inasabaThe Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
How would business work? Currently a business’s purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don’t need to pay for right now, it’s external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What’s the benefit of degroth over internalizing?
Chetzemoka"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Hmm interesting. Thank you!
They do have an obligation to what their share holders want though don’t they?
Maybe part of degrowth would be fewer public companies beholden to shareholders.
Private companies are still beholden to their owners. Would the alternative be government ownership?
Co-op structures could work too.
In co-ops the employees have a controlling interest, right? So a majority of them would still need to want to shrink the company. That might be easier to convince them than investors though.
True, it would still need to be based off the cooperative ideas. There was an awesome forestry co-op in the 70-90's called the Hoedad's that had an interesting model and had each section ran as separate crews with even different pay structures and even philosophical structures. They did tree replanting and brush cutting and many other activities but each sub group bid contacts independently but we're part of the workers cooperative collectively.
If the shareholders want the corporation to blatantly violate the law, they don't do that. They don't have to do everything that shareholders want. Shareholders are perfectly free to sell their shares, if they don't like what a company is doing, or to vote out members of the board, if they don't like the way the company is being managed. The idea that corporations have no other choice is a myth perpetuated to maintain the status quo