Bonus Quotation of the Day..
by Don Boudreaux
on January 21, 2021
… is from philosopher Doug Den Uyl’s excellent September 9th, 2019, essay “A Stake in the Heart of Capitalism”:
The greedy capitalists of the old shareholder model of corporate responsibility had one thing in common with their shareholders, namely, both were largely motivated in the same way. Management was incentivized to maximize profits, and investors invested so that those managers would do so. Under the new stakeholder dispensation, presumably management is to be concerned with the public good. Greed and self-interest are replaced by concern for public well being. Of course there might still be a way to interpret the actions of management under this new dispensation as self-interested. They can now avoid having to answer solely to the group most likely to monitor their activities – their investors – in favor of a concern for their stakeholder pool in general. This might be another way of saying they don’t have to answer to anybody while pretending to care about everybody.
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