What can reasonably be done to combat it? Leadership at all the biggest firms is on board with shareholder capitalism. To them, Welch style management just means line goes up...
in my opinion, it seeems to have been enormously on the rise since the end of world war 2 and especially after the end of the cold war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.?wprov=...
The Supremes ruled for shareholder value.
However I forget details of ths case. If anyone here happens to know what case I am referring to, please chime in.
We need to pierce the corporate veil and directly go after the responsible individuals when they, either directly or by deliberate ignorance, cause problems that lead to people dying etc. No shielding behind a corporation if your decisions to make lots more bucks led to avoidable deaths.
As for the notion that Boeing has prioritized shareholder value over safety: just look at their share price over the last few days. It tanked by 10% since this accident occurred. Clearly, making safe planes is a prerequisite for generating shareholder value. There is no conflict there.
The problem is that because Boeing has a US monopoly and global duopoly on large jets neither the regulators or customers are willing to punish them when they under perform. Boeing has become too big to fail.
The time horizon of these jokers is too short. If they had a 10 or even a 5 year risk horizon, they would not make these short-sighted decisions. The Welchian approach isn't just value destruction, over a longer time horizon it's quantifiably unprofitable for the business as a whole.
Forgive me a tangent here, particularly relevant with the 737, about how leaders regularly mistake economies of scope for economies of scale.
Scale and Scope are fundamentally different things, but M&A specialists and related finbros often treat them as equivalent. This is unfortunate. Scalar efficiencies are largely functions of density - more people buying the same thing over a given space. Scope involves equivalence - more people buying things that are just similar enough. This is a trap. In order to evaluate equivalence, you need domain knowledge, but in order to consolidate operations, you've already jettisoned that same domain knowledge. Also known as "Why do I need fuselage experts in three different places? It's just a tube! Let's just hire one outsourced Fuselage Expert".
Economy of Scope takes a truly heroic amount of domain knowledge among the M&A team to make it work, but if you're already convinced that finance contains the secrets of the universe, you're probably going to be dismissing domain knowledge as a basic concept.
Again - not for the first time - I marvel at the structural similarities of end-stage Soviet industry and our own late-stage financier capitalism.
Concerning.
https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...
Hell, people will commit financial crimes that result in significant prison terms and they still do it.
Change humans and maybe you can solve the problem.
The state should wield power it derives from the mandate given to it by it's people, and it should defend the capability to influence the economy with that.
This fact seems to have been forgotten since the end of the cold war, when neoliberal theory seems to have been the defacto "truth" in economics.
It was enabled by deregulation, so regulation seems important.
That was enabled by more overt bribery of politicians (PACs, super PACs, etc.). So stop the bribes.
That happened simultaneously with changes in how business was depicted by media, whether news or entertainment. So . . . convince the heads of that small handful of companies to change their representations.
And so far that's just the US. All of these things are global.
My point is that just combating the existing problems is akin to whack-a-mole. A new pervasive philosophy will replace neoliberalism, though. Maybe put effort into pushing whichever of those seems best?