It's not like Shareholder Value Theory single-handedly destroyed the world. I'm no fan of Milton Friedman, but "maximize profits for your shareholders" isn't crazy-talk. More importantly, it's easily quantifiable: Compare and contrast: Annual reports to that focus on what matters to employees of the corporation Corporate purchasing for employees Bringing democracy and transparency into corporations through - Jury trials (of peers) within organizations for organizational violations - Employee oversight of lobbyists - Customer and employee participation on boards of directors - Free presses within organizations (very different from a newsletter) - Minimum values standards for vendors - Efficient capital markets for non-profits Go ahead and quantify "employee oversight of lobbyists." The author would have you believe that everything was grand until Ayn Rand cranked out her pablum, Milton Friedman couched it in academic terms and the whole of Wall Street suddenly became short-term locusts. Yet he uses the example of the original Tea Party to demonstate rapacious corporations... 100 years before Ayn Rand was born. The real problem is that corporations have always been about maximizing profits (short or long-term) but since '71, we've had a massive Capitalist influx of neoliberal zeal (Milton Friedman among them) that has hacked away at the regulations designed to keep corporations in check. I mean, you can try and make the world a better place by asking corporations to be nicer. Or you can, you know, actively restrain them from being dicks. A corporation exists to make money and protect its owners and shareholders from liability. That's it. It is not a moral apparatus, no matter how hard you try. If you want a better society, don't ask the shark to stop biting... take away its teeth.DID YOU MAKE MONEY? _X_ YES ___ NO
HOW MUCH MONEY DID YOU MAKE? _____ DOLLARS
Ethical scorecards
Or get your own teeth. This is an area where conflict is inevitable, so it needs to be embraced. Most of the problems solved by the bullet points you quote are better solved by ensuring workers can organize and conflicts with management aren't one-sided, which is why capitalists have been buying laws to pull unions' teeth almost since they became a thing.If you want a better society, don't ask the shark to stop biting... take away its teeth.
And now we are at "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind". The only way to "win" a fight like this is to not participate in the first place. Nobody is going to come out clean, proud, or a winner, when "well shit, conflict happens, man" is the company motto.
I agree with this, but the tough part is that in the neoliberal, free trade climate, the only way to affect change is via international cooperation. The more I read about it, the more I think that a Tobin or transaction tax is necessary to ensure functional markets and wise capital allocation. At minimum this would require the US, EU, UK (because let's face it, they're only nominal EU members right now), Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong to all be on board. The odds seem long, to say the least.If you want a better society, don't ask the shark to stop biting... take away its teeth.