others are maximizing profits we take a cut and distribute it to hopefully add some more good to the world

> i dont think a mutual benefit ought be required to do a little good

My personal cynical belief is that there is always a mutual benefit, it could be of different kind but everyone gets something in return. We value goods/actions differently and don’t place $ on every action, but every action has a cost.

I've never heard of it with the phrase

> shareholder class

at the end of it. But make no mistake, every discussion I've had as been "how will this make us money, and will that impact the stock price" -- which has an implication.

Cuz retail investors don't count for much w/r/t stock ownership.

Plus Milton Friedman's "companies exist only to generate profits for shareholders" has been a mantra since I went to Uni in the 80s.

> Plus Milton Friedman's "companies exist only to generate profits for shareholders" has been a mantra since I went to Uni in the 80s.

Would you invest your 401k/retirement in companies that don’t generate profits for you ?

I think that was presented as an ideology rather than anyone’s personal beliefs. Paraphrasing Zizek, to follow an ideology you don’t have to believe it’s true; it’s enough to act as if it is.

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