It is overly reductionist to say that a company exists solely for the benefit of the shareholders. Such a model is a rather incomplete description of reality.
It's not reductionist at all; that's exactly how it is in a purely capitalist system, and how it is in America. It's different in other countries, like European ones and Japan, where companies really do have a responsibility to employees and society at large, but in America they don't have any such responsibility, no matter how much you would like it to be otherwise.
This is clearly, obviously not the case. There are many ways to make money and the management of a company has a lot of freedom to choose how to go about it. Different companies have quite different strategies and cultures. Some treat their employees much better than others. Pretending they're all the same is sort of like saying it doesn't matter who wins in an election.
What we can say is that when new management takes over, sometimes things change quite drastically. But this isn't deterministic and so you can't conclude all that much just from knowing the theory of shareholder value.
Yes, but you can find clear trends when you look at different groups, such as American corporations vs. European ones, and if you do that, you can see that employees, on average, are treated much worse at American companies. While there are some success stories in America, such as Costco (which is pretty famous for paying and treating employees very well, considering the jobs there are generally low-skill and don't require college degrees), the American system rewards companies that don't treat employees well and they tend to do better when competing with companies that do.
Executives may often have excessive power and influence, sure. And there is much room for improving how the system affects all individuals. Is this what you are trying to imply?
You can disagree all you want, but executives actually run the corporations, and their boards of directors (stacked with other executives who are buddies of theirs) don't care what you think, and will continue to run these companies for the benefit of the executives rather than the shareholders.
Yes I do know there where precursors to worker coops in Italy prior to that.
Marxism as practiced in places like, eg, Russia fell down because they disrupted the ability of the market to send and receive accurate price signals and over time that led to catastrophically misallocated resources. Many of the people who want socialism seem to support disabling said price signals, because they are unfair, which is why socialism is so dangerous - those price signals are very important. However, as long as they face the same risk of bankruptcy as everyone else, workers co-ops with the ability for outsiders to invest are probably a superior model of ownership.
This is extremely ahistorical. The fall of the USSR was due to Gorbachev's decision to introduce "western" markets into Russia and Yeltsin's opportunism. Growth and stability weren't flagging in the Soviet Union until they attempted to privatize.
Viewing the health of a nation on the growth of their income isn't necessarily telling the story. Soviet inflation was almost unheard of save for hyperinflation shortly after the revolution, and hyper inflation after the collapse. Also as investment wasn't as much of a driving force since the economy wasn't private, so infinite growth isn't necessarily a good indicator of the state of things.
Many markets are stagnant and do not offer healthy competition. There's a fair share of markets that still offer healthy competition, but from my perspective, it seems like the end goal of market optimization almost inevitably leads to monopolization which always leads to stagnation.
True competition and an informed/economically conscious consumer market are key requirements to this signaling process. We don't have a lot of either in many markets.
In reality, humans are frequently lazy, corrupt, incompetent, etc., and so in a market where there's healthy competition, the presence of competition provides a check against these problems, giving consumers an alternative when one player screws up too much. With a monopoly, there is no alternative, and no incentive to do better, unless it's being heavily controlled by the government which has to respond to voters.
I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, a lot of Marx ideas were good. He also famously said "I'm not a marxist".
Or at least, that's how CEOs sell themselves. I think that idea makes sense, but only if the company does well. If it doesn't the execs still have the power to grant themselves massive bonuses before the shareholders can react.
It's kind of like the classic 2% fee investment manager, they'll say they are the best at what they do, when of course they almost never beat the market. Still, regardless of how they do, they make bank. I think what really needs to happen is people need to learn to stop trusting people just because they talk smooth and make an optimistic pitch, and start focusing executive salaries on being entirely results based, with only a modest base salary.
If you're competent, you likely hesitate because most cases are truly not clear cut when viewed through a lens of knowledge with a conscious.
It's easy to come off as confident when you're ignorant or know that simply appearing confident has a positive effect. The real key is to be competent and hide your hesitations/in decisions with confidence. The real problem is discerning which a person is: ignorant, manipulative, or a great leader--so confidence isn't a good measure for me. The only good measure is a historical record of good decisions or clear communication from leadership.
A CEO who acts like a true owner would know this and reallocate salaries as needed to keep employees happy and motivated.
Mismanaged incentives - employees don't matter, just shareholders.