And how does he think disputes between companies or between companies and consumers should be handled?
Money managers are a good example of this. At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game, and all money managers can produce in total is the negative effect of their fees on their clients money, yet people pay them because they take the chance that their money manager will produce a better than average return.
Similarly, the vast majority of marketing jobs are zero-sum jobs. True, a teeny minority do inform the public about a new product or service they wouldn't otherwise know about, but the vast majority are just trying to convince the public to use your widget over competitor's (actually very similar) widget. But any individual firm needs marketers, otherwise the competitors would take all of their business.
If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.
I don't understand this. "Stock picking" traditionally refers to buying or selling stocks through the stock market. It doesn't create or destroy any stock, and the dividends are invariant with respect to who owns the stock.
That makes dividends perfectly zero-sum. If I buy a stock from you, my gain from getting the dividend is exactly equal to your loss from losing the dividend.
What am I missing here?
Dividends do not alter that argument in any way. The trade is described as zero-sum because the total amount of value it produces is zero -- in the trade scenario, I gain X, and in the no-trade scenario, you gain X. X minus X is zero. My gain is your loss.
This part of it all, in particular, reminds so much of “Meditations on Moloch”[1] . If anyone hasn’t read through this, I highly recommend it. It’s an inspiring look into how human society gets trapped into these games where no one wins, but to stop playing is much worse.
1: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Like feathers on a peacock.
This assumes that the same stocks are issued and purchased regardless of the efforts/nonexistence of money managers. Do you think it's possible that scams might be more numerous or more successful if there were nobody at all trying to determine the worth of individual stocks?
If you do think that's possible, then money managers can collectively produce positive value.
The tax code in America messed with this dynamic with taxing stock buy backs(capital gains) less than dividends (income). Giving large chunks of stock options to the company execs also didn't help.
Perhaps a solution would be to ban them by law. So if corporate lawyers were banned then the executives would settle their disputes personally at a fraction of the cost.
A common "cost saving" measure in companies is to get rid of various admin staff, people like PAs and the ones who book travel etc.
Now everyone has to spend a bunch of time doing work that a £20KPA first-jobber could be doing.
In some cases (e.g. scheduling meetings), the amount of time doing that gets bigger the higher up you get. This means that a £200KPA executive probably now spends a fifth of their time on grunt work.
In other cases (e.g. international travel booking), someone who has it as their day-to-day job will get it done correctly in a fraction of the time of anyone else.
I think that voting and calling your representative should be the maximum effort necessary to be fairly represented.
That isn't reality, nobody should take this as an opportunity to condescend to me as a fair weather child. It SHOULD be reality.