To maintain or increase profits, it becomes necessary to exploit workers more to reduce costs and to prevent competition to increase prices.
For national security concerns alone, I’d wish we could incentivize growth by years and decades.
The knowledge loss alone is alarming.
If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air – or of the money to buy it – even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless the had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. Even as you think at present that it’s right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: “It’s Their Land,” “It’s Their Water,” “It’s Their Coal,” “It’s Their Iron,” so you would say “It’s Their Air,” “These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?”
And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on “Christian Duty” in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers.
And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of the gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you’ll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to “justice” in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.’
Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philathropists (1914) | Ch 15Now, since pollution spreads so far and so quickly in air, he may have a different point, whereby the corps freely ruin the air, and then could charge for purified, usable air. The root problem there is the pollution, not the purification---which takes effort and capital to perform at scale.
Tressell is just another person who takes real problems, the depression of the poor, and suggests that a simple fix is to just "don't let them do this," as if anything in the world is this simple.
I guess what I'm saying is, the golden shields were just a happy accident of other terrible behaviors?
It seems to me that they push for some short term profit to get bonuses and promotions and then move to do the same things elsewhere.
However, it could also be a personal selection or survivor bias in my memory (I remember stuff like that more). Nevertheless, it really feels that very few companies optimize for the long run by prioritizing user satisfaction or similar metrics.