It goes further than that. There's a school of thought, stemming from an 1970 article by Milton Friedman, which claims that the only responsibility of corporate management is maximizing shareholder value. Forbes has a good analysis of that article, its influence, and aftermath.[1] The Harvard Business School creates leaders who believe that statement. This is a problem. A big problem.

The Forbes article makes the argument that this approach is not only bad for society, but is responsible for the decline on return on capital since 1970. Despite the focus on the pursuit of shareholder value within each company, the overall result has been a decline in shareholder returns.

Think about that for a moment. The only point of this form of capitalism is high shareholder returns, and it's not delivering even that.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori...

That thinking seems to be much more prevalent among (for example) HN users than it actually is within the upper echelons of business.

All those Fortune 500 CEOs probably know it's wrong. Otherwise they'd be thinking twice before implementing "Corporate Social Responsibility" programs.

It's catnip to the intellectually lazy because it's completely unfalsifiable. Any action a company takes driven by anything but profit is dismissed as a PR move. Actions that aren't publicized but made it out anyway (since you wouldn't be discussing them otherwise) are dismissed as intentionally leaked.

That isn't to say that a narrow view of a company's stakeholders isn't a problem, perhaps even a pervasive one. But most threads I've come across on HN et al on the topic have elevated it to the status of a religion, where people are utterly convinced that it's not possible for a company to be anything but blindly profit-driven.

But can't it be argued that even social responsibility programs by companies are profit driven? Does it hurt or enhance Apple's image that they care about the disable, the environment or security against state actors? In the short term, likely not, but I weigh all of those things carefully when thinking about which phone I'm going to buy.

That's what I mean. It absolutely can be argued, but an unfalsifiable[1] claim is worse than useless. My complaint here is not against those who claim that seemingly-altruistic moves are sometimes profit-driven, but rather those who are convinced that _every_ action taken by a corporation is solely and only profit-driven. People who believe this (or talk like they do) are far, far more common than you'd think. As I said, as far as I can tell, it's likely due to the fact that trying to intuit the culture of a company through its actions over time is very difficult and it's far easier for lazy or small minds to decide that there are no actions beyond profit-seeking ever taken.

[1] For those who don't know precisely what I mean by this, it essentially means that there's literally no possible action the accused could take to prove otherwise.

Yes, indeed–but that's actually part of the argument against: it allows to define basically anything "profit-driven" and makes the idea meaningless.

The unfortunate part is where this supposed doctrine is used repeatedly to excuse companies' worst behaviours: "Amazon cannot install air conditioning in warehouses that have people fainting in the summer, because that would clearly cost money and Bezos would be criminally liable for leaving money on the table".

Of course it can be argued, but that doesn't make it correct.

You don't need to point to social responsibility programs to show that it's falsifiable.

Simply point to CEOs outrageous self-serving compensation and other perks, and numerous conflicts between active investors and management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_fight is a well known thing.

What are you talking about? I'm describing people who think that it's _literally impossible_ for a company as an entity to do anything but ultimately maximize shareholder value. Just because your rebuttal has the word "CEO" in it doesn't make it relevant to the conversation, and it certainly doesn't do anything to show that this phenomenon is universal (which, again, is the main and only thing we are talking about).

Friedman won the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of the consumption function, and was well regarded for monetarism. It's a little bit of a stretch that a whole "school of thought" of corporate management stems from some guest op-ed he had in the NYTimes.

By the way, that is a fake Nobel Prize as it is not associated with the Nobel Foundation. It is actually the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in MEMORY of Alfred Nobel.

It has a decidedly political slant pushing for exclusively pro free-market policies and only awarding it those studies.

The very first paragraph of the linked article notes exactly this:

"No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970."

I'd be willing to bet that the majority of business owners throughout history have had a similar thought.

Not that there's any way to test that claim bet.

What's gone is corporate fear of labor. Of unions. Of strikes. Of your company being nationalized, as in the UK in the 1950s. Of communism winning economically, something business people worried about from 1930 to 1970. At last, oppression of workers is back!

For about forty years, capitalism had ideological competition. There was a competitor, and capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living to compete. With the competition defeated, capitalism has a monopoly, and acts like a monopolist.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." - Orwell

Interesting thought that an ideology itself could suffer from the bloat/excess inherent in any monopoly. Thanks for sharing.

I imagine most business owners have a much more complex and nuanced understanding of their business, what it means to them, etc.

I mean, going off of Friedman's nonsense deriving a feeling of accomplishment from your business would be meaningless.

Friedman also introduced one of the least scientific ideas into economics.[1] Sciencism at it's best.

[1] https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/against...

Thanks, that's a much better article that focuses on the book.

The linked Economist article is a bit strange, it starts with an interesting opening discussion on the books topic, then dismisses the entire thesis of the book in a sentence and gives a quickly put together comparison of HBS to a business, and some recommendations with little analysis to support the changes.

...They should have just focused on the book and critiquing that.

Ah, yes. Morals.

  "Took a class,  big fun
  Modern Ethics 101
  First day learned why
  Ethics really don't apply"
  - Steve Taylor

> cultural nihilism that rejects the national community

It did reject that, after noticing that it's just fancy language for 'racism'.

On paper, I'm a poster child for the above-described "cultural nihilism" with respect to national identity: my grandparents are Indian but spent a good chunk of their life in France, my parents moved to the US in their 20s 40+ years ago, and I was born and raised in an impossibly diverse environment, to the point that I was shocked when I came to college and discovered (e.g.) East Asians who only hung out with other East Asians or white people who only had white friends. The upshot of my background is that my family hasn't slotted easily into a given national culture for a few generations, and my personality developed around the concept of building one's identity around other (IMHO more rewarding) things. The accelerating trend towards universalist, fluid cultural identities built around mobility and big cities is practically tailor-made for a person like me.

That being said, it's either very dishonest or extremely narrow-minded to claim that racism is the only reason someone could care about a cohesive national identity. Just because it doesn't suit my view of the world doesn't mean no one gets value out of it, and in fact I'm acutely aware of the extra work required to connect with someone without a shared cultural background (I just happen to think it's more than worth the benefits of such a philosophy).

On top of that, this belief in a cohesive national identity is entirely possible without going anywhere near racism. "Blood n' soil" nationalism doesn't have much claim to relevance in a nation of immigrants like America, so our identity as a country is ideally built around people choosing to voluntarily join a society based on shared core values instead of the historically-common form of national identity built around ethnicity. It's possible to hold this view while having absolutely no opinion about someone's race: one could consider an ethnic nationalist (e.g.) Norwegian refusing to accept our values to be just as unfit as anyone else.

You'll find that the world gets a lot more interesting if you don't desperately rush to pattern-match everything you hear into one of a few trite buckets that comprise an overly-simpleminded model of the world and its people.

Yeah, that's one of the tropes of such discussion: Nobody can disagree with that definition of "national identity", i. e. "America is altruism, tolerance, and cute puppies".

Then, when people demand some women shouldn't be wearing this or that piece of clothing, the definition of "national identity" seems to have shifted somewhat.

> Nobody can disagree with that definition of "national identity", i. e. "America is altruism, tolerance, and cute puppies".

Did you even read my comment? The whole point I was arguing against was the impulse to tar every person who feels positively about nationalism with the same brush. Saying things like "nobody can disagree" and "the definition seems to have shifted" means you clearly haven't understood a word I said.

Since you're having such trouble with these pretty basic concepts, I'll lay it out even more clearly.

1) We're talking about a group of people that has more than one person in it.

2) You made a blanket statement about this group of people presumably based entirely on reading the comment section of Daily Kos.

3) I provided a counterexample that I have happened to come across that doesn't fit your criteria: there is a subgroup within the group we're discussing that has principled support for nationalism without touching any of the negative things you're describing (particularly racism). Even though I disagree with these people and in some ways their philosophy on society is diametrically opposed to my own, I'm not simple-minded enough to think "hurr durr any group of people I disagree with hold the same set of beliefs as any other group of people I disagree with" (which in this case, means that it's possible to hold these views _without_ being racist).

4) You failed to actually read my comment, pattern-matched a couple buzzwords and decided to respond by....doing the exact same thing and lumping in every person who might think that a national culture has advantages into a much-larger and more specific set of views. Against my fading hope for your reading comprehension, I'll repeat again: the fact that some people believe in both a national identity and racism doesn't mean that all people who believe in a national identity are racist. I'm not saying this like it's some mathematical proof, I'm thinking of multiple specific people, either whose writings I've read or whom I know personally.

> Then, when people demand some women shouldn't be wearing this or that piece of clothing, the definition of "national identity" seems to have shifted somewhat.

What on _earth_ are you talking about? I suspect this topic is hopelessly beyond your comprehension. _Nothing about the point I made and the people I'm describing include the views that you're talking about_.

Cultures without a national community tend to be conquered by those with. The Arabic word for this is Asabiyyah and was coined by the historian Ibn Khaldun.

Making inference from past experiences with a low n, and no relevance to the interconnected modern world, isn't adequate to dress up racism as rational. The English word for this was coined by the physicist Richard Feynman, and it's "Bullshit".

Have you ever wondered why these irrational behaviors are so common? It's not just racism but also overconfidence, aggression, jingoism, ultranationalism, fundamentalism and any number of similar modes of thought. Clearly the fact that they are widespread instincts indicates that while it is irrational at an individual level and is the cause a lot of suffering and injustice, there is a trade-off at the societal level.

These trade-offs are also the reason why more liberal Western societies are plagued by a new generation of social ills and inefficiencies. I happen to be an very liberal person but it's easy to see that people sometimes respond poorly to the absence of value or things to believe in, no matter what these values themselves might be.

Although the person you replied to did cite a medieval concept, it's still very much relevant in the modern world since we now have to deal with anomie on a large scale. I do hope the liberal modes of thought will prevail however! But if there were no trade-offs they would have won out a long time ago.

> Have you ever wondered why these irrational behaviors are so common?

Yes, it's because we have tribal roots: we have spent 99% of our evolutionary lifetime in groups of countable quantities and competing with similar-sized groups.

> Clearly the fact that they are widespread instincts indicates [..] there is a trade-off at the societal level.

No, it merely indicates that there may have been a positive trade-off for this trait. Assuming that every trait is a net positive now or must have once been a net positive is a naturalistic fallacy.

> people sometimes respond poorly to the absence of value or things to believe in

Since there are narratives out there that do not paint artificial boundaries (and some do, but do not pursue confrontation because of it), this in no way excuses racism, jingoism, or nationalism.

How did you come to that conclusion?

Because it sounds like a strawman or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, depending on how you mean it.