The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead.
I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money.
I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty seat at a taverna in her village on the weekends. They barely had any money, and few around her were employed, but they had certain priorities.
Meanwhile in the US, I had a teacher condescendingly tell me that the Greeks were lazy (ignorant of the history that led to 2008). It can be hard to see through certain cultural biases. Particularly when the primary goals are so different.
That's cool, if you have a family nearby or you're a in a good relationship with yours. Sucks for those who do not, which is why social safety nets are more important. You pay taxes but in case you fall down, the safety net should catch you make sure you don't end up on the streets if you don't have a family nearby.
Not it isn't, I'm European from a European centric thinking. What you're talking about applies if young people choose to continue living in the same village where they were born and their family still lives, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. Young people (in Europe) move to big metro areas for university or jobs, and often, especially in Greece, they move to other EU countries.
Your family from some Greek village, won't be able to come take care of you in Amsterdam, and most likely they won't have the money to support your NL living expenses from their Greek pensions to help you out, nor will you moving from Amsterdam back to some Greek village help you out too much since there's no jobs in your niche there, or maybe even no jobs at all so now you're broke in Greece instead of broke in Amsterdam but with less job options.
Your PoV scenario is just unrealistic in the world of today and only applies in the traditionalistic tribal village lifestyle that's more or less dead nowadays and few live it. Sure, some lucked out and were born in afluent big metro areas with universities and jobs meaning they always have their family close by, but that's more the exception rather than the rule. If you look at international cities like Munich or Berlin, most people living there weren't actually born there or have family there, they just moved there for study/work. How can family help them then?
I know plenty of people who emigrated to the Netherlands, I don't know anyone who was poor and emigrated there (they don't speak enough foreign languages to have a hope) or that lived there for more than a few months while unable to get a job
Who are these people who go be unemployed in a high CoL country?
Anyway, that's my opinion, and trying to correct people from other cultures that tell me my opinions on my culture cannot be right is tiring, so I'll leave it here.
I wasn't lecturing, I was using Greece as an example that would be familiar to you, but feel free to use any other country where people emigrate from to go to a high CoL country: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.
>I don't know anyone who was poor and emigrated there (they don't speak enough foreign languages to have a hope) or that lived there for more than a few months while unable to get a job
I do. Plenty of Eastern Europeans moved to high CoL countries without knowing the language or having credentials and many found jobs, not the best jobs, but being on minimum wage in Sweden or Austria is better than being broke in Romania or Bulgaria (again, assuming you don't have a well off family to help you out and many who are in the situation of taking minimum wage jobs abroad don't, since they also come from poor or broken families unable to support them, which is why social safety nets are important to catch and help such people and prevent them from perpetuating this cycle).
>Who are these people who go be unemployed in a high CoL country?
You don't "go to be unemployed in a high CoL country", I never said that, but unemployment can find you there when you get laid off, which is why safety nets are more important than a far away family from a low CoL country who has no way of helping you out.
>Anyway, that's my opinion, and trying to correct people from other cultures that tell me my opinions on my culture cannot be right is tiring, so I'll leave it here.
Regardless of your "culture", people not having parents to help out (orphans do exist you know) or family too poor to help out, is not really something that goes against the "culture" you keep harping here. Not everyone's family, Greek culture or not, will be able to help out, hence my point of tax funded welfare social nets being important. None of what you wrote so far is an argument against that.
You should have asked her why she came to the US
Plenty of Greeks have no interest in going back because they want the "American" life, but there's no question you ate better in the village, had more community, or had a sense of history - what you didn't have was more than ~35k euros a year, if you were lucky.
Maybe the relative poverty fosters that kind of culture, and a high earning society necessarily becomes atomized, or perhaps atomized societies fosters high earning.
Everyone knows everyone in a ghetto. Gated communities often don't know their next door neighbors.
People sometimes have rose-colored glasses about emigrating to the US.
Eventually, they were rotated to Germany. As soon as they arrived, she was off to England. 6 weeks later, she was back, and did not complain about the US again.
She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 more vacation days each year as compared to their American counterparts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Not to mention the unrelenting psychic toll of working low wage jobs in a country with a weak social safety net.
Which may suggest that the "American way" is to work fewer hours per day, and then try to cram in some fun after work, whereas the Greeks allow themselves to delve into more fun over the span of entire days instead of short spurts. It is possible that more happiness is derived when one is able to enjoy themselves in larger blocks of time, even if the total quantity on a time-unit basis ends up being the same as anyone else. That would support both scenarios in the comments, even if they seem contradictory on the surface.
But, as with earlier comments, this is all based on hypotheticals for the sake of illustration. There is no indication of what the speaker from the greater thread was actually talking about.
Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do.
Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given nothing else changed. Only somebody who found happiness through suffering would ask for less, and be more happy with less.
Money means even less.
>Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
Yes, people have been conditioned to be working.
Money is a way to transfer resources. Resources make people happy. Somebody with no food for 3 days is happy when they finally get food. Money buys food, therefor money can buy happiness. People like to say the opposite, but they forget money can also buy unhappiness, or when talking bout the extreme cases where somebody has 20 billion, would 1 more billion have any affect on their happiness? Oh shit, we are back to WTF is even happiness. For all we know 1B more to the 20B guy might make them more happy because they are now richer than their enemy or some other happiness driven from the count of money.
We can break this down in other ways too. Some people say family is what makes them happy. I can tell you that a family of 12 with no money is less happy than a family of 12 with enough money. Its the difference between having shoes, or eating in may cases. Its clear that happiness is a compactor, and money can change the outcome.
Not really. "1 money" is just a promise to deliver 1 unit of value in the future. But what characterizes the unit? What is the difference between one unit of value and two units of value?
In reality, we don't really know. It's a continual quest to try and figure that out and it changes on a whim.
BTW there must be some interesting story that your Greek teacher had to move to US and deprioritize happiness.
Both are more or less factual statements.
This argument of
Conclusion: $RichPerson doesn't get to do what they want.
Premise: They're under constant obligation to $MoneyMachine
The premise is wrong: at that levels of wealth, the obligation is not real, it's opt-in and you can opt-out at any time.
The conclusion is wrong too: At that levels of wealth, the person can do everything anyone else can do in their off-time, and they have much more off-time than the person making the argument anyway.
It's a poor argument and should not be made.
A random billionaire nobody knows might walk around the Colosseum undetected, but try doing that with a profile like Zuckerberg's.
Also, there is the personal security concern. If you are rich, you have a lot of ability to pay kidnappers of you and your family.
There is the story that shortly after Pichai became Google CEO, he walked around a conference and he barely got recognized, but if you stay in the limelight for long enough, people recognize you.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/searching-for-...
I strongly disagree[1]; I think it is incorrect to equivocate a non-living thing that needs no care from a particular person to a child's objective need for their parent.
If we reduce all arguments to "well, of course that person cares about $FOO, because parents care about their kids", then any $FOO is then as equally valid to kill oneself over[2].
You created a well-loved piece of art? Well then it's okay to jump in front of a n oncoming train to save it because that's what parents do for their kids!
You wrote a research paper on good UI guidelines? Well then it's okay to jump into a burning building to get the only copy because that's what a parent would do for a child.
I guess I'm just trying to demonstrate that there are few, maybe even none, "I created this thing" comparisons with the parent->child and child->parent relationships.
[1] But I see your point, so upvoted you anyway. I just think that your point is not at all comparable to a parent/child relationship.
[2] Parents will not hesitate to put their life in danger to save their child.
Having money helps a lot in making yourself comfortable when life makes you uncomfortable.
I'd bet that she was wealthy relative to the average Greek, but was perceived as "regular" because they are middle class relative to the rest of the west. The wealthy in the the US can prioritize happiness above all else. On average, Greeks works the longest hours in Europe, which is more than the average American.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/world/europe/greece-six-d...
can you share your version please?
Like all history, it’s tricky to pick a starting point, but an easy one is the end of 400 years of Ottoman Turk occupation leading into the 20th century with the Balkan Wars, WWI, and then WWII.
Greece successfully fought off Italy in WWII but then was quickly occupied by Nazi Germany for four years. During this time, the Nazis successfully exterminated every Greek Jew. This period created extremely radical political parties that persist to this day. Following WWII, Greece then transitioned into a dictatorship lasting until 1974. Greece presently has the youngest democracy in the EU (50 years old).
The past 500 years have been hard on Greece, and the past century was no exception. Modern Greece is a young country with tons of recent scars that have led to corruption and bribery that a healthier nation may not have developed as intensely. My grandfather fled the region with his father in the early twentieth century when the Italian army began regularly hanging people in their town square. It really traumatized him.
Anyway, 2008 wasn’t some event that happened in a vacuum. There were many events that shaped the country leading up to it. To simply claim it happened because the Greeks were lazy is itself a lazy take.
A very good book on the topic is Inside Hitler’s Greece[0].
People in Greece certainly don't prioritize happiness instead of making money. There was a clear shift where Greeks became more and more unhappy after the (still ongoing) crisis. No1 problem is financial insecurity; as a resident (MD) I work 70-80hrs/week, for less than 7€/hour. Prices are comparable with rich EU countries.
In general, what an individual is doing with his free time, is no one's business.
Source ?
I highly, highly doubt that this is true.
I am talking very about small nukes, cheap, minimal and for personal use as a self defense. Two grams of gold cheap, 1 km evaporation range and 5 km blast.
Very minimal, but as soon as millions of people have one, gather a lot of them in one place and you do some serious damage.
This lady seriously suggests that millions of Thai's will have their personal nukes, millions of Mongolians or Brazilians will have small nuclear weapons each, but Greeks will not, because Greeks are lazy somehow. I don't know where she reads that stuff, probably some comic series.
You haven't thought through any of this.
Either they were a liar or an idiot.
Greece is the worst example as it is highly optimised for money and not social happiness/success. There is a reason that fraud is rampant and no one pays taxes unless they have to.
But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.
Quantity of people benefitted isn't the only measure: magnitude of benefit is also relevant. The customer at a 7Eleven benefits in that they get to... what, buy snacks conveniently? Versus the worker who receives their entire livelihood and benefits, it becomes obvious that workers are the primary beneficiaries of a company.
> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway.
This is quite obviously false. All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.
> And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.
Why is that exactly?
Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.
Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.
Major companies are regularly prosecuted for conspiracy to suppress wages. It if weren't for government intervention your wages would be much lower and there wouldn't be anything you can do about it.
This blind faith that billion dollar corporations would behave ethically is highly inappropriate
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
The social democracies, a middle path, as the Nordic countries have experimented with, seem to have done quite well. And there's now strong evidence that our system (neoliberalism) has stunted economic growth.
Regardless...
I support simple social reforms, like sovereign wealth funds (Alaska, Norway) and universal healthcare, greatly reducing the tension between labor and capital. Then these labor, employment, and ownership reforms wouldn't be so fraught.
Early form of capitalism didn't have limited liability companies. Just because you have to use Unlimited Liability Partnerships, for example, that does not mean it's not capitalism.
Once we move beyond capitalism, there are other words too, like mercantilism, imperialism, Neo-feudalism (arguably what we are getting to), schumpeterianism, etc. Expand your vocabulary.
Huh? You seem to know absolutely nothing about how the Soviet Union worked. They certainly did have money and companies. (And don't give me that BS about the CCCP not being "true communists" -- No True Scotsman fallacy)
In real communist societies like the Soviet Union (which are more accurately labeled "authoritarian socialism"), they need money to control allocation of goods, just like any other modern society. How exactly do you decide how many rolls of toilet paper to give to people? Some people need more than others, so either you have a giant government bureaucracy just to police how much toilet paper people use, how much of every possible type of food to eat, etc., or you just give people money and set prices for stuff, and let them figure it out themselves. These societies were centrally planned, but at some point it's simply impractical to plan everything.
I think it’s you who doesn’t. Notice USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was not a Union of Communist Republics. Have you stopped to think, why is that?
Leaders of USSR were communists, as in they believed in Communism. However, according to them, the country was socialist and they were working towards the goal of achieving Communism. That goal would be achieved eventually, when society or economy or technology was ready. But no official or leader of the Soviet Union would claim that they have already achieved communism.
So you can use USSR to claim that putting communist leaders in charge is a bad idea, but you cannot claim that USSR was an example of communism because not even people running it at the time claimed that it was.
And yes, the eventual goal was to get rid of the concept of money. You can read any of the soviet sci-fi, like Bull's Hour, and see how they imagined it would work.
This is so obviously, trivially false, I doubt even you believe it.
Should we remove the prohibition on murder?
Does regulation only shift murder, not stop or prevent it?
[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/30/feds-powell-inflati...
And even then, there are lots of companies who want to provide the highest pay possible. I have always strived for this in my companies, anyway.
That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue.
> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.
If you can't pay your workers a living wage your business has failed in the only way I care about.
This doesn't contradict your point, but fwiw the pay gap of quite a few other nations come before the US. In terms of RP, the US ranks about 35th, behind many African and Asian nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
There's much more at play than just "cooperatives are not any better". Cooperatives don't get as much funding from investors because investors won't be owning a larger share of them, and taking their returns, they instead invest in a traditional company because then they can extract as much as possible from their investments.
That by itself already puts small scale cooperatives at a competitive disadvantage, you can't raise as much capital as the non-cooperative startup, even if their product could be better and their employers could be happier the lavishly monied startup will try to outcompete them by throwing money away until they get a larger share of the market.
If somehow this situation was improved where cooperatives are not immediately disadvantaged from an earlier stage we could see more of them popping up, right now there's not nearly enough cooperatives for this comparison to be possible, simply because they get extinguished by others with more capital.
Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives.
Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist.
I don't know where you are from so I can't comment on how unions function in your society, where I live they're definitely not in the same realm as a potential investor for cooperatives.
You are also asking for unions to compete against VCs, and banks, let's be realistic that even a large and wealthy union is not even close in terms of wealth management as a small to mid-size bank/investor. On top of that the union has responsibilities to provide benefits to all members, a bank or investor has none of that, tilting the scale even more in disfavor of an union assuming the role of investment.
It's a good thought though, another entity such as a credit union supported by workers in an industry which also takes the role on investing in cooperatives to foment them, would still be an uphill battle but if some good cooperatives came out of it maybe it could be another viable (albeit smaller) model to start companies.
A bank has responsibilities to its shareholders.
Depends on the union. A credit union is structured for investing and is literally their reason to exist.
[1] Although definitely not necessarily. A group of labour unions in these parts collectively own one of the largest hedge funds out there.
As in Labor Union.
Pedantry and HN - name a more iconic duo.
A "Labor Union" is colloquially a Union. A marriage is also called a "Union". And so is the mathematical operation joining two sets.
Not sure why you think we’d randomly change the topic all of a sudden for no reason…
Neither does the Union of European Football Associations, otherwise known as UEFA. They make up for it with a dope anthem.
Neither the Kalmar Union, nor any other personal union of monarchs, ever invested in a cooperative. Although some may have invested in joint stock companies, such as the various East India companies.
Maybe the Soviet Union was into worker cooperatives? Not sure.
And finally, the union of the set of workers at cooperatives and the empty set invests in cooperatives. Hey look, we found one type of union that definitely invests in cooperatives!
(I was just having fun making this as absurd as possible. Sorry, no malice intended).
Is that because most marriages exist in urban centres where cooperatives are uncommon to non-existent? Out here in rural country, where cooperatives are the norm, most married people invest in cooperatives as most of the cooperatives are customer owned. You don't have much choice but to invest, assuming you want to be a customer – and no doubt you want to be, given that they provide basic services for the region.
I'm certainly an investor in several co-ops, and not because I went out of my way to do so. That is, with the exception of one co-op, which I provided additional investment to. That particular co-op runs a very successful operation and provides healthy returns in what is a comparatively stable environment to those who provide an over-and-above investment. They attract quite a lot of investment dollars as a result.
Which says something about unions that aren't investing. Why aren't they investing? Simple: The companies they see in front of them aren't worth investing in.
Think CalPERS, CalSTRS, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and many others.
They seem to have plenty of extra money to fund political candidates.
Top hit from my casual search is a report containing case studies, two of which are SEIU.
A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions [2021]
https://unioncoops.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/...
Also, Richard Wolff has been advocating worker directed social enterprises (WSDE, aka coops?) for a while. Sadly, his now dated arm wavy book doesn't is more advocacy than HOWTO.
Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism [2012] https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
And his website is not very focused.
https://www.democracyatwork.info/
I'm fine with polemics (about marxism, socialism, capitalism). But I'm already convinced.
Now I just want concrete action steps.
Please share any other (better) resources and links.
We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world?
Hrmmm, where have I heard that before...
I wish we didn't force capital to do things like that. Then it can run wild with Mandatory arbitration which bars access to the justice system, algorithmic manipulation of prices for rents / real-estate (1) and installing spyware on the customer's computers (2) and MITM attacks of your communication (3). They are all free market innovations. Very efficient at doing the wrong thing.
1 - https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-manag...
2 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-...
3 - https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...
I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].
The many systemic market failure modes of capitalism are well documented and written about at great lengths.
That "by any metric" is just plain wrong. There's several metrics by which the US healthcare system is among the best--in general, if the metric you are tracking is largely covering the success rates of medical procedures (sibling comment mentions 5-year cancer survival rates, for example), then the US generally scores high. If the metric you are tracking is instead covering general population health or things easily caught with preventative medicine, then the US scores abysmally in those metrics.
In other words, the US healthcare system actually turns out to be very good (if perhaps not on a per-cost metric)... but access to the good healthcare system is extremely poor. And that's kind of what you'd expect for a market-driven system: good healthcare if you can afford it, shit healthcare if you can't.
US Healthcare is expensive, but the quality is better than most other countries.
The American pharma companies also don't do the research, a lot of it comes from scientific institutions funded by public money.
What pharma companies do is provide capital for drug trials which are absurdly expensive, they are more alike investment companies than actual research institutes...
That's certainly not true. Of course compared to pretty much every highly developed country if we factor in relative spending per capita you'd be right.
But yeah, purely market/profit driven systems (with extremely poor and inefficient regulation) certainly don't work in certain sectors like healthcare.
Also it depends on what do you mean by 'socialized medicine', if you're specifically talking about single payer, your point is only valid if you ignore all other countries which don't have single payer besides the US. The Swiss and (as far as I can tell) to a lesser Dutch healthcare systems are 'privatized' to a much higher degree than the one in US i.e. effectively fully, there are no Medicare/Medicaid equivalents there. Instead they are very strictly and relatively efficiently regulated. They pretty much have Obama/Romneycare++.
If you mean something else than single-payer then the US system is arguably heavily 'socialized', both through insurance polling (just like in the countries I mentioned) and because the US government itself spends more on healthcare than most industrialized countries even relative to GDP. e.g. if we exclude all private spending (both individual and insurance) government health spending per capita in the US is significantly higher than in Britain and more than 2x higher than in Spain (and still significantly higher if adjusted by PPP GDP per capita)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?locat...
I feel that the USA's education system has indoctrinated students so deeply into the red scare that real terms have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the larger American audience, the words simply don't mean the same, they mean what you've been indoctrinated to believe they mean.
What other forms of semi-stable functional "socialism" are there?
> have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the
Discussing hypothetical pseudo-utopian systems like "socialism" or "communism" isn't particularly meaningful either (from the economics perspective, not philosophical).
IMHO the problem with socialism is that it will pretty always be outcompeted by private ("capitalist") enterprises which can provide goods and services which are both higher quality and cheaper (yes by "underpaying" their workers but also they tend to be much more efficient). Therefore you can't really allow both in the system/country.
So realistically "socialism" can only exist if the state suppresses any alternatives using various degrees of coercion and force. Since no real competition and by extension dissent can exist (i.e. nobody has enough resources to challenge the state without significantly damaging their career/status/wellbeing) the state ends up becoming more and more oppressive/controlling and unavoidable corrupt. I'd love to see any empirical evidence disproving this but as far as I can tell historically that's what always ended up happening.
Cooperatives. This article we're discussing here is advocating for socialism, it's just not using that word.
However I'm not sure cooperatives are strictly a "form" of socialism, they have been a part of capitalist societies since pretty much the very beginning. I guess it depends where we draw the lines between partnerships etc. and cooperatives, I guess hiring additional workers who don't have an equal stake/share in the enterprise or subcontracting any sort of labor (let's say on a significantly meaningful scale, but still very hard to avoid) would be it.
Never mind the heavy leftward tilt of teachers, students, and universities.
The ones that were overcharging consumers?
Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down.
That's a benefit, not a drawback.
Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.
Consumers are the judge of what's best. And they vote with their wallet and feet.
Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families can't put food on the table, and infrastructure is falling apart.
Whatever it is about this system that you find "efficient," I don't find it valuable. The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. A mixed economy where private capitalists are not solely responsible for investment choices, and where ownership of that capital is more evenly distributed among the public, could fix a lot of problems.
The Chinese government has spent massive amounts on vanity projects. A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos.
Thanks but no. I’ll take American capital allocators over the Chinese any day.
Most importantly, I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.
Billionaires get to invest however they want because it's their property. What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue. They are massively contributing to the economy.
I think it'd be good, is why. Non-intervention with private property is extremely low on my list of moral priorities. If someone's starving, I don't think you really have a right to keep food away from them.
> What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue.
…and are they actually making anything useful? Or are they wasting everyone's time? Workers could be employed doing any number of things. For a rich person to "creating jobs" means nothing if those jobs are pointless. We could easily take that money away and create jobs doing something more important.
I believe in private charity, which would solve this. But I do not believe the state gets to steal from some people to give to others. The only reason for taxiation is to fund public goods.
> …and are they actually making anything useful? Or are they wasting everyone's time? Workers could be employed doing any number of things. For a rich person to "creating jobs" means nothing if those jobs are pointless. We could easily take that money away and create jobs doing something more important.
Who gets to define importance? This argument always devolves into state controlled economies which are charactetized by deadweight loss, corruption, and poor incentives. I'll take my access to private property every time.
As an aside, do you also believe in private knocking-you-on-the-head-to-take your-food-you-don't-think-they-deserve?
As an exercise, I invite you to trade without money: barter your goods or services with others. It's more work but completely doable. But remember the state is still expecting taxes on that transaction. And then ponder upon whether state-issued money is truly the source of private sector asset accumulation.
The public sector produces plenty of wealth - security, public goods, law and order, environmental protections, public health measures...
Nobody is obliged to accumulate state pegged money, yet most people do. Feel free to accumulate cheese if you wish.
Yeah, because they're corrupt and undemocratic. I certainly don't endorse China. But they do put to rest the idea that the freer the market, the stronger the economy.
Unfortunately Xi is now focused on saber-rattling about national security and bullying neighbors. He has cracked down on free markets, and China’s economy is suffering due to his incompetence.
China is strong because of its massive population combined with an economy that performs better than the only other country with a similarly massive population.
The thing is, people who pile up capital don’t have to be efficient with it. They can basically do whatever they want with their money. They can build giant vanity estates, which you could certainly call inefficient — who needs 20,000 square feet for a family of 3? But… we also care about freedom, so we let people do inefficient things. The only difference between rich people and poor people is they have more money so their inefficiencies are louder. But everybody spends money on senseless wants and vanity. Who needs manicures and hair extensions? Arguably nobody. The “poor” spend on vanity too. And we let them because we care about freedom.
If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system, would that mean banning the fulfillment of any desire that wasn’t strictly a need? I don’t think anyone would want to live in such a system.
What you see as vanity, such as hair extensions, may be a high utility item for others. Consider the hair extensions make them a more attractive mate and provide them the opportunity to breed with a better stock, for example.
Similarly, consider that 20k ft sq mansion in context: all the prior owner(s) of that property were traded revenue for the land. And the construction workers were paid. And now the gov gets taxes.
At every step, each contributor to the end product voluntarily participated and maximized their outcomes. That is maximally efficient, economically speaking.
It is not. The resources which went towards that mansion would be (by your definition) much more efficiently spent elsewhere. The utility which one wealthy person gets from a 20k sqft mansion is much smaller than the total utility which 20 homeless people would get from a 1k sqft apartment.
My answer is economically efficient. Yours is utilitarian. I believe in private property.
Holy mother of slippery slopes x) Do you think $current_economic_system can be improved? Ah so you want to ban fulfillment of any desire? Sheesh
Yes. Their inefficiencies are deafeningly loud and have a massive impact on the rest of us. This is why I am suggesting that we intervene to get rid of the ultrawealthy as a class.
> If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system
Stop right there. Don't pretend that "what if we got rid of billionaires" is a slippery slope towards a society of perfect clones where all individuality is suppressed. You don't really believe that—you're just fishing for gotchas, and it's beneath you.
YCombinator is billionaires investing in startups.
> Billionaires tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects.
Musk's only meaningful contribution to SpaceX was money. We could just have raised NASA's budget instead, but we didn't. There are lots of things that we need to spend money on. Space is not our top priority.
Musk, however, is independently wealthy and can spend his money on whatever he wants. So he spent it on rockets, as a vanity project. Yes, some useful innovations came out of that. But what was the opportunity cost? Was this where the money was best spent? I have no reason to believe so.
It was a heck of a lot more than that. See "Elon Musk" by Vance.
> We could just have raised NASA's budget instead
He did it for a tiny fraction of NASA's budget.
> So he spent it on rockets, as a vanity project
He's reached cash flow positive.
> Was this where the money was best spent? I have no reason to believe so.
Becoming the richest man in the world through his investing is a whopper of a reason that it was well spent.
NASA does a lot of things. If they'd been given SpaceX's capital and a mandate to build reusable rockets, I'm sure they could. They're world-class engineers.
> It was a heck of a lot more than that. See "Elon Musk" by Vance.
I'm not going to read his biography for the sake of your post. Rich people like to act as if they're uniquely good leaders, but it's easy to take credit from a room full of people when they're all on your payroll. If Musk had something to contribute other than fame and cash, name it.
> Becoming the richest man in the world through his investing is a whopper of a reason that it was well spent.
Not at all. Him becoming rich benefits nobody but himself. Funnelling money toward one individual's personal wealth is an extremely poor allocation of resources.
> He's reached cash flow positive.
Barely. And so what? Pet rocks were profitable. Did we actually need SpaceX? Is this really best the direction that so many billions of dollars worth of economic activity could have been directed? Is Elon Musk, the buffoon who ruined Twitter, really the person who should be making that choice?
The welfare of the public today is not the same as the welfare of the public for all time. The Soviet Union couldn't compete on the development of computers, because the USSR was trying to optimize towards what could computers be used for then and there. It turned out that computers could be used for a lot more than what people thought of at the time.
Drug R&D and patents lead to enormous profits for companies, because they can charge outrageous prices for the drugs. But the benefit to the public is that now those drugs and the knowledge about them exist. That's going to have a cumulative positive effect for hundreds of years in the future.
So you see, I'm actually radically in favour of R&D.
Without the possibility of this outrageous profit we would just get less drug research done. That money would then be invested in something else. Drug prices wouldn't be so outrageous (probably), but we probably also wouldn't have as many treatment options. They might be too expensive now, but there's a chance they won't be in 50 years.
A massive amount of research is funded by public grants. iPhones are a famous example of a private-sector product almost entirely created off the back of public research. It is absolutely not true that private investment is required for pharmaceutical R&D.
There was a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8 Asianometry - "Why the Soviet Computer Failed" (18m56s) [2022-07-07]
Innovation is also becoming a meaningless word to defend the system, the innovations have their foundations fostered with public money, through funding of scientific research which is then later captured by the industries to develop products. The innovation is productionalising another innovation, the foundation is built mostly on public funding. Very few companies actually do ground-breaking research that innovates, they're pretty risk-averse in this sense, the productionalisation of those discoveries has its own value, not questionign that, but it only gets traction afterwards when the brunt of the work of discovery was done.
Efficiency of markets is a hypothesis of financial economics with much better written criticism than I can write here, Warren Buffet doesn't believe in it, for example. It's not a given whatsoever, nor proven empirically.
At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.
The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement".
The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane.
The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead.
AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.
Compilers, which you work with your whole life, came from research done by public funds.
Most medical research has been done with public funds.
Radios, modems, every single piece of networking we currently use was first researched by public funds.
We can keep cherry-picking examples if you wish go down this road, it doesn't foster much of a deeper discussion though if you are going to keep your dogma.
Public funding is necessary, private funding is necessary, what kind of system we can create that enables the best out of both worlds to evolve and be better? That's a discussion I'd like to see, this end of history bullshit is too boring, and tiring to discuss.
Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on, it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Being dogmatic about it doesn't take us anywhere, it just conserves a status quo which is not the best we can achieve.
As usual, I think you are a bright person, Walter, you've done tons and achieved a lot more than most, but keeping this dogmatic narrow-view of the world certainly pains me, exactly because you are the kind of mind that should be able to see through the bullshit...
It was an incremental step, followed by other incremental steps. There have also been many, many internets along the way: AOL, Prodigy, BYTEnet, MCI, Gopher, RBBS, etc. Every organization that had more than one computer soon figured out how to connect them. Even I did that.
BTW, Ethernet was invented by Xerox. I use it every day.
Compilers appeared shortly after computers that were capable enough to run them appeared. This suggests an inevitability, not a discontinuous invention. Jet engines were a discontinuity, too.
What I see is that if invention X is derived from inventions A,B,C,D,E,F, and D was funded by the government, the government gets all the credit.
> Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on,
How has that been shown?
> it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Show an example of any system working better.
Free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction. There have been endless attempts at "fixing" that. None have worked better.
I tend to take a step back and keep in mind that Free Enterprise is not inherently a part of Capitalism and vice-versa. They've gone together pretty well but each might do better with a different partner or different arrangement altogether.
This post is precisely about a free market economy where the (imo unnatural) disconnect between working in an enterprise and owning the products of that enterprise doesn't exist. That's all.
Not sure what "command economy" has to do with it.
If you hire a landscaper to redo the landscaping of your property, is he thereby entitled to own a share of your property? How about the guy you hired to fix your water heater? Does he get a share, too? Is that natural?
And if so it could be considered a (very) generous decision more often than not.
Hiring a worker to help your business is employment
I'm sure I don't have to explain the differences between a transaction and employment?
Investors don't need to own part of a company to buy a Bond, they just want to see good credit rating and yield.
*VC is also part of capital markets but mostly private and such a small % of global investment.
Even if it did, would it not makes sense that investor priorities would change if their only options beyond cooperative businesses were some very small startups and mom & pops?
A system of public banks could handle investment based on the priorities set by all citizens. Everyone would effectively become a shareholder. Successful businesses could be taxed based off what the public invested in those new cooperatives, and those taxes would be used at least partially be used to fund more startups.
Coops have been vulnerable to "hostile takeovers" (I don't know what to call it), transmuting from benefitting members yet another rent seeking enterprise that remains a "coop" in name only.
I was a long time member of PCC and REI. As I understand it, both experienced juntas. Histories I'd love to understand better.
I've read that most farmer coops also fell prey, becoming profiteers, from helping to harming their members. IIRC, there was even a personal account here on HN by a dairy farmer.
In conclusion, I'd LOVE for coops to be the norm. My biggest concern is how to structure coops to remain true to their mission and resilient to enemy action.
Unless you go to where capital isn't concentrated (i.e. rural areas), then co-ops are everywhere. It is not uncommon to be able to get your groceries at a coop, your gas, your phone/internet services, you name it.
Sure. And workers extract as much as possible from their employers. And customers go for the lowest price possible, and sell their stuff for the highest price possible.
That's how people are.
In the 50s, my dad was in Italy watching the news on TV. A man had just won the lottery. The reporter asked him what he was gonna do with the money. Before he could reply, another man stepped in front of him, saying "he's a loyal member of the Communist Party, and he's going to give it to the Party!" The winner pushed him aside, announcing "Oh no, I'm not a Communist anymore!"
Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making lives better." If bettering lives is not the most profitable it is very often eclipsed by what is.
It's much more complicated than the simple lie that "you get what you pay for."
One tactic that some people find helpful when they want to buy a discretionary item is to wait a few days/weeks, and make sure that it's not just a whim that they'd regret.
Political campaigns also get more sophisticated. Scott Adams has an interesting podcast where he breaks down the latest manipulative persuasion techniques used.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/business/21auto.html
Answers to your question are nuanced, and fortunes are exchanged in purchases like cars even if customers aren't loyal next purchase(s)
Unfortunately, yes :-(
Of course, at the time I bought it, I wanted it. TBH, it happened more often when I was young, not so much the last 2 decades of my life.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fotschcase/2017/04/17/uniteds-t...
Nobody is saying that employee ownership is a magic bullet that fixes organization disfunction but data from that first year does show that it can have a positive impact of performance and customer satisfaction.
Firms that are optimized for turning market demand into revenue streams will naturally outcompete firms that are optimized for other goals, regardless of what ideals or preferences anyone bears. This isn't something that anyone can decide upon, so a call to action based on one's own "ought" preferences isn't really meaningful.
If reality works one way, but aspirational idealists are trying to "ensure" that it works in some other way, then their attempts will falter. Many regulatory interventions are at best performative rituals that measure their success in terms of creating the appearance that something is being done, with the question of whether what is being done actually resolves the actual problem (if there is one) barely being considered. In the worst case, these performative interventions create harmful unintended consequences at the same time, leading to them being a net negative.
It's worth noting, also, that nothing other than "actual humans" are involved in any aspect of this. There are no non-human "entities" in existence that have autonomous agency and participate in economic exchange. Every question here is about interactions among humans, and the organizational models that humans use to coordinate their activities are not separate "entities" with independent intentions.
Since we see that a majority of customers consistently go with the cheaper option, we know how they feel. So the "better" firm gets outcompeted.
So regulation, you say. But those regulations are set by governments voted in by the same consumers. Their preference for lower prices is clear, and government follows their preference.
Is your suggestion that the government go against the will of the people and apply those pro-worker-coop regulations anyway?
This litmus test is absurd. If more consumers buy products manufactured with child labour, is it "going against the will of the people" to ban child labour? Not in any meaningful way, certainly.
Instead, in the US the DOT or the CPSC (can't be arsed to look up which) says: "every helmet sold must meet this standard of safety", and then backs that up with guns. Now you're free to price-compare, with the assurance that your head won't explode. (Yah: I keep doing it! Sorry. I like injecting levity into serious subjects. Try not to get distracted.)
Consumers, acting as individuals, have negligible influence over corporate behavior, and are easily misled.
People, acting collectively (in this case as a "government", but as other collective organizations, too - including "corporations"), can stand up to other collectives and force them to adjust their behavior in pro-social ways.
> There's a large economics literature on this: worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital
There are any number of ways of making it easier for co-ops to raise captital.
> (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.
You could make a similar case that making decisions solely around stock price leads to underperformance as well, if we quantify "performance" in terms of value provided to the broader economy. Mass layoffs are great for stock price, but they deal serious damage to your institutional knowledge base. Rather than simply shuttering an underperforming division, if you buy out the ownership stakes of the people working there, they'll have cash to re-train with. If we find that co-ops have a tendency to avoid doing that when necessary, we can tweak the incentives and subsidize a portion of the buyout, under certain circumstaces. Subsidies to tweak incentives are nothing new.
> This isn't something that anyone can decide upon
Yes, it is. Policy can change which strategies predominate in the market, by shifting incentives, by controlling streams of investment, and simply by regulating undesirable strategies out of existence. Mixed economies can be very effective. The notion that the market is a force which out to go untampered with is ideological, and it doesn't serve us well.
Monopolies are still bad either way, but I doubt that the failure modes at employee owned monoploes is the same as at outside investor owned monopolies.
There are a multitude of ways that employee ownership can be encouraged, required, or ownership can be limited to employees.
Uplifting the entire global financial system to make a COOP more attractive through regulation wouldn't change this.
Some people are happy focusing on their family. Some people are happy working hard in their career. Some people just want a job to pay the bills and plenty of time to play video games. These are all fine and valid choices and no company is going to optimize for all of them.
If employment were more isolated this argument would still only be superficially reasonable, because we also live in a society with structural sexism and racism and other bigotries. Plenty of people have fewer employment options because of the circumstances of their birth.
Then look at me, I am professional contractor and not the obvious target of any of those bigotries. 16 contracts (often 6 or 12 mo), in the past 20 years. of that maybe 3 weren't complete shitholes. How long is one person supposed to keep making major life changes to search for a job that doesn't abuse them? Because a 1 in 5 hit rate implies some things.
Setting a floor on how shitty companies can be to their employees would a boon to everyone and likely make the whole economy more productive simply by reducing depression by a double digit percentage.
Yes, we do that. It's called "labor laws". There are many of them.
It's a question of agency. If you assign responsibility for your well-being to others, then you're always going to be at their mercy. Sure, there's structural whatevers and bigots and all sorts of things. Some people won't hire you because you remind them of the kid that bullied them in 3rd grade. Whatever. It's still up to you take control of your life. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Every time you try and demand that someone else do it for you, you are going to end up disappointed.
No one person can be an expert in everything, we live in a society and should act like it. Needing to be an expert in healthcare, hiring processes, finances, and a dozen other topics just to switch jobs is a major barrier to the just switch mentality you are presenting. And I know first hand, I am just switching constantly because it is what I wanted. We should have reasonable baselines and minimums for treatment, and those should shift and get better as we improve society.
> Every time you try and demand that someone else do it for you, you are going to end up disappointed.
Yet there are countries that have better situations for labor than the US?!
Even something as simple as universal healthcare would fix a ton for millions of US people. It would empower worker to switch jobs and employers to lure top talent held by it. Only a hundred or so other countries figured it out, there is no way we could do it here we would only end up disappointed, right?
I pick that as an example, but we could go over many possible topics that aren't blanket assignments of "responsibility for your well-being to others". Consider non-compete clauses, IP transfers, minimum wage and tons of other topics that if they had a minimum floor of decency could allow more freedom the the worker and employer.
Nobody is saying you need to be an expert in all of these things to switch jobs. Consider the fact that very few people, if any, are actually experts in all of these things and yet people do in fact switch jobs all the time. Empirically, it is not required.
> Yet there are countries that have better situations for labor than the US?!
Better in some ways. Many of those countries are significantly less productive and have moribund, declining economies and low pay compared to the US.
> Consider non-compete clauses, IP transfers, minimum wage and tons of other topics that if they had a minimum floor of decency could allow more freedom the the worker and employer.
non-compete clauses: don't sign them. I've never encountered one. Negotiate terms that you feel are adequate to compensate you for not competing. If you don't have sufficient leverage to negotiate, work on that.
IP transfers: again, don't sign it, or negotiate. Most workers will never generate any significant IP so this is rarely an issue. If you are going to generate valuable IP that is 100% due to you, then start your own company.
Minimum wage: less than 1% of workers make minimum wage. Anyone with a pulse and half a brain can quickly become more valuable and qualify for higher paying jobs. Just be organized and responsible enough to be an assistant manager at a fast food place and you're already making more than minimum wage. There are store managers at Wal-Mart and Buc-ees making $250k.
You vacillate between personal responsibility and skipping requirements, which is it? Should we take you seriously or not?
You do understand that when I say people need to be "Experts" I don't mean hold Phds, I mean they need to be far more well read and have a much deeper understanding outside of core competencies than our contemporaries elsewhere in the world. They get to focus on family or work, and I need to understand 50 pages of contract nonsense to sort out how screwed I am on this interstate tax law and why my health insurance won't pay.
> declining economies and low pay compared to the US
You looking at the median income or the mean income? Because if you cut out a few billionaires the US Mean drops by like 20%. If you look at median we are in line with Countries like Canada and Western Europe who have better worker protections and are doing fine economically. (And they have healthcare so insurance doesn't pin them to one job for fear of literally dying)
> non-compete clauses: don't sign them. I've never encountered one.
You are arguing specifics (and doing it incorrectly) while I am showing you a forest of problems and you go after each tree with an axe ignoring that there is a whole forest.
On this specific tree. Some states banned non-competes. Some people do run into them. Some people do. Some people have no real options without them. Some people signed them in the past not fully understanding them (because they weren't IP law experts). I am not saying these should go away I am saying there should be a floor for how hard employers can screw workers so that someone who isn't a legal expert isn't forced out of their profession in a moment of desperation.
Fundamentally, in the forest of problems you are arguing "I have leverage so this works for me" and ignoring all the people who must say "I have no leverage except for my labor and I am willing to work hard, but I sure hope the system doesn't screw out of these hard earned pennies".
You misunderstand. These things you claim are requirements are not requirements. You do not need to be an "expert" in health insurance or interstate tax law. Mostly you just need to read and follow the basic instructions for those things that the experts already wrote out for you. You think countries in Europe don't have bureaucracy? I live outside the US in a country with public health care. It's nice, but it doesn't mean you never have to spend time navigating a bureaucracy, I promise you that.
> You are arguing specifics (and doing it incorrectly) while I am showing you a forest of problems and you go after each tree with an axe ignoring that there is a whole forest.
Yes, because this is actually how you solve problems. You look at each individual problem and say "Hmm, what can I do about this?" Then you think up a solution and do it. Vague hand-waving at a group of problems while saying "Gee, someone should do something about all this mess!" doesn't actually accomplish anything.
You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives.
in my opinion worker ownership of the means of production is just socialism, and that doesn't have a good historical track record.
Please cite some sources that are not communist countries. You know, “just socialism.”
You way want to also ignore the existence of Norway, much of Europe, and popular US federal programs too when you're doing this exercise.
It’s not socialist in any sense. It’s a diehard capitalist country with a lot of public services and welfare (funded by taxes generated under a capitalist system).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Specifically this is market socialism.
Our world is being destroyed by capitalism, maybe its time to try something else.
Well.. same could be said about "democracy". Despite its many inherent flaws (and even a more non inherent ones) free market capitalism has been the main driving force behind human progress for hundreds of years.
Personally I strong believe that (free) competition was the actual real "force" behind it. It just happened that capitalism (however flawed) provided the best environment for incentivizing individual and groups to compete in a "productive" way, accumulating capital in a reasonably regulated and fair way, instead of treating the world a zero sum game (i.e. in premodern societies usually the only real option you had if you wanted to gain significant wealth besides inheriting it was taking it from other people through force or coercion). Stable legal, societal, economic environments (also things like patents, copyright etc.) created ways to reward innovation and other societally productive enterprises.
When I say "fair" I of course mean it in relative terms (and even then that limited "fairness" was almost exclusive restricted only to members of your own society). But it was a huge improvement over arbitrary despotism, societal and economic, instability and various misaligned incentives that preceded it (e.g. possibly why the Roman empire didn't really progress past the "proto-capitalist" stage).
IMHO Socialism and similar systems have a major flaw (besides the fact than they can't really exists without excessive coercion) in that they stifle competition and don't tend to incentive/reward behaviors leading to growth and innovation.
Not that monopolistic-corporations etc. are any more likely to behave any differently without strong incentives, or that non-profit/government funded/etc. organizations can't produce anything innovative or societally beneficial or are somehow inherently worse at that than profit seeking companies (often the opposite). However again they need incentives to not consume/waste all the resources they get without providing anything in return and the need to compete (or lose funding/end up privatized) with the private sector often (again in relative terms, compared to any alternative systems I can think off) provides those incentives.
People claiming that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy is "socialism" are not any less silly.
If this was a startup trying to make worker owned co-ops more attractive I'd see a blog post explaining how they fixed the problems everyone else was having. That, and explanations of how this scales to an entire society.
That's the standard of discussion for everything else on this site and it shouldn't disappear because the subject is socialism.
> existence of Norway
Which is certainly not a "socialist" countries, unless you define socialism in extremely broad and ambiguous terms at which point the word losses any meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy isn't socialism by any reasonable definition. Unless you think Bismarck was a socialist...
What's the actual plan?
For instance, even public companies might increase the percentage of employee ownership over time.
But capital needs could still be met, as the public or private non-employee stock class would still exist.
Why would an investor invest in a company that, if it fails, they lose their money, and if it succeeds, their ownership is taken away?
Owners are bought out. For a public company that just means buying back shares.
A company whose employees care very much about share price sounds good to me. It is not much different from companies who let employees “take” options.
That could be financially mismanaged too.
There would need to be a rational structure.
But in practice, what does it mean? Do you want to make illegal a shareholder selling when they want to? They have to sell at whatever the price is when the company needs their shares?
It would be straight forward to require companies over a certain size to issue and distribute some number of shares based on current pay to employees. Existing shareholders will have their stake diluted but are welcome to buy more shares on the market while employees are welcome to sell or hold. If the investors are actually good at allocating capital, they should have plenty of profits from previous investments to maintain their % ownership despite the share inflation. If they aren't, then they should find a different job.
Under this scheme, Bezos would still have become a billionaire, and we know this because Amazon and tech companies already do this exact thing by offering stock options!
And the neat thing is, when a company does a stock-buyback, this is literally the same giving a dividend of the profits to employees.
I know you said "literally", so all bets are off in how you'll parse a reply, but yes, I do know about share dilution. You're describing practically the same thing. You want people to risk all their capital, and if the business does well you auto-dilute them. That's fine if it's what they signed up for, but it will have a chilling effect on investment.
> Under this scheme, Bezos would still have become a billionaire, and we know this because Amazon and tech companies already do this exact thing by offering stock options!
Again, the "literally" made it clear that this wasn't going to be great, but you're committing the apex fallacy. If you only consider the highest of high performing companies in how your instincts guide you, you're going to commit some very obvious errors.
We can lower interest rates for CapEx business loans to encourage investment. Do we really believe that if Bezos could have only become a single-digits billionaire that that wouldn't have been enough motivation?
> Again, the "literally" made it clear that this wasn't going to be great, but you're committing the apex fallacy. If you only consider the highest of high performing companies in how your instincts guide you, you're going to commit some very obvious errors.
Are we to believe that if Amazon hadn't formed, the hole in market would remain unfilled? I find this very unlikely. Someone was going to be Bezos. And we don't have to begin diluting their share in the first year of the company. And lets be real here, they're going to be paid the highest salaries at the top. They can buy shares that their employees sell on the market like everyone else. I mean, if you're a CEO of a company, you should want to buy shares right? Because you believe in your leadership? So they can pay themselves a large salary and reinvest as much of it as they want.
But this framework exists, and is used by a huge number of firms.
There seems to be a lot of sour grapes that pro employee arrangements are inherently scammy. For no good reason. None of the ESOP companies were mandated!
Thee is a legal framework for those.
There is a legal framework for changing an S-corp to C-core
There is a legal framework for going public
There is a legal framework for declaring bancruptcy
They have NOTHING to do with mandates.
Frameworks are developed over time to handle complex and not always obvious issues in a rational way.
The benefit of a legal framework is its accumulated wisdom developed by law and courts. And the fact that it becomes a recognizable thing for all parties to consider, and makes that path easier to take if that is the decision.
But any transition would (by any reasonable process) be at the agreement of current shareholders. So issues of compensation, and other issues should be dealt with sensibly.
The most sensible way for this to be an easier option, that works out well, is to develop a well thought out framework.
—-
Open source is a very valuable recognized legal framework. Between evolved OS licenses, supportive court cases and the general law, we are better for this framework.
It makes it easy for small actors to take advantage of that approach to publishing software with little legal risk (if they handle known issues, such as not including non-OS work, etc.)
Nobody is forced to be open source.
People and organizations who talk about social welfare (e.g. unions) should put their money where their mouth is, and do the seed investments.
Sure, you're free to optimize for anything you like. As am I and everyone else. I don't think there are any legal hurdles to set up a company that is fully owned by its workers.
In the US, you are free to set up a company any way you like.
Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Should teachers be judged on how a pleasant life they live, or how good they teach?
Focusing on children is the more pro-social preference, but children who attend schools famously don't have jobs in functioning societies.
More importantly, the teaching system is basically un-incentivized by incentives - teachers in the US (focusing just on the US for a sec) are incredibly underpaid, and basically rely on masters-degree teachers putting in effort completely disproportionate to the pay. Everyone accepts this state of affairs specifically because we're all ignoring market incentives in favor of the good of society (i.e. the quality of childrens' education).
So, let's suppose we judge teachers based on how well they appease politicians and parents who support their funding: they pass all students, regardless of how poorly they do on tests and how badly the children need to just repeat the year. This is a terrible outcome, and yet you're implicitly endorsing it.
Nobody gets into teaching for the money—and, for that matter, there’s not a clear connection between doing it well and any kind of rewards at all, as it stands.
However, if you're really good at teaching you can teach at a private school and reap a lot more rewards. Better pay, better recognition, a better work environment this list goes on and on.
/wife is a teacher and has taught in both public and private highschool
As a bonus, private schools are usually way more willing that public schools to tell annoying parents to get bent. Which is a pretty big perk on its own.
....sounds better when you elaborate on the categories you selected.
Given that, if you could make everyone's jobs more fullfilling and increase people's salaries at the cost of things costing a bit more, you would definitely increase overall wellbeing. People would afford a small amount less, but that would not impact them significantly, or maybe at all.
The problem I see is that in global competition, you may be put out of business by countries that give much less shit about worker's wellbeing because people will still spend almost all their money on the cheapest available option (even more so if they can afford less!), and that IMHO explains why American companies have taken over so many markets overseas (and now, China seems to be doing it even more). When that happens, everyone in the country loses. So there needs to be a balance, which I think Europe is doing more or less well: people still have great working conditions but can afford less than in the USA, where people have very near the worst possible working conditions (nearly no vacation mandated by law, no parental leave, no healthcare except for the best jobs), but can buy more useless stuff.
That seems hard to judge in the short term - if in 50 years some economically-critical ecosystem collapses like the north atlantic fisheries did, they will have been absolutely necessary in retrospect.
Speak for yourself, not everyone is in debt all the time, and some never in debt whatsoever even when they have no unusually above-average earnings.
But as part of a vast majority, you are as correct as possible.
Then again capital is just plain Other Peoples' Money, and you can't be a capitalist without capital, no matter how much you wish it was true.
One problem with housing is that real estate has investment potential but for decades it has been too expensive for average people. Debt is crafted to barely make it possible to get into a property, and you may do well if values increase but there is an entire system in place so that others profit more from the same piece of property than you. Vehicles are another high-dollar item where debt is usually incurred, but these almost always depreciate fast. You can draw the line there and be pretty realistic, but there are plenty of people who are at the extreme where everything that costs money is borrowed.
So that's about as close to capitalist as most people get. That's about all of OPM they have at their disposal, and the only thing invested in that has upside potential is the home. For those fortunate enough to have gotten in when it was more within reach. And there can still be a gradual spiral downward which is too slow to notice until it's too late.
Sometimes it helps to do the math and not be afraid to admit how far from capitalist you actually are compared to how capitalist everbody thinks they are.
Disclaimer: this article was DOA & flagged instantly with zero comments, but it seemed OK to me and I vouched and now look at it. Nobody's fault but mine.
Excepting for the cases where people have no other choice.
I mean, do you know how any of your food is produced? If you wanted to verify that the ingredients are what they say they are, can you? If you're buying a car how confident are you the transmission is reliable? Do you actually understand how the transmission is designed OR... is it just brand name? It's brand name, right.
Ultimately companies don't need to, and are better off not, producing high quality and safe goods. It makes much more sense to produce lower quality goods and reinvest the savings into advertising. The consumer won't know the difference, and they couldn't find out even if they wanted to.
It's possible companies with lower profits don't survive when they can be outcompeted by the higher earning companies. This sort of competition has killed plenty of companies.
The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the world) and asking to be disrupted. This is good.
In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds (either via their personal retirement or public pensions). In fact, the largest shareholder in almost all public companies is some index fund.
So workers do own the companies, in proportion to how much value they deliver to the world due to market cap weighting.
The system we have now has evolved out of thousands of years of humans battle-testing various other systems. The current form has taken pretty much the entire world out of devastating poverty at breakneck speed. Seems like we shouldn’t redesign it based on the whims of armchair internet commenters.
Who says? What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better?
> In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds
in proportion to their wealth. That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.
Good news. The world spent the entire last century experimenting with that idea. It did not work out well. I’ve already explained why.
But, you are of course free to start a company doing that. If it turns out to produce better outcomes for customers (the world), you will win and society will win!
I’m guessing you won’t test your ideas though, and will instead vote for authoritarian central planners who will deploy this straight to production via laws. Then your country will cease growing, and will be forced to slowly dismantle this worker-optimized system as a result. See Europe over the next 50 years for more info.
Where are these so called experiments? I only see employee conditions getting progressively worse. If you go back long enough, we did get a few wins like weekends and some limits on hours after a lot of people died for it, but that's about it.
The last change we had was probably WFH which only affects a small portion of people and, realistically, is only being accepted because it's cheaper for companies.
>But, you are of course free to start a company doing that.
I argue nothing different than the status quo can ever succeed without deep structural change.
It's like trying to be a pacifist in the middle of a war zone. You will be killed. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being a pacifist, but it simply cannot work under those conditions.
The part that people seem to forget is that we chose to value profits above all else. We can also choose to change that. Even if it's extremely hard to imagine this with all the propaganda we've been bombarded with in the past century, it's possible.
They're repeating propaganda about communism and socialism.
It's tiresome, really, the degree to which Americans have bought the propaganda that countries like the Soviet Union themselves spread, that they were communist, when in fact they were authoritarian dictatorships with a few very-badly-thought-out planned-economy features.
Please then, what was it? Capitalist? Feudal? Democratic socialism? I need a clear answer..
It's obvious that "communist" policies don't entail that you have the same government as the USSR, so I think it's fair to call arguments that suggest so propaganda. It's probably meaningless to argue about whether the USSR had "true communism".
That's the problem with this type of topic. As much as I like to talk about it, there never seems to be any real talk. People pick a side and arguments be damned.
The extent of their knowledge generally extends to "communism bad" and there's no good faith in actually talking about the shitty situation we're in today.
My original answer was not even citing communism at all. I was specifically talking about worker conditions, but people seem to be unable or unwilling to have a conversation and instead degrade it and down vote.
I'm saying communism is bad.
> in proportion to their wealth. That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.
Maybe we should work on helping people to manage their tendency towards jealousy. One way is to have a culture of personal responsibility so that if you're poor, you believe (rightly or wrongly) that it's your own fault so you're not filled with hate for people who have more money than you.
You’re describing a race to the bottom for quality of jobs. But in this system we all have to have jobs, so you’re describing a race to the bottom for quality of life for most people. I think it is reasonable to question and discuss how we can better optimize our goals so that people’s material needs are met but jobs also don’t suck.
> So workers do own the companies, in proportion to how much value they deliver to the world due to market cap weighting.
This claim hides a great deal of assumptions about economics that are highly contested. For example the idea that how many shares you buy is proportional to the value you deliver assumes that workers with zero shares deliver zero value, which is obviously false. This also assumes that wealthier people, who own more of the shares in index funds, and delivering proportionally more value. Lending does have value, but it has limits. Imagine in the extreme case a company with 100 employees where 100% of the shares are owned by one person. Does that person provide 100% of the value?
My point more directly is that worker’s labor has value unrelated to ownership in shares, and simply offering stock options is not the same as a worker owned company, in practice.
I think workers should have a seat on every board; workers should have a right to first refusal - with a preferential price - on companies that are going through an exit; and that the state should provide an investment fund to allow for this to happen on the condition that the business be ran as a worker co-op.
I think policy such as this would bring stability, long-term thinking, and more genuine customer empathy that isn't solely profit-driven, while reducing costs and driving up baseline wages.
Democracy is important in our politics, but we spend more time at work than anything else. Therefore democracy should be part of our workplaces too.
It's worth adding that none of this prohibits businesses from starting up and reaching the point where they exit with a handsome reward.
No, no one is more important or less important than anyone else. Every role has to be played order for anyone to benefit. Someone has to bear the risk and pay the upfront costs; someone has to do the operational work in order to deliver value to the market and someone has to be willing to pay for the resulting product in order to generate net positive value for all participants. If any one of these items is missing, the entire initiative fails.
So the participants negotiate arrangements that mutually incentivize each other to pay their parts satisfactorily. Whether those arrangements meet the speculative standards of uninvolved strangers' dogmatic ideologies is not and should not be relevant.
> So the participants negotiate arrangements that mutually incentivize each other to pay their parts satisfactorily.
I don't think this is accurate. Stakeholders in a founding business certainly do this in order to set the pace of initial growth and retain key staff. Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most. And whether it's by destroying terms and conditions, laying off staff, or by slashing pensions, all of this serves the owners and major stakeholders at the expense of everyone else. Having a better distribution of ownership disincentivises these malicious activities.
Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.
• Worker co-operatives are larger than conventional businesses and not necessarily less capital intensive
• Worker co-operatives survive at least as long as other businesses and have more stable employment
• Worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organised more efficiently
• Worker co-operatives retain a larger share of their profits than other business models
• Executive and non-executive pay differentials are much narrower in worker co-operatives than other firms
Source: https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/worker_co-op...
I'm afraid that this is not true. Owners are not just the ones who enable the business to be initiated in the first place, but are the ones who bear risk on an ongoing basis in order to keep the business up and running. Firms that need ongoing capital infusions to expand operations, or that incur debt in order to get past short-term financial bottlenecks, absolutely need someone to be responsible for the inherent risks associated with doing so.
Eliminating the business owner as the risk-bearer, and setting up a business in which "workers" are the responsible parties makes workers themselves bear all the risk. In the status quo, the worst risk exposure that workers face if the firm faces financial difficulty is that they will just lose their jobs -- i.e. that the customer that has to that point been purchasing their services will simply cease making further purchases. But in a situation in which these service providers were the owners, and therefore responsible for the firm's obligations, they would not only lose their jobs but would also be on the hook to repay its debts and/or will suffer the loss of whatever funds they put into it to ensure it had sufficient capital to operate.
Workers generally don't want to do this, and usually prefer to just receive an agreed upon rate for services rendered for as long as the relationship persists.
You may note that the industries in which worker-owned co-ops are relatively common are the ones that have low risk inherent in the business model -- markets with predictable demand, long product life cycles, and relatively inelastic price sensitivity, e.g. grocery stores. Industries with high volatility, rapid technological change, short product life cycles, high need for capital, and elastic demand simply don't work well under a co-op model.
> Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most.
Ultimately, everything is just a proxy for consumer utility. A business that is acting in the interest of a potential buyer needs to ensure that the firm is performing viably, since the buyer usually aims to operate it (or, if they aim to liquidate it, the current operators need to maximize the liquidation value).
In either case, the only way to do that is still to satisfy market demand -- we may frown at the tactics they use to do so, but ultimately, they will only use tactics that are effective in terms of encouraging customers to actually purchase their goods or services. At the end of the day, it's still customers assigning more value to the product than to the money they are exchanging for it that enables the form to earn a profit.
> Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.
Per my point above, I believe you have the causality inverted. Co-ops are only suitable for stable, sustainable businesses that have low risk exposure and low capital requirements. The correlation you are seeing is because co-ops generally don't participate in more volatile markets in the first place.
False comparison bc today's companies balance customer value with shareholder value. Collectives can do the same thing.
The fatal scenario of companies optimizing for owner's benefit is in fact the scenario we have today where investor-owned companies benefits themselves more than customers, eg pollution, disposable plastic products that can't be repaired or maintained, like the millions of apple tvs that just become landfill overnight, fake shortages to raise prices, stock buy backs, low quality processed foods manufactured in at bliss point.
Um, what? The point of a company is to make profit for its investors, and making a useful product for the customer is only a byproduct of doing that. This is why corporations are making record profits, instead of investing it all into R&D or rainy day funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
If only some companies are coops, then those have to compete with companies that aren't and consequently they have to work efficiently or fail. The idea behind making them all be coops seems to be removing this pressure to perform. Bad idea.
Again, this is a culture thing, where I'm saying "I don't care about being productive, as long as I'm happy", and you're coming from a Protestant work ethic place of "but how can you be happy if you aren't productive?".
As for me being some sort of Christian; I'm not and I take that as an insult. Kindly go fuck yourself.
Also productivity is complicated because humans are complicated. You may assume that, say, 50 hours of work is more productive than 40. But I doubt it - from what I've seen, it might be less productive. Even though more time is spent.
As for 'the change from serfdom', if you're referring to the improved working conditions following the peasants revolt, remember it took the Black Death to wipe out 50% of the population in England, consumption went down, but the potential productivity of survivors would not have changed much, so landowners had to pay more for laborers to attract manpower for farming.
A decrease in productivity relative to consumption is not good, as it just causes low-supply driven inflation and makes everybody poorer. That being said, I believe the quality of productivity / consumption also need to be considered, not just aggregates. It's entirely possible a lot of productivity is just garbage products and irrational consumers are happy to consume or are tricked/bamboozled. ZIRP and excess monetary expansion facilitates these distortions, giving investors cheap money to stimulate production in dubious industries, and giving consumers cheaper credit to purchase products of dubious value.
I think sometime in the future working will be completely optional. Would this be infinite productivity, or zero?
And you're free to work part time or switch to a lower-paying job that you enjoy more. I did the latter recently; it's great, and I'm thankful that our economy is so productive that I can still afford everything I need.
Coops don’t want to beat the competition, they want to be a useful structure for A) their clients and B) their workers.
If they manage to do A+B, they have already won. They don’t need or want to beat out competition.
They don’t play the capitalists game, they play the real game of "in a working society, workers want to be useful and customers wants a good service". There is nothing more to happiness of a society. Everything else is just about making rich people more rich.
There are lot of countries out there in the occident where you can’t "excise unproductive divisions" and where firing a worker without a solid reason is hard and dangerous for the employer.
And guess what, they have a cost of living that is comparable to the US (except for housing which is currently shitty all over the occidental world).
Ok, you may say that the US is the first worldwide economy or whatever. And what ? A good economy is just a tool to help societies flourish. If you have a powerful economy but your citizens are sad and depressed, you are loosing the society game anyway.
Being efficient at getting shit done is probably important for global happiness, but that’s up to a point.
If people in US are sad, it’s not because schools are too long to construct or because roads are too long to fix, it’s because nobody even decides to build/fix them because it benefits "only" to the community.
Humans don’t inherently hate working, that’s even probably ingrained in their genes, they just hate being exploited.
By the virtue of your argument we should optimize owners wealth because there are more owners than employees.
World is much much more complicated to be throwing simple arguments like that :)
> The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead.
All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are better at optimising workers happiness than cooperatives (maybe they pay better? Maybe they enable more job hopping?)
But there are so few cooperatives that the chance of you joining one is very slim anyways.
Or everyone is too exhausted from their daily grind to even consider doing so, which is honestly not very surprising.
And some people do that (modulo creating coops), just not middle-class people. No-one without a decent cushion would be able to risk it. Especially with health care being tied to employment.
Setting up a coop versus setting up a company aren't on equal ground. One has clear legal roads, and the other is perceived as communism by 50% of Americans. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.
It's a similar argument I hear against unions - "well go work somewhere else!" The problem is that it's just not equal. Companies have infinitely more power and leverage than laborers. The labor market is EXTREMELY skewed in favor of companies.
If we want the labor market to not be skewed like this, we will need to allow (and even force) laborers to unionize. That's just not gonna happen. In practice union busting is not only allowed, its perceived as a good thing.
We already allow workers to unionize; a practice with which I don't agree. If we were to force workers to unionize, then we take away worker atonomy. I fail to see that as a benefit.
I don't have anything against unions generally and am happy for companies to decide they will exclusively deal with unions to reduce their costs of negotiations, but I absolutely do have a problem with laws saying employees can decide to take away atonomy from their employer and force their employer to negotiate only with a union.
The reality is that employers should not have such autonomy. What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers.
Unions only work if they're enforced. Just like a right to life implies an anti-right to kill, a right to fair negotiations implies an anti-right for employers to choose not to negotiate with unions.
No. My argument is that forcing companies to only negotiate with unions if that isn't want the company wants to do is an anti-right. It violates free trade. You disallow entity A from negotiating with entity B because entity C doesn't like it.
> Just like a right to life implies an anti-right to kill, a right to fair negotiations implies an anti-right for employers to choose not to negotiate with unions.
My point above is illustrated here. Person A being alive doesn't impact person B being alive, or person C being alive.
Disallowing entity A from negotiating with entity B as entity C means that you are now infringing on entity A and entity B as an external third party.
As entity C, you would be perfectly within reason to inform entity A you will not trade with them if they do not negotiate through entity D or if they negotiate with any of your peers through any channel other than entity D. Entity A would get to decide if you offer more value. But to be entities X, Y, Z and disallow entities A and B from trade is anti-rights.
If an employee wants to work without a hard hat, and the employer also wants the employee to work without a hard hat, but OSHA says no, is that more or less rights?
The naive answer is less rights - well the employee wants to! In practice, this manifests as pressure. Soon no employees wear hard hats. And they're denied the right to a safe working environment.
I argue its MORE rights. Because we give the employee, and employer, the right to a safe working environment.
Meaning, if we want employees to have the right to fair negotiations, we have to restrict employers.
Edit: OSHA would truly be a third party here. A union is a first party. Also: I believe OSHA is unconstitutional.
And no, we cannot just outlaw competition. Having an efficient economy is important and valuable because it allows us to have a higher standard of living while putting in less work.
But, many companies (especially those really competitive ones!) just... don't make money. It's easy to be a big disrupter like Uber when you make -500 million dollars a year for 15 years. Naturally that wouldn't when you aren't on capital welfare.
Companies should not deliberately make workers lives bad. But, optimizing for the worker seems fundamentally unworkable as this would essentially mean financial independence at the time of hiring followed by bankruptcy.
That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
A perfect market is one where
- alternatives can be created for little to no money so they can easily exist
- consumers have an infinity of time, money and energy to analyze products
- consumers have total agency over their decision
- picking an alternative has no cost, no drawback
- it is possible to buy nothing and still be content
There are 0 markets that fall under those conditions. The measure of how good your product is is not in its sales figures it is in... reviews.
No, it doesn't. We live in a stochastic world, not a deterministic one, and nothing perfectly fits any speculative model. There are always outliers and edge cases, and that's fine -- the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.
And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
But that's my point: the world is so different from that model that it becomes inaccurate. You might be privileged enough to have a good enough approximation of a perfect market, leading you to believe that the model stands, but you are not representative of the population. Not even close to the median.
> And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
I don't know why I'm debating this in the hyper-capitalistic forum that Hacker News is, but no, business profits are not. If they were, no advertising would be necessary, because products would naturally be sold. If they were, every consumer would have access to everything. If they were, no lobbying by any company to soften laws seen as too restrictive would be necessary. If they were, companies would not emit a single gram of CO2.
The whole point of business profit is to profit. Aligning with consumer interests is lucky happenstance, not a necessity. A fringe outlier, as you say. You cannot say "it is true because I see it". It needs to be backed by strong analysis.
Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.
Do you mean there are myriads of example of companies who say that they are optimizing for profit, but don't actually follow through in their actions? Humans do, indeed, have a penchant for saying one thing and then doing another. But if they are truly optimized for profit, how could they possibly go bust?
Of course not. The constraints are exactly what you optimizing against. Choosing to operate in a market that is not capable of supporting profitability is not optimizing for profitability, though. One may claim to be optimizing for profitability, but actions speak louder than words.
"Just existing in the world, providing a service to customers and a wage to employees" is a fine and stable way for a company to exist.
One could similarly say that the company goes kaput if you over-optimize for profit extraction.
The goal should be to some-how optimize for the sweet spot where the well-being of the company, the employees, investors, the economy and the environment are sufficiently in balance.
I think the customer has a good bit of influence by voting with their wallet but we don't see it in action very often. One could underoptimize for that too!
While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.
Are we just asking rhetorical questions that pick out one data point that we think supports our presupposed notions?
2. A business-first, citizens-second approach to society.
3. Wealthier, and less risk-averse investors (ties back to point 2.).
Simply put, very different societies (even more considering Europe is not at all a homogeneous block), with different priorities, both extremely wealthy by global standards.
The question is more: which model is more sustainable as a society in the long-run, that play is still ongoing and we might not have a clear answer for the next 30-50 years.
This is meaningless. Businesses are activities undertaken by people. Everything resolves back to the people -- the same aggregation of the same individual people in all cases. Reifying the abstraction of "business" to treat it like some separate entity that's at odds with the very people who are engaging in the actual activity that term describes is a monumental confusion of ideas.
Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that.
Citizens need to abide to cultural norms, societal expectations, etc.
Of course everything resolves back to people, in a reductive sense, but those entities (citizens, and businesses) don't have the same standards: morally, ethically, nor legally. Neither do they share the same needs, businesses can by eventuality support the needs of citizens to sell stuff but their only motive is profit-motive, not what's best for citizens.
Business-first is a prerogative of how the USA approaches regulations, it's left first to businesses to regulate themselves until issues mount up to the point where regulations are needed, at that point the businesses have had time to amass power and fight against those. Even in the cases where regulation would be beneficial to society, even in cases where the current regulations which are business-friendly are damaging to society (US's healthcare is a clear example).
It's only meaningless if you don't want to see what it means, citizens needs are considered below the needs of businesses as entities, it's a cultural trait of the USA to let businesses roam more-or-less freely (again, with the exception of some industries) until they cause enough damage to generate popular calls for them to be restrained, at that point is not clear if the government will be able to reign in them. Businesses in the USA have much more power than the people, they make policies, they donate enormous amounts to political campaigns, etc. Citizens can't play in the same field.
There are many cases from the past decades: the global financial meltdown of 2008, the dysfunctional healthcare system, the opioid crisis fueled by a single pharma company, the nosedive of Boeing, etc.
You can attack my point in many ways but not by saying "it's meaningless", businesses interests are, in many cases, not citizens' interests. A very clear example: if a business could they would not hire any Americans, simply because the workforce is expensive, shipping this labour outside of American borders would be great for any business' bottomline, it would not help at all society as a whole. They would do that even if it meant killing their own businesses, since there wouldn't be consumers to buy their products, it wouldn't matter until the issue was extreme enough to require them to actually create a consumer market by employing people in the country.
I don't understand the concept of assigning moral agency to a pattern of activity. The legal entity is itself just a conceptual framework under which actual people operate, and not a concrete entity capable of autonomous action.
The individuals who own and operate the business are the moral agents, and I don't see how they are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. Limited liability just creates a distinction between personal and business assets for the purpose of financial liability, and does not have anything to do with ethical or moral standards.
> their only motive is profit-motive,
"Profit" is just a quantification of net gain in subjective utility experienced by people, in whatever form that takes. Fundamentally, "profit motive" is a redundant phrase, because "profit" refers to the fulfillment of whatever motivation you had in the first place. Whether that's good or bad overall isn't a function of the pursuit of profit -- profit consists of fulfilling the pursuit of anything -- but rather what was being pursued, and what moral boundaries were crossed its pursuit.
Some people seem to bend over backwards to create conceptual frameworks aimed at externalizing the causality of human behavior. Perhaps those who want to create utopia need to find the fault in our stars, not in ourselves, in order to hold out hope that all the world's problems can be someday solved, so they blame abstractions like "capitalism" or fictional characters like the devil for the unethical behavior of human beings. But none of that is really valid -- all of the problems of society are rooted in the fallibility of human nature, and there's no way around that. Unscrupulous, ambitious people don't go away simply because you've altered the form of some abstract system -- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
>Unscrupulous
>-- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
A more sophisticated chef with a dish completely unfamiliar but irresistible can still be disruptive. Whether or not it's a brand new concoction or a rehash of something so out-of-style that it's simply long forgotten.
Mission-critical companies were not supposed to degenerate to having any outstanding leadership risks that can leave room for such tragic nosedives :/
Workers keep more of the profits but there's less produced so there's less to buy? That doesn't actually make workers' lives better.