• dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    6 months ago

    The problem is our investment economy that focuses only on the stock prices continually going up. It’s literally an unsustainable system.

    Yup, this is the problem right here. Investments are supposed to generate returns, that’s the whole point. But Milton Friedman and Jack Welch decided that the sole mission of any company was to increase shareholder value, and the rest of the world rolled with that. So whenever these CEOs point to their Mission and Vision statements, unless they say “Our only priority is delivering returns to our Shareholders”, they are lying.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

    Economist Milton Friedman introduced the Friedman doctrine in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”.[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.[6]

    Meanwhile, we’ve decided that these corporations are people. Psychopaths who have no moral responsibilities to anyone but their shareholders, but people nonetheless.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      6 months ago

      Thus our efforts to make social justice a core condition for profits: fuck people over and get a boycott or protests or a label in media as toxic, and lose customers.

      It’s not going well, as a strategy. It requires an educated populace.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
        6·
        6 months ago

        I mean, every economic model out there “assumes rational actors,” which I’ve always taken to mean informed and educated. Too many of the masses are neither.