> Why can't bad decisions be called out for what they are and not be excused as rational economic behavior?
My point is that we only know it was a bad decision after the fact.
The economy is incredibly complex and anyone who tells you they can consistently predict what comes next is lying to you or lying to themselves. Even experts who dedicate their lives to studying economics get things wrong regularly. Calling for a CEOs head because they failed to predict something that pretty much everyone of their competitors also got wrong seems stupid.
To be fair, I think the culpability of CEOs has to be balanced with the corporate boards that appoint them and give them direction, and the major activist shareholders who were the ones who gave them marching orders to the tune of unrealistic growth targets into a volatile skewed economic situation in the first place.
But the point is when everyone gets something wrong, there should be time for at least reflection and steps to remediate such a mistake from happening again in the future. Just saying the "economy is complex" is no excuse. If anything, it is defeatism.
> there should be time for at least reflection and steps to remediate such a mistake from happening again in the future
I agree with you there, but when almost the entire industry got something wrong, I don't firing your CEO does anything to prevent that mistake from happening again. If you ask yourself, would it be reasonable to believe another person would have done better in this situation, I don't think the answer can be "yes" when pretty much everyone got it wrong.
Maybe the shareholders should stop and reflect upon whether their expectations of exponential growth, even in a booming market, especially in a booming market propped up by abnormal conditions, are reasonable. Because sure they lose money but they're not losing their jobs.
My point is that we only know it was a bad decision after the fact.
The economy is incredibly complex and anyone who tells you they can consistently predict what comes next is lying to you or lying to themselves. Even experts who dedicate their lives to studying economics get things wrong regularly. Calling for a CEOs head because they failed to predict something that pretty much everyone of their competitors also got wrong seems stupid.