291–300 of 1001 posts
That being said working for a company who actively fights against me makes me just not want to work.
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I've read studies about workers coops and some of them somewhat contradict what you say in your last paragraph, specifically (b). Worker coops often cut down on their individual profits in hard times to keep the boat afloat. I think ultimately a company creates and maintains a culture, regardless of the legal structure. Maintaining a good culture requires effort and especially a sensible, trusting image of humanity.…
> Worker coops often cut down on their individual profits in hard times to keep the boat afloat. Sure, I believe that. Do they do it enough though? Co-operatives were big in 19th century Britain; now they make up a small part of the market for most things. In particular the Co-op supermarket, though it's cute, is now small (6% market share). > A single worker doesn't move the statistical needle in a very large corpor…
The history of the mutual/building societies is interesting - customer owned financial institutions. The stock market offered them a huge amount of money to sell up in the 90s, which almost all of the customers took (after all, free money). Then 2008 hit and a lot of them had to be bailed out by taxpayer loans.
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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…
How does this work in practice, though. It's easy to say what you're saying, or go slightly further and say "let's stop optimising for work and start optimising for everything to be free". What's the actual plan?
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> You or I can not buy stock in them. But that means employees cannot sell their stock, either. So if one of those millionaire employees retires and the company goes bankrupt one year later, the million is worthless all of a sudden.
I think the idea is that employees make most money from the profits paid to them as owners, instead of an increase in the stock price and then selling.
Employees that can sell shares at any time have the same financial interests as with any other corporation. As much reinvestment as grows value faster than the overall market is how much is best to reinvest.
Distribute the rest to owners to use/invest elsewhere.
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…
It's difficult to understand pay of that size on a rational level. That represents individual shareholders voting for a significant dilution just to retain an extremely controversial celebrity CEO at a time when sales are falling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/02/t...
I see this kind of thing more as "how much the CEO is allowing himself to steal from the till because there's nobody above him" most of the time. Except in this case the shareholders really did make an expensive choice.
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> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
How is it a wild statement? The whole point of a company is to make money. It's like asking why workers care about their salaries.
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It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders. If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.
If it's so easy, why aren't you doing it? Presumably it requires some amount of investment to break into, but with such a high upside it's still massively +EV.
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is it so insane, in a world of disparity and outsized influence of CEOs and billionaires, where people cannot afford houses? maybe the insane thing was how for hundreds of years we let the rich dictate the rules as if they knew better for having taken advantage of others.
I see. And you keep looking at billionaires instead of regulations or the things that make it possible, like housing regulations (talking Europe now, Idk America well enough). If you really set the market more free, you will automatically have more reasonably wealthy people bc of competition. When thede few billionaires exist due to governments favors we should think what is wrong with some people selling favors to o…
Also, you're under the naive assumption that lacking regulations, companies will want to compete. Why wouldn't they just form oligopolies/monopolies? Either due to natural restrictions (e.g. competing in infrastructure is way too expensive, usually), or the richest company/private equity buying up all the competitors to have a free hand at abusing the market.
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Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. For that matter, the Soviet Union wasn't socialist either - the workers owned nothing, the state owned everything. All the land, all the factories, all the manufactured goods.
Yep, that's what it leads to. But it all began with "good" intentions. They destroyed well-developed empire, took the land from the rich and see where it all now. Trust me, you don't want "to take money from the rich and spread them across poor" in USA, it sucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization . Pleas, keep being a place where anyone can build a unucorn company and become rich af
The Russian empire wasn't well developed by any stretch of the imagination.
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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…
Overoptimize on worker happiness -> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust -> workers lose their jobs -> no worker happiness
One could similarly say that the company goes kaput if you over-optimize for profit extraction.
The goal should be to some-how optimize for the sweet spot where the well-being of the company, the employees, investors, the economy and the environment are sufficiently in balance.
I think the customer has a good bit of influence by voting with their wallet but we don't see it in action very often. One could underoptimize for that too!