It may not be the exact same statement, but it's very close in spirit. This should be beside the point; we should do things that are good because we can, not just because they make us money, but I usually tend to see there being a ton of potential for the engineer's idea to help make money.
I like a bunch of the gist of what you are saying, but I feel like most capitalism is bad capitalism, that the short-sightedness's prevalence is almost always outrageous & deserves the hate it attracts.
Organizations have extremely short reward loops. People come and go & dont try to do the right thing for next year, much less the next 5 years. Markets & investors punish poor quarterly reports. Maybe there's an idealized version of capital where folks can play it smart, but it doesnt seem to be happening on this planet.
If I hire you to fix my car I’m not paying you if instead you fix the neighbors car
I didn’t say that. We put rules on corporations to protect shareholders. Nothing prevents shareholders from taking profits and giving them away.
But we don’t want the execs deciding to give away the shareholders moneys for them.
This is also where taxes come in. While others are maximizing profits we take a cut and distribute it to hopefully add some more good to the world
> i dont think a mutual benefit ought be required to do a little good
My personal cynical belief is that there is always a mutual benefit, it could be of different kind but everyone gets something in return. We value goods/actions differently and don’t place $ on every action, but every action has a cost.
> shareholder class
at the end of it. But make no mistake, every discussion I've had as been "how will this make us money, and will that impact the stock price" -- which has an implication.
Cuz retail investors don't count for much w/r/t stock ownership.
Plus Milton Friedman's "companies exist only to generate profits for shareholders" has been a mantra since I went to Uni in the 80s.
Would you invest your 401k/retirement in companies that don’t generate profits for you ?
I have never met a single person at any level of any organization or otherwise who has expressed this sentiment. This characterization is a strawman.
Usually the idea that shareholder wealth maximization is central comes with a whole bunch of other economic ideas. Like that long-term wealth is what matters, not wealth tomorrow. And that corporations aren’t the center of all life or meaning for everyone involved, just a way to generate stuff. And that in order to generate more wealth you need to constantly provide more goods for more people at lower cost.
These distorted strawman characterizations of capitalists are just outrage porn, they don’t help move the world forward at all.