#Economics

A fitting and compelling swansong for #ShareholderCapitalism, as well as a dismantling of #StakeholderCapitalism by #CoryDoctorow (@pluralistic .)

👉 I strongly recommend using the essay formatted, long version in сonnection with a #ScreenReader.👈

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/113158693528976262

@twrling

Economics is a system for distributed management of societal priorities. If the economics do not favor a system that coordinates essential information about an existential threat to humanity, it's worth considering whether the priority management system itself is doing its job of helping to properly prioritize what society needs.

Seeing societies be told that we must prioritize personal enrichment of the rich, rather than survival of the species "because the budget demands it", is very troubling.

Budgets are tools. Our monetary system is a tool. It is critical to regularly ask whether tools are functioning on our behalf as a society, or whether, for example, tuning is required.

Taxes are one way we tune things. When people disapprove of taxation per se, without acknowledging that varying taxation has differential effects on the way power is distributed in our society, favoring some groups over others, they may just saying that they favor the power structure status quo, or they like the way lower taxes favors their own group.

Right now, society's power structures are favoring those who are killing the planet. Perhaps some reshaping is in order. Listening to the whining of those who are leading the charge toward the climate cliff, hearing about their fears of being disempowered, may not be our best choice.

Moving to stakeholder capitalism from shareholder capitalism is another approach.

I am not here advocating any specific action, just review of cause and effect. Something needs to be done, and that something is not passive inaction and acquiesce to negative societal outcomes for the sake of ever more decadent profit flowing to the already lavishly rich.

Further enriching the rich is sometimes tenuously justified on a theory that their wealth is proof that they have done well by society and so these people specifically should be trusted to do more. But is that in fact what's in play here?

- - - - -

Further reading:

Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-policy-and-dewey-decimal-system.html

Losing the War in a Quiet Room (on shareholder vs stakeholder capitalism)
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/01/losing-war-in-quiet-room.html

#economics #taxation #capitalism #LateStageCapitalism #priorities #society #StakeholderCapitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #climate #collapse

@Snoro

Well, for one thing, if each government stubbornly insists on avoiding the application of MMT we'll be in big trouble, I think. I'm neither expert in nor a regular evangelist for MMT, but I have been gradually persuaded that its advocates are speaking sense and that monetary availability is better controllable than we're letting it be. There are thongs that must be done and done now, not later, so even if we have to print money to do them, that's what we need to do.

The REAL problem seems to me to be the fatalistic theory that markets are smarter than people and must be left to themselves, that the mythical Unseen Hand never fails. Sometimes timelines matter, and during Covid capitalism did (pardon use of technical term) crap to help. Gloves, lysol, tests, toilet paper were all in short supply because the Unseen Hand of the unfettered free market just was not interested.

Since I doubt the feasability of replacing capitalism wholesale, even as I recognize it as a key part of the problem, a change to stakeholder capitalism is essential so that corporate leaders can make decisions in the interest of entities other than The Almighty Shareholders, and be graded on such. Under stakeholder theory, entities like the general public and the environment, including a habitable climate, start to matter again.

Meanwhile, any focus on debt is a potentially very bad thing just now. Monetary availability for spending on necessary climate issues is key, to the point that they could and likely should block out all else society does for a while if the public really understood the threat. Avoiding a climate disaster needs to be humanity's key buskness just now if we don't want disaster recovery and, frankly, just plain death to be humanity's key business soon.

It is as if the people we trust to tell us what is right are comfortable with the preposterous notion that if we get debt in order but fail to prevent climate change's rapid onset, all will be well, and if we get climate under control but are left with debt, that's a disaster. That cannot be allowed to stand.

I know Mastodon readers are globally distributed, but speaking from a US-centric point of view for just a moment, since national debt here infects many conversations, I have to think the world will much more easily forgive us some debt if we stop destroying the climate than they will praise us for tightening our debt position at the expense of human civilization being laid to waste. And the choice is just that stark.

(Also, don't even get me started on "growth" as an economic metric of health. If we don't figure out a way to measure health sime other way, that alone will be the siren call leading us to foul our finite nest. We must come up with ways to measure, target and enforce sustainability and to seriously, even criminally, penalize exploitation of externalities for profit.)

#environment #capitalism #climate #NationalDebt #MMT #StakeholderTheory #StakeholderCapitalism #economy #EnvironmentalJustice #Degrowth #sustainability #debt #ClimateCollapse #ClimateCatastrophe #Extinction