261–270 of 1001 posts
How about every employee instead gets money every month, and then can go out an buy shares in any company they want, their own or others?
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> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
Proof of what? Proof that non profitable companies go bust, which is what your quote says? Or proof that over optimising for employee happiness results in under optimising for profit, which you haven't quoted?
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There are additional options Co-determination was born as a compromise in Germany (between the capitalist occupiers and the communist occupiers trying to find common ground for decades) that has done well, essentially its that the Employee Union has at least one board seat, by law employee representation on the board in combination with US stock ownership concepts would be very novel and very attractive I think both…
It's possible. But note that Germany has struggled to move out of declining sectors (petrol cars) and into new ones (tech) - which fits what I said about worker control making creative destruction hard. Its economic performance has been dramatically bad recently. Equally, I wouldn't want to judge Rhineland capitalism on a few bad years, or claim that the US "open the casino" approach dominates it on every dimension.
I think it’s quite disingenuous to blame Germany’s slow moving industry sector on “worker’s control”.
> After they leave the company or retire, the complete balance of their accounts will be paid out to them over a six-year period. Hmmm, so that line is a little misleading since they don't really "own" the stock in a conventional sense. They can't sell it to anybody else and they can't hold on to it indefinitely. To the extent they "own" it they are are forced to only ever "sell" it back to the same company at some m…
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Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
If every company that offers goods or services prioritizes "worker happiness", by for instance refusing to excise unproductive divisions, then the result will be a world where everything costs more and takes longer. Not just consumer goods, but any sort of public infrastructure project, R&D, etc. If you think it takes too long or costs too much to build a school or fix a road in America these days compared to a few g…
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How does that work when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? When you're not sure if you'll manage to pay the electricity bills to keep your fridge turned on, is your first thought going to be "let's invest in the market!"?
People need to stop using this stat. It's completely useless. There are literally people making top percentile incomes saying they're living paycheck to paycheck in these surveys because they interpret the survey questions wildly different than other people. A tiny, tiny percentage of Americans would literally go hungry if they didn't get their next month's paycheck the rest would have to cash out some small percenta…
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I'd encourage you to Google for some articles on how worker-owned coops stay in business. This isn't a radical new idea that's never been tried.
Obviously they exist. But they are only certain types of business. How is a company that requires hundreds of millions of dollars before it's profitable supposed to be a co-op? Step by step?
For instance, even public companies might increase the percentage of employee ownership over time.
But capital needs could still be met, as the public or private non-employee stock class would still exist.
I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…
My sense is that both (1), and the (1) && (2) combination, correlate fairly strongly with accepting a more-modest pay package. Such people seem to actually care about the organization. Or appreciate that others are doing 99.9% of the work. Or lack "the usual" pretend-to-be-emperor-while-looting-Rome sociopathy. Or something.
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If I earn 30 million a year, I have next to no risk and can retire anytime I want. Hell, I could retire after the first quarter.
Do you realize that for the first N years of Nvidia, he probably made less than minimum wage, AND had immense responsibilities on his back to try to get the company to profitability? That's the risk. He's getting a 30M paycheck today only because he built a trillion dollar company from nothing and sacrificed the job opportunities he could have had at other companies for three decades.
But that is his stock he kept from founding the company. Not today.
He should of course still be CEO of Nvidia and get the money(stock awards), because unlike others, Nvidia execution is excellent (see market cap) and has been for decades, but that is not really any risk for him personally.