Stakeholder capitalism: Difference between revisions

Long ago, our forebears<ref>No, not enlightened, white, male, cis-gendered, colonial oppressors: ancient Babylonians.</ref> figured out how to distil pure, abstract, immaterial ''[[value]]'' from the relativising commodities or perishable [[substrate]]s in which it is usually embedded:<ref>Granted, it is imperfect: until recently much cash did have a substrate (paper send coins), and its value is still coloured by the credit consensus of its issuing bank, which can control its supply and demand, but the substrate issues are largely resolved, and consensus in the bona fides of the [[Federal Reserve]], [[ECB]] and [[Bank of England]] has proven a lot more robust then that of crypto currencies. Don’t @ me, [[bitcoin]] maximalists.</ref> [[cash|''money'']]. You can take or leave the value of a container of palm oil. It may perish, offend you, or be surplus to your present need. Its value, even at a single moment in time, is relative. Not so, cash.

There is no dog who can eat a [[Chief executive officer|chief executive]]’s homework, no looking on the bright side because employee engagement numbers are up, no shelter to be taken in the popularity of the company’s float in the  May Day parade: if the annual return disappoints, members of the executive board, ''you should expect to get shot''.

Now, before you throw up your hands and cry, “but surely, shareholders need no protection from their chief executive officers!  It is the disenfranchised underclass at the margins of society who must be protected —” consider the chart to the right, taken from data published by the Economic Policy Institute,<ref>https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/</ref> which, in mapping CEO compensation against worker compensation and the performance of the S&P500 since 1965, gives a pretty good picture of how shareholders, workers and executives are doing relative to each other. It’s hard to see, but worker compensation has  improved, by 50%, from $41,900 in 1965 to $56,200 in 2018 — an annualised rate of 2.5% — while  those rapacious shareholders gained 445% an an annualised rate of 8.5%.  

===[[Stakeholder capitalism]] means never having to say you’re sorry===

Recall that when shareholders hold the whip hand, an executive’s objective is simple. ''Make money''. All that clarity of purpose evaporates the moment a company expands its remit beyond making ''more'' money for the aligned group who have given ''it'' money.