Hot take because Line Must Go Up is being blamed on "For the Shareholders!" lately, but:
It’s not just publicly traded companies. Private companies have greedy C-suites too.
This its why capitalism is failing. Shareholder profit is a fundamentally unsustainable incentive.
HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 6 days ago
ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sorry to be pedantic but strictly speaking “shareholder profit” isn’t the issue with capitalism because that would include worker-owned cooperatives which are not causing the same problems.
The issue is the legal obligation of a private or public company to make an increase in returns for shareholders year on year.
This is why decisions like downgrading quality, design by committee to appeal to focus groups, everything becoming a subscription service, and firing staff to reduce wage overheads in the last financial quarter exist.
Because it’s easier for the company directors / C-level executives to make these decisions which make line go up, rather than try to justify to shareholders why a steady or small dip in returns is necessary for longer term investment and growth.
This is compounded by the shortsightedness of companies only planning quarter to quarter then governments + central banks basing all economic decisions on GDP figures.
Because the easiest thing to make national line go up is to give tax cuts to the owning elites for them to shuffle even more money around in the stock and commodity markets, they buy up all the assets of the working class, the middle class, and the governments selling them off.
But funnily enough, centralising all the apparent wealth in the hands of a few silver-spooned arseholes is not a basis for a functioning society.