Hacker News Reader

Comment by johndunne | Hacker News Reader

I find this facet of Capitalism the most concerning; fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder. It breaks the link between people and matters that concern society (like the environment, in the case of this article). In the drive to increase profit, individual legislators can be convinced to tweak a law or two for 'greater economic growth' somewhere. Over the decades, the effect is a shift in political power away from the people and into industry and ultimately into the hands of a few. I've come to think that this is what we're witnessing in the US. While we're not looking, the landscape is changing behind the scenes. Bram Vranken's quote from the article is poignant: 'Who does the Commission really represent: Big Tech or the public interest?' I often wonder what can be done by us (i.e. all people) to push back and it mostly requires a lot of effort from everyone; participation in Democracy.

View on HN

This isn't solely due to shareholder fiduciary duty. Even without such a duty, the shareholders would fire anyone who doesn't put them first. Even without shares, a sole owner of a company would also do that. No matter your position, you don't get to do things that are bad for your boss, so the ultimate bosses (whoever they are in a given system) hold all the power.

And power has a tendency to accumulate. Powerful people always use their power to increase their power. There are no exceptions.

That's an Ayn Rand type black and white view of society. Not so long ago, companies were supposed to (and many did) care for continuity, in a broad sense: survival, labor, customer, and product. Nowadays, you would add environment too. Shares were a way of getting more interest than a savings account. Heck, there were even cooperations in which the laborers were shareholders as well.

The word you are looking for is greed.

Corporations do care for survival and continuity - of themselves. Not the people, not even people working in them or running them - just themselves.

How could a corporation itself care about anything? How would it act itself (without humans), for example, to express such care?

In my experience, it is always people.

Think in terms of a dynamic system. Or in terms of "selfish gene", as I've observed it to be easier to talk about.

Any single person or group in a corporation is expendable. You can swap out the sales department or a CEO, and the corporation will continue on its course without a pause or major change of direction. No single person or group of people is in total control of the direction - what directs the corporation is the sum total of ideas, vibes, internal influences, bylaws, operating practices, assets, and external environment of competitors and markets and regulatory landscape. The people that make up a corporation may be diverse and have conflicting goals, but if there's one thing they're all aligned on, is that they all want to keep their jobs and increase their pay or influence. I.e. they want the corporation to go on, to survive at least to their next paycheck.

The end result is, a corporation can be seen as an independent entity - kinda like an animal (or a super-colony for more accurate comparison) with a survival drive independent of the people that form it.

If there is a single owner, could shut down the place, for example.

As I said, in my experience, the humans - interchangible or not, as customers, competitors, owners etc - determine what happens, not the corporation itself.

Can look at a corporate as "living thing" itself, but I think that underestimates the human side.

Individual neurons determine how your arm moves, but we still speak of a human as a whole being that makes decisions.

Then again, there are 100 billion highly interconnected neurons without a CEO, a CFO, a CTO, a COO, etc. Thinking that from 50, 500 or even 5000 barely connected people with exterior motivation some higher intelligence can emerge is naive. Do not anthropomorphize.

> 50, 500 or even 5000 barely connected people

5000 barely connected people isn't a corporation, it's a mob. A corporation has more to it.

In fact people aren't much more important that the software that runs on them. Because that's what all the bureaucracy is - all those rules and bylaws and contractual obligations and checklists and playbooks and regulation - software running on a runtime made of meat, one form letter or internal memo at a time.

Most of the time, losing people is to corporation what clipping a toe nail is to an adult, or a bit flip to a modern computer - a non-event you barely notice and carry on.

> higher intelligence can emerge

Nobody said "higher intelligence". I mentioned animals, ant supercolonies, but the same patterns of behavior is visible in even most basic multi-cellular and single-cellular organisms.

> Do not anthropomorphize.

Nobody says you need to.

(Except with LLMs, where refusing to do so means you'll just remain confused about what can or cannot, should or should not, be done with them.)

Fiduciary duty effectively turns profit maximization into the only valid goal. Companies with sole owners or family businesses tend to have much more diverse goals. Many of Europe's large companies are still private (certainly more so than in the US), and from the ones I've personally dealt with the image of the founder/owner/family is often a driving concern. That can materialize as better business practices, or as a ruthless business that reinvests a notable part of profits in projects with public benefit, usually locally wherever they are headquartered.

Other examples in the US would include SpaceX, which supposedly is not about profit but about building a mars colony (and so far their actions seem to align with that), or Rupert Murdoch's media empire that's at least as much about spreading right wing views in the anglosphere as it is about money.

No fiduciary responsibility needed, democracy alone is enough to encourage corruption.

For example, a company decision-maker responsible for picking the city/county/country in which their company will put a new factory is in position of great influence on municipal/regional/national level politics - simply because the people want jobs, and politicians want to be popular with the people.

> simply because the people want jobs

To be more precise, the people want to live within a certain standard. I can’t think of anyone¹ who really wants a job. Purpose, something to do, money (which translates to standard of living), recognition, sure, but those don’t really necessitate a job, as in something you have to do on the regular to be able to survive through the indirection of money.

The distinction is important because those who have the power you described are also the ones who have the biggest incentive to perpetuate this notion that everyone needs a job and that there’s no other way the system could work. Thus, by framing it in the context of jobs we’re discussing on their terms and have already lost.

¹ For sure there’ll be someone, but not enough to be meaningful.

I agree, thanks for the correction. In the timeless words of 'nostromo:

No job is the goal. No money is the problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987073

The issue is corruption and it is in capitalism, socialism and communism. Corruption is everywhere all the time. Capitalism is just redistribution of resources. There is also redistribution of resources in communism and there the corruption i would say is even bigger. Less in amount for one specific person, but spread out throught society that it rots from inside.

Capitalism is not the redistribution of resources. It is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by private owners, as opposed to collectively.

In theory, full communism prevents corruption by removing its structural causes rather than relying on laws or moral exhortation. And since corruption under capitalism (in Marxist analysis) stems from private ownership, class divisions, and the scramble for scarce resources, abolishing those conditions should eliminate the incentives that drive people to exploit positions of power for personal gain. Without private property to accumulate or a state apparatus to capture, the reasoning goes, there would simply be nothing left to be corrupt about.

>Without private property to accumulate or a state apparatus to capture, the reasoning goes, there would simply be nothing left to be corrupt about.

Right, it becomes mostly the corruption of power, and the lengths people will go to in order to retain it. It’s astonishing that is not recognized as a problem.

You must be joking right?

what does this have to do with EU politicians breaking their own rules

> I find this facet of Capitalism the most concerning; fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder.

That’s not the least of my concerns. My problem with capitalism is its desire to influence politics in its favor, and the utter lack of regulation amongst politicians (ie self regulation) to forbid this practice.

The whole industry of lobbying should not be allowed to exist.

Lobbying must be allowed to exist. You bringing issues to the attention of your representative or asking them to change some policy is lobbying. It is even very useful to allow organizations to lobby politicians. For example, I want EFF to be able to lobby politicians about things I don't have the time or influence to really push for political change on. I do wonder how we could effectively restrict corporate lobbying in that context. Maybe there could be a special type of charitable nonprofit that is more restricted, such as only being allowed to accept funding from individuals rather than corporations and then deny lobbying rights to anyone acting as agent of any organization other than one of that sort? But I think we're very far from a political environment in the US in which any constitutional amendment restricting personal rights in the political process would end well.

Well lobbying is ok. Bribing is not.

I guess we need to pay politicians enough. And have very very strict checks on their wealth. Maybe even only pick people with no families and don't allow them property. That would essentially eliminate bribery. Question is what else would it do... Nothing is so simple in the end.

But yes any such system has to be very simple at it's core.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com