Capitalism doesn’t function in a way that has a “grand plan” that takes the whole picture into account, it’s not incentivised to care about collective sustainability.
The best (profit maximising) way for a single company to operate is to pay as little as possible to employees, and to charge as much as possible to customers.
With all companies collectively doing this, charging more and paying less, then eventually nobody will have anything left and the market will as a whole collapse, but even if organisations can predict this and see it is coming, which they surely can, they are individually disincentivised to change, and will not change.
it’s not incentivised to care about collective sustainability.
Not only collective. Most companies don’t even care about their own sustainability.
CEOs working there for some years try to inflate short term ‘shareholder value’ to maximize their bonuses.
The shareholders no longer see themselves as owners who collect dividends but as investors who can just sell their stocks if the price increases.
What happens to the company 5 or 10 years down the road doesn’t matter.
People want more than what they have and will do anything to get it including burning down the house around them. The attitude is everywhere in modern society and its a serious problem.
It’s so unfortunate too, we could provide that needed incentivization for change through strong consumer-centric regulation, and the corpos would still be making money hand over fist. But, they’ve captured Congress via legalized bribe money, so there’s just nobody home when it comes time to regulate. Washington is willfully asleep at the wheel, dreaming of lining their pockets with “campaign finance donations.”
Capitalism doesn’t function in a way that has a “grand plan” that takes the whole picture into account, it’s not incentivised to care about collective sustainability.
The best (profit maximising) way for a single company to operate is to pay as little as possible to employees, and to charge as much as possible to customers.
With all companies collectively doing this, charging more and paying less, then eventually nobody will have anything left and the market will as a whole collapse, but even if organisations can predict this and see it is coming, which they surely can, they are individually disincentivised to change, and will not change.
Not only collective. Most companies don’t even care about their own sustainability.
CEOs working there for some years try to inflate short term ‘shareholder value’ to maximize their bonuses.
The shareholders no longer see themselves as owners who collect dividends but as investors who can just sell their stocks if the price increases.
What happens to the company 5 or 10 years down the road doesn’t matter.
The problem is greed, period.
People want more than what they have and will do anything to get it including burning down the house around them. The attitude is everywhere in modern society and its a serious problem.
It’s so unfortunate too, we could provide that needed incentivization for change through strong consumer-centric regulation, and the corpos would still be making money hand over fist. But, they’ve captured Congress via legalized bribe money, so there’s just nobody home when it comes time to regulate. Washington is willfully asleep at the wheel, dreaming of lining their pockets with “campaign finance donations.”