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Comment by IncreasePosts | Hacker News Reader

First of all, it is extremely difficult to say whether certain actions are good for society. I think there are some things that you can say are clearly good or bad for society, but what about all the stuff in the middle?

Would the Coca-Cola company be allowed to exist in this world? Are professional sports team good for society?

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Sure, it's hard to say exactly what's good for society, it's a broad aim. However, being a PBC also insulates you from extremely short-sighted shareholders. It's different than being a charity.

Coca-Cola could easily be a PBC, so could pro sports teams. It just gives you the freedom to shut down short-sighted activist shareholders who can't see past next quarter. It doesn't require you to be Mother Teresa, it just doesn't let anyone punish you if you decide that's what you want to be.

Requiring benefit is a huge step from where we are. Perhaps it would be easier periodically determine the n most harmful and dissolve them. Predation is known to make an ecosystem healthier.

This would sidestep the problem of:

> but what about all the stuff in the middle

What do you think the top 10 worst companies are? How likely do you think it is that your list matches mine or anyone else’s?

Exact match? Unlikely. But suppose that with each tax return, everybody had the option of listing 5 corporations which they believed were doing more harm than good. It would be simple statistics to determine if the signal was strong enough to warrant action. As for mine, well I'd have to do a bit of research but they'd likely come be in defense, oil, or adtech.

Perhaps we also could list 5 which we think are having a positive impact. The assets of the bad ones could be auctioned off to the good ones, the money made from that auction could go towards severance for anyone whose job was dissolved.

> Requiring benefit is a huge step from where we are.

The phrase "requiring benefit" is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting in this statement by assuming benefit is something that can easily be agreed upon, or that it's not already taken into account.

Since it will obviously be difficult to agree on this, what if we just vote? I'd propose a system where each of us gets a certain amount of tokens, and then we use our tokens to vote on which products are beneficial. Those companies that make beneficial products will receive the most tokens. They can distribute some of them to their employees and shareholders. The companies that don't provide enough benefit will naturally go under as they fail to accumulate enough tokens to attract employees. We can also set up systems to ensure that everyone receives a minimum number of tokens, and also so that certain people don't accumulate so many tokens as to give them too much control over society.

I believe this system will work well for rewarding companies which produce benefits and punishing those who don't and look forward to it being implemented.

Something along those lines is what I would propose, although once the tokens were used to decide which companies get dissolved (and maybe which ones get tax breaks) I'd zero-out all balances rather than creating a secondary economy around their circulation. By that point they'd have done their job. But I'm not really enough of a game theorist/economist/evolutionary biologist to be coming up with the details. My point is just that we should try something like this.

As I recall, Kickstarter was a very early Public Benefit Corporation. If nothing else, it probably gives a card to activist employees who think the corporation is hurting the public in some particular way.

Because Coca Cola is more than gaseous sugar water.

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