>My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence.
Evolution just means change, and it includes genetic drift. In common parlance, 'evolution' generally implies improvement, but that's not the technical definition.
I’m not sure if it encourages saving but I can’t think of another way to tackle the debt that is more fair to people starting out and that incentivizes people to participate in the economy.
It’s not a fair situation to anyone — honestly it is a sad scenario. To be clear a special assessment does not imply that a higher wealth person pays a higher percentage of their wealth. I am not advocating for that.
It should be pointed out that people who currently work hard aren’t rewarded the same way people were when a lower tax environment existed. Do you think that is fair , if the taxes were raised significantly to cover the debt ? Specifically debt that the government accumulated before you even entered the workforce.
They have been conditioned to become greedy. That’s how the system works.
You need to continually show growth. Actual profits don’t matter, it has to be expressed as growth.
The first one to blink loses as money flows out of the stock. So right now everyone is squeezing their business to avoid showing flagging growth. Jacking up prices.
Because investors only need growth, it doesn’t need to be sustainable - if there’s a general market correction that’s fine but you don’t want to be the one starting it.
Look at google. Ads is clearly on its last legs as a growth model but but aggressively pushing all levers like a cable company adding more and more ad breaks, they create the impression that things are still growing while gesturing at AI in hopes investors see the future growth there. No metric here measures the advance to the tipping point where customers abandon you to an alternative and they are not used to there being alternatives.
The current earnings season doesn’t show business health, they show greed dynamics.
> did companies only just become greedy in the last two years?
No, but their greed was kept somewhat in check by consumers who'd rightly feel ripped off if they saw a company suddenly jacked up their prices. Before the pandemic companies generally didn't collude to all raise their prices at the exact same time.
When the pandemic first hit, companies lost a lot of money which they wanted to claw back somehow. There were some legit supply chain issues, but companies who were not affected by them said "We know our prices are sky high, but supply chain issues! We're all in this together!" and consumers bought the lie. Long after the supply chain issues improved companies still used them as an excuse. I don't blame consumers here. Things were going on that were totally unprecedented and giving companies some slack seemed perfectly reasonable given that surely we were all suffering.
Then as inflation started to soar it was all the news talked about and companies again said "We know you're going into debt to buy groceries, but it's not our fault! It's this damn inflation! We're all in this together!" and fewer consumers were believing their bullshit since by then the news was already talking about how those same companies were pulling in record profits and making money hand over fist, but since every company was doing it, consumers had little choice but to pay up or go without (which isn't always an option).
Companies have also tricked a lot of people with the narrative that the pathetic amount of disaster relief people got during the pandemic is to blame for inflation. I'm surprised how many people I see who are convinced that the $1000 checks people got to help pay off the record amounts of debt families went into to keep rent paid and food on the table is the real problem. This helped to deflect attention away from the fact that companies have been price gouging.
Lately they've been trying to use that same trick for everything. Some companies had to increase egg prices because of bird flu. The news reports it's the worst outbreak in almost a decade! Consumers are primed to expect egg prices to rise. The largest egg supplier in the country wasn't impacted by bird flu in any way, but they still raised their prices because they had an excuse and made over 700% more in profits. Cal-Maine Foods made a killing by ripping off the public who were already struggling and being taken advantage of. They got away with it entirely.
So companies were always greedy, but they didn't always have convenient excuses to point at to deflect the public's anger. Now they know they can lie to the public and collude to raise prices openly without fear of any repercussions.
The scapegoating scheme actually started a little bit before the pandemic with rising gas prices (notice how many companies increased their prices and told the public it was all because of gas prices but didn't lower their prices after the price of gas dropped?). They made money on that, and the pandemic was just the next major excuse. I suspect it's going to continue with companies looking for any and every excuse to jack up prices at insane rates.
>If you take the entire sum of your own unique talents, and find a way to combine them properly, you can become extraordinary simply by finding a new way of looking at the world, even if the individual talents you have are not outstanding compared to others.
maybe i'm too pessimistic in the opposite direction but this kind of argument always sounds like appealing nonsense to me. appealing because we'd like it to be true, and because the number of possible combinations is great enough that it's not immediately obvious that it isn't true. but in reality, skills don't generally exist in isolation, and as long as we're still attaching some kind of objective qualitative value to being 'extraordinary' beyond just being unique, most people who are mediocre at two things are not going to significantly exceed being mediocre at their combination, whereas people who are extraordinary at one thing are (in my experience) quite often at least near-extraordinary at a few others.
>Removing any other expense will be detrimental to the business, that is, make it work less well. Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends.
I'd say two things.
1. A listed business wouldn't exist in the first place (or in its present form) if owners hadn't been enticed to put up capital in the hope of getting dividends.
2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to produce goods or services - producing goods or services is just a means through which to pay the owners.
Further, you are just plain wrong about both of your points. At least as general statements.
1. Of course there are some businesses that are created to be able to pay the owners of the capital dividends (or more common, to be able to sell the business later to someone who hopes to be able to collect dividends). But a lot of businesses are created to for people to just being able to do their job. Say a gardener who wants to work with tending gardens. Their main purpose of the business is not to collect dividends, and they may never do.
2. That a business sole purpose only is to pay the owners is a quite recent (popularised in the eighties) neoliberal idea and far from any universal truth. The purposes of any single business can be whatever the business owner wants, which range from the obvious, become rich, to serving the community with some particular goods or service, providing employment and security to the local workforce or creating opportunity for people work with some craft they love.
The stakeholders in a business are far from only the people that invested capital in it. They also include the local community, the employees and the family, and of course the customers.
Most of the people criticising my points are glossing over the key word of my post, which is listed. Not every business is listed, and those can be run for all sorts of reasons, but a listed business is a stock first and a business second. The stock is meant to enhance the owners' wealth (whether by going up, paying dividends, or both), and the business is just the means to that end. At least in theory, when that happens in a well regulated society, it turns out that the best way to make the owners richer is to give people what they want, and to allocate capital in the most efficient and productive way. Obviously reality may differ.
The ultimate goal and purpose of any economic system is to serve whole society - those people own anything because we as a society recognize that we are not able at present moment to build better system without their rent seeking behaviour. But this does not mean that they have some god given right to unlimited dividends from work of others. It all seems backwards (as in tail wagging the dog).
And don't get me wrong - I know that their behaviour is just part of human nature, that our culture tries somehow to tame and this behaviour is no different from monarchs and aristocrats of old days, but it does not mean that this is the ultimate system and there is no metaphorical guillotine waiting for them all somewhere in the future.
> The ultimate goal and purpose of any economic system is to serve whole society [...]
Sure. But that's not in contradiction to individual parts of the system having individual (and different) purposes.
Btw, not all companies have to make a profit. That's just a pretty common goal. (And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, you have to at least break even.)
> But this does not mean that they have some god given right to unlimited dividends from work of others.
Duh, obviously you only get dividends from businesses you own.
>> Sure. But that's not in contradiction to individual parts of the system having individual (and different) purposes.
But those purposes are only allowed because they serve greater purpose. On their own they are meaningless.
>>Btw, not all companies have to make a profit. That's just a pretty common goal. (And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, you have to at least break even.)
Maybe if You mean non profits like charitable fundations that holds water, but those are mostly not real businesses.
I do not think is feasible to break event for normal companies. Its like with birthrate - if You naive You could believe that with birthrate equal to 2 (one children for each parent) to preserve status quo. But in real life minimal rate is around 2.1 to prevent population collapse. The same is with profits - You need some to account for future risks.
>> Duh, obviously you only get dividends from businesses you own.
It's only obvious if You ignore platform effects (amazon anyone?) and monopolies, but that's besides the point. The point is that owners collectively as a class are able to extract too much from the system. And by owners I do not mean the hatted guy from monopoly, or rather not only him, but also german pensioner with ever increasing life expectancy crashing his hundred thousand euro camper around Europe. Even here in Poland I personally know people that are retired for decades and their work life was mostly sitting around doing nothing (my own grandma was retired for almost 50 year and before that was a housewife and got pension from my grandpa work). Meanwhile most of younger generation will probably never be able to afford to buy own house (unless someone old dies and leaves them inheritance).
> But those purposes are only allowed because they serve greater purpose. On their own they are meaningless.
This gets it backwards. In most places, we haven't arranged society as "everything is banned except for this list of allowed activities," more as "everything is allowed except for this list of banned activities."
We're not necessarily good at divining utility of actions when deciding what should be banned, either.
That any individual activity serves some greater good is a happy accident, there's no natural law that individuals will take actions that are net positive when you zoom out.
I was trying to build value framework, not legal one - it does not matters what is allowed or banned if we cannot assess its value in context of sth (I used society in this case).
The free for all strategy (libertarianizm?) may be a great diacovery strategy but it does very little for building and preservin things that works (that were discovered by it). I sincerlly believe that real freedom ends with strongest psyhopaths stomping down on week that are on their way to fullfill their desires.
So even if its all happy accident on the lowest level there is a meta game of rules far above it that prevents our world from collapsing (at least for now)
> 2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to produce goods or services - producing goods or services is just a means through which to pay the owners.
This is true only in the simplest of world views. Let's take this idea to the real world. Let's say all food producer would say today to stop and instead start producing toilet wipes(or insert anything here) or whatever because the can make more money that way. Now suddenly we won't have any food producers tomorrow and billions will starve. Clearly food productions companies only purpose wasn't to make money for owners, it was also shockingly to keep people from starving.
over time yes. But that assumes not every producer leaves the market in a short time frame. The bounce back effect would be devastating. In fact food production is already a pretty non-profitable endeavor and yet the companies don't stop doing it.
reply