271–280 of 1001 posts
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Overoptimize on worker happiness -> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust -> workers lose their jobs -> no worker happiness
> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
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Yep! ..and when workers are owners, optimizing either ways works !
Except for the part where the company gets outcompeted and goes bankrupt. And no, we cannot just outlaw competition. Having an efficient economy is important and valuable because it allows us to have a higher standard of living while putting in less work.
But I understand why companies prefer to pay you in full rather than stocks, (1) it's gonna be miniscule compared to their actual cash flow and (2) they would prefer to pay you whatever your contract says and keep whatever interest for themselves, even if that's not much.
So they are optimizing for their own interest in both ways. I'm not knowledgeable in this area but as a normie that would be my guess.
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Wealth disparity is a function of overall worker comp, but it doesn't matter whether you force companies to pay part of that comp in shares instead of cash.
what the proposal for employee ownership _actually_ want to achieve is for the existing owners to have part of their ownership reliquished (without much, if any, compensation), and given to the workers. AKA, the workers do not take on the prior capital risk that the owners have, but reap the rewards of success. Obviously, a failed company means no such shares given to the workers (by definition). Therefore, under thi…
But it doesn't make much sense: just because I work at Google (which is worth a lot per employee) I don't deserve more re-distribution than someone manning the cashier at eg WalMart.
If you want to re-distribute, I would suggest to tax the owners and hand money to the people, regardless of where they work.
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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?
It would be nice to have a legal framework for companies to increase employee ownership, but be able to do it incrementally with no requirement to go straight to 100%. Or ever. 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.
Why would an investor invest in a company that, if it fails, they lose their money, and if it succeeds, their ownership is taken away?
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Now please use the barista argument on what house wives should be paid.
>> ...what house wives should be paid. House wives are often very well compensated. They have a home they don't pay for. They often have a bank account they can use to cover expenses (effectively direct deposite). The entire reason alimony exists is an acknowledgement that she has effectively been getting that benefit from the marriage and is not prepared to abruptly lose it in a divorce even after splitting the asse…
The circus lion is bred and trained from birth not ask too many questions.
But once you give the circus lion access to the internet, sooner or later the lion is going to ask why am I jumping through hoops?
It just take one of them to find a better answer and a better purpose in life to walk off the circus, for all the others to see what options they have to totally disrupt the foundations of the circus.
The circus managers and the circus have elements of domination and exploitation that have been swept under the carpet. Its good to recognize them. Otherwise surprises and shocks are on the road ahead.
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> To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations. > Imagine that shares resemble electoral votes, which can be neither bought nor sold. Interesting idea. Perhaps the take-away is that we should allow trading in electoral votes.
I thought the main reason we didn't allow for vote buying directly (advertising is doing the same thing but less reloably) was because it encouraged "corporate raiders" too much, one for whom a sufficient amount of capital would be encouraged to leave a mess by stripping out the copper wiring and selling it for a profit. Combined with the other issues of non-secret ballots like (political) bosses extorting votes.
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Well, there are worker-owned coops, and they haven't gone bust, so how does that work? It's almost as if the workers don't actually want to lose their jobs!
Survivorship bias. You have to compare against all that have in fact gone bust over the same timeframe.
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Your savings don't need to be tied to the stock market, it's actually not the case for most people outside of the US afaik. Your retirement pension even more so. How we choose to redistribute the extra wealth generated by others is mostly political.
Isn't the case for most people outside the US government funded pensions essentially just "the Stock Market but with extra steps"? If the market crashes pensioners are going to have a bad time.