Mondragon is probably something of interest for this discussion. It's a federation or worker owned enterprises.
Every company should be owned by its employees
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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…
Restricting ownership may help but there are aren’t enough houses or apartments in the places people want to live. Building more housing is the best answer. It lowers the price because there is more supply. There simply aren’t enough homes in the Bay Area, NYC and many other major cities. If you could build many large apartments in the Bay Area you could fill it with people who’d rather live there compared to a tiny…
> Building more housing is the best answer. It lowers the price because there is more supply. There simply aren’t enough homes in the Bay Area, NYC and many other major cities.
One problem is building more luxury housing leads to more rent-seekers / investment homes / transplants, which doesn't solve the problems the area faces (e.g. lower income families can't make it work, and in addition to it sucking for them, they staff lots of critical functions so it ends up sucking for everyone since the price of everything increases and you get a whole class of supercommuting low-income folks -- ask bay area folks about their daycare teachers).
We need more _affordable_ housing, likely gated on AGI.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#723I 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…
The limit case is of course https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/06/13/tes... 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…
Worked out for me. I bought a bunch on the last time everyone claimed Tesla was dead and then voted to keep Elon. Up 28%. Everyone’s got theories. I prefer money. What use are your theories if they don’t predict the outcome.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#724Easy for you to say, but did those employees start the business with the full backing of their rich parents? No! They didn't!
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They get outcompeted because worker-owned companies aren't allowed to be leeches. You can't have your workers own negative shares.
But, many companies (especially those really competitive ones!) just... don't make money. It's easy to be a big disrupter like Uber when you make -500 million dollars a year for 15 years. Naturally that wouldn't when you aren't on capital welfare.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#726I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way. How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the st…
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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 mo…
Happiness. What hell is it even? It means nothing. Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve. I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do. Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given…
All of that is "I" and "me", not everyone. Happiness isn't meaningless, it just appears that you can't internalize someone else's internal state and understand how they might achieve happiness a different way than you.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#728Central States is in litigation with some of its retirees over a "dilution event".[1] This is like CAP table problems of additional funding rounds, where earlier owners are diluted.
The picture in the article doesn't look like a Central States product. Central States makes prefab metal buildings. So do other companies, most notably Butler Buildings. Most farms and rural businesses have some of those. They look nothing like that picture.
[1] https://ia601700.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.arwd.6...
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is arguing for ESOPs, basically stock options for employees. The examples cited are actually quite tame by tech industry standards: "During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent." By contrast, FANG employees routinely make >50% of their compensation in stock, and it can be up to 80% in good years. As for how…
There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.
Money and stocks would be fungible if all companies were public, all investors had perfect information, and no employee could make a difference in the stock price of their employer. All three of those conditions are false. You may be working for a private company that you would not otherwise be able to buy the stock of; sometimes, employment is the only way to get ownership of it. You often have better information about how your own employer is doing than you do about random public companies. And for smaller companies, you can often make a difference in the company's bottom line. This is why companies offer stock compensation in the first place, as an incentive for you to have a stake in the company's success.
If your company is a shithole or fraud, then you absolutely do not want to be receiving company stock. But then, if that's the case you may want to re-evaluate working for it at all.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.
You seem to have missed an absolutely critical element of what drives human behavior. We call it "incentive".
Yes both the money and the stock are incentives and they are of equal value. You've still failed to explain why one is better than the other.