The quitting economy

>The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company.

They don't actually, see:

Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights.

http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [pdf]

>The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders.

But this is relatively easy! Instead of top level management being rewarded for stock price only, they should also be rewarded for other metrics, like customer satisfaction or how much they lowered the spread between median and mean wages. Hell, we could even allow it to be determined only by share price, but only the share price on a long time horizon, no sales within five years.

"[...] thinking of themselves as the CEO of Me, Inc; and to survive in the neoliberal world of work, the CEO of Me, Inc must be a quitter."

I fail to see how that's a bad thing. I've never quite understood this notion of tying your fate, your welfare and your livelihood to a single company.

By not thinking of yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. you ultimately become a commodity for employers to do with as they please. At the very least there will be a power differential where the employer will always gain the upper hand in negotiations.

Seeing and marketing yourself as a service provider in a market economy instead will allow you to focus on creating value in lieu of trading time for money. This can be beneficial to both parties. This whole idea of using 'time spent' as a surrogate measure for 'value created' is a large contributing factor to waste in modern economies.

This is a good point; but perhaps we need to think a little more "meta" about the situation. In our era of late stage capitalism Finance dictates production - this is an inherently cannibalistic model of economics and it's not surprise that the U.S. labor market continues to degrade into a more "gig" (Considering a "tour of duty" a gig for arguments sake) economy that hurts the laborers the most.

We should question if this is the system we want to continue to perpetuate, or on the flip side do we want more regulations and restructuring of our market economy? The question is not "More or less market?" but rather "What kind of market?"

As an [outside] investor in the company, I'm more than happy to vote for compensation packages that are driven by stock price (management wins iff shareholders win). I'm unlikely to vote for a compensation system where management can win big without shareholders gaining.

It's not accidental that the tie between share price and executive comp came into being.

I really think trying to reason about labour markets using pure theory in a Hayek-Friedman-esque way is a dead end.

It's the 2nd time in two days I made the recommendation, but throwing Ronald Coase into the Neoliberal canon would help a lot. He was a "chicago school" academic from the same intellectual family, so it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock.

He wan't like "progressives" in the "evidence based" sense but he also objected to first principles theory like Friedman. Instead, he tried to find persistent phenomenon and theorized about why they exist.There was always a link to the real world.

Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever.

IRL, labour markets are obviously very different than most other markets. It's inflexible. People stay in jobs a long time and most employers actively try to lower their average turnover. Why?

If flexibility is so wonderfully efficient, why do almost all companies have such a big inflexible workforce? Why is the market for labour so different in practice than the market for oral hygiene products and services.

Why isn't Wall street staffed by day labourers or SV products built by quarterly contractors? You have to look past pure theory to answer these questions. I think you probably have to look beyond economics, or at least to its fringes (like behavioral economics).