You can also see this in their personal behavior. Those at the top of the top have enough money to do anything. And what they end up doing tends to be work until they drop dead, in some cases literally - with 93 year old Buffet being the poster boy there, engage in mundane hobbies and activities - same as anybody else, and then start directing lots of money towards philanthropy. But the myopia tends to again strike there often making the philanthropy awkward and largely ineffective in effecting any sort of meaningful and lasting change -- unforeseen and unintended consequences, alongside a simple mixture of inability, abounds. The philanthropy ran exactly as they ran their businesses.
It's unthinkable and insulting that some of the lower orders might have actually have valuable skill or important agency.
The primary product of corporations has always been hierarchical status for the owners.
But sometimes there's been some sense of generosity and mutual obligation. Now there's none - just myopic selfishness which often leads to disastrous consequences, sometimes affecting those afflicted by it.
So, the result will be even worse, with people not even having jobs and left to fight for scraps instead. Or maybe one of the hot wars will eventually go global and humanity will be nuked down to 1% of the population, Fallout style. Who knows.
Once one of those things happens, they start to squeeze blood from the stone. The quality of the product drops, the prices are inflated, jobs are outsourced or eliminated, they pivot into providing other goods and services (which will also get worse later), etc.
None of these things are mutually exclusive with that "next quarter" mindset.
I actually blame the stock market for a lot of this. Private companies can, in theory, settle for just making a nice profit year after year. As long as they come out profitable they don't need to expand. Once you're publicly traded though, you have no choice but constant expansion.
The boom and bust cycle has been happening for a long time now.
Is part of the problem, that people making the decisions have asymmetric incentives - the gain from the boom is greater than the penalty from the bust?
The value of a stock is base on its long term value, not its short term value. Sabotaging the future of the company to drive short term results is something you'd have to keep secret.
I've worked in a major company ( global - 10s of thousand of employees ) where the chairman and CEO were changed and it was like night and day.
The company changed from one that was driven too much by short term pressure from money men investors, to one that took a much longer term view and invested in R&D and inhouse skills.
Note the change in management was instigated by some of the larger, longer term investors ( pension funds etc ) - ie not all capital is short term.
The new CEO put together that long term vision - said investment now ( and so lower EPS now ) will result in substantial longer term bottom line growth - had to persuade the markets etc.
They were successful, and it's sort of self-fulling - the short term capital leaves and you get more longer term investors that matches that longer term vision ( obviously the spiral can go the other way ).
However - that's the easy bit - delivering growth - at some point it's not possible to sustain that level of growth - then selling the idea you need to invest to standstill is much harder.
The CEO - also have to fight-off opportunists - where the problem is the maths is often in favour of buying a company, stripping/milking the assets and sacking the people.
Note sometimes it's only capital efficient because the capital doesn't need to pay the full social costs of the company destruction - it's governments job to make sure they do.
there have been some clawbacks -- government regs, realizations that low-cost means you get what you pay for -- but it was going hard before, and will keep going.
a significant portion of HN is either automating, offshoring, or else working next to these trends (if they're not making them happen).