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MBAs are the symptom, the root cause is elsewhere. I would lean on the ever increasing desire for company’s to grow. We need to move away from this broken concept of maximizing shareholder value above all other concerns.
There's a strong case to be made that MBAs, specifically the business, financial, and economic scholarship undergirding elite MBA programs, truly are the root cause.
Profit motives aren't stronger today than yesterday, and prior generations of business leaders and investors weren't more altruistic than today. What changed were the business and financial narratives regarding how best to successfully operate a business and make investments. Those newer narratives were more sophisticated and more grounded in empirical analysis, but just like older wisdoms they also incorporated many subjective, normative preferences and assumptions. It's those latter aspects, including a laissez-faire, libertarian, "greed is good" perspective, that seems to be largely responsible for many of the broader patterns we see today. People aren't more greedy today than yesterday, but there's less (both intentional and accidental) channeling of long-term thinking. The "greed is good" narrative says, among other things, that long-term profit maximization is best achieved by relentless short-term profit maximization.
The perspective at the center of MBA programs is also easily identifiable in popular political culture, but it originated in economic and legal scholarship and spread through conservative political circles before ultimately coloring and shaping much of modern American culture, conservative and liberal, today. MBA programs were one of the earliest and most important conduits for the spread of these new perspectives into the broader culture.