Buddy Rand-wank, listen the fuck up.
A company is â by any and all means you might classify its actions â an alien intelligence. It is a compound organism made up of its employees, of its bureaucracy, of its bylaws. It is motivated (oftentimes) by a singular desire to maximize shareholder value.
Shareholder value is not niceness, or kindness, or charity, or the common good, it is a number. If you gave a company free reigns to reshape reality it would replace all its employees with robots and use every bit of material in the universe to build computers and write âshareholder value = 9999999999999âŠâ with the nines taking up every nano-angstrom of memory.
Google âpaperclip maximizerâ for more info.
That is what a company wants. So letâs just throw out the idea that a company can be benevolent by its own merit: it is always and only ever doing good because doing good is profitable, or because somebody is overpowering the companyâs wants.
Next: in a company, the rules that workers abide by â be they bylaws or managerial decisions â are dreamt up by fallible humans. Fallible here meaning they are poor approximations of what policies would actually maximize shareholder value. The errors in judgment made by the fallible humans are informed by politics, misinformation, ignorance, and a lot of other things. Humans are pretty stupid.
So hence, a managerial decision like âworkers canât sit down ever even if there are no customersâ is probably not an effective means of maximizing shareholder value. It is probably made by some executive who has never worked a store floor in her life, and thinks poor people should really have thought about the consequences of choosing to live in poverty before they decided to do so.
Denying workers the ability to sit down provably decreases their effectiveness, which means in order to maximize shareholder value you have to make this decision as part of some grander scheme to utilize desperate minimum wage workers, and making sure the poor stay poor because working at your company tires them out.
Iâm not sure why you would, though, because the strategy that actually maximizes shareholder value is probably more along the lines of something like increasing consumer spending by paying your workers more, getting legislation passed that increases economic equality and consequently vastly increases economic growth. Sure, that wonât maximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter but it will on a timescale of a decade.
Actually, we can probably model companies as âmaximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter and add noiseâ and get decent predictions. This behavior more accurately reflects things like AirBnB getting a developer to build houses explicitly for AirBnB (which is a hotel, but not subject to hotel regulation because loopholes) and Uber existing (which is a taxi service, but not subject to regulation because loopholes) â in essence the free market in aggregate interprets regulation as damage and re-routes flow around the damaged area.
So, short-term maximization. Itâs short-term. It is probably driven by inverstor desires which ultimately clash with shareholder value maximization â Q1 boom, followed by Q3 bankrupcy is not shareholder value maximization, it is suicide by stupidity.
And so we have short-term concerned execs informed by neo-liberalist ideology, who have their minds warped by the possession of incredible wealth, and who have opinions informed by executive culture, who make decrees like âthe customer is always rightâ and âemployees are not allowed to sit down.â
This is what I mean when I dispute your claim that we canât do âbetter.â We have fucknuts in power parroting truisms from 200 years ago. This is not a glorious shareholder-value maximization, this is human stupidity getting in the way of human values and corporation values.
This is capitalist culture: itâs not even compatible with idealized capitalism!
What the flying fuck do you mean this is the pinnacle?! Where are my god-level artificial intelligences maximizing shareholder value? Where is the abolition of capitalism with all its affront to all humanity holds dear? Where is your god damned ambition, you spineless libertarian?!
âBut what can we do right now?!â Fucked if I know whatâs right. I just know youâre wrong.
PS. fuck off with that burden of proof bullshit. Your claim is just as extraordinary.