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What else do you expect from publicly listed companies?

Mix that with the increasingly higher concentration of wealth, and things are just going to get worse.

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50 years ago, publicly listed companies understood that chasing short-term growth targets undermined long-term sustainability. The current failure mode is not an inherent property of being a publicly listed company, it's a consequence of incompetent leadership and bad regulatory policy.
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"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism. I get your complaint, but if you reframe it I think it isn't the real problem here.

The whole point of a market-based economy is to allocate resources to making things people actually want. How does the market figure out what people want more of? Well, profit margin. If someone is making a lot of profit selling something, that is a really good sign that people want more of that thing. Other people see the high profit margin, and move to get into that business. More of that thing is created, and people's demand is satisfied.

The high profit margin is the signal (and the incentive) to get more of that thing.

In other words "Compulsively chasing only the highest margins" can be rephrased as "investing in things that people want more of"

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>"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism

That's news to the ALDI brothers and Henry Ford. Capitalism used to be about the exact opposite. We moved from low volume - high margin, extractive feudal-like economics to consumer capitalism, high volume low margin. You create wealth by churning out commodities at low margins that the average worker could buy.

The tech industry is trying to exactly reverse this, as Varoufakis appropriately points out, by returning to techno-feudalism where you're not a consumer but a sort of platform serf. High volume commodity markets is exactly what these people try to eliminate to return to a kind of direct resource extraction.

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I don't think those previous capitalists were any different than the ones today, they just didn't have the same opportunity. It wasn't possible to build a company the size of modern ones with the technology at the time.

Look, I am not saying there aren't horrible flaws with capitalism. There are a ton, and we should, as a society, work to mitigate them.

I just don't think the solution to the problem is for us to ask capitalists to not seek the highest margin. This is not a problem that is fixed by people just being more moral.

We fix this problem through public policy.

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I think you got lost, this is not the Steam forums.
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2015 called
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