> Corporations these days are simply “financial paperclip maximizers”: amoral entities that do whatever is profitable, consequences beyond the bottom line be damned.
I don't think "whatever is profitable" pins it down enough. They do what is profitable on a short time scale. They don't do what is profitable over long time scales like 30 or 50 or 100 years. If they did, they would not be able to get away with, for example, privatizing profits and socializing costs, because what enables them to do that is that the profits show up in the short term but the costs only show up in the long term.
Back when corporate governance worked, shareholders were mostly individuals and they typically held shares on a long time horizon. That created obvious incentives to judge corporations by profits on a long time horizon. But now, most shareholders are mutual funds who judge individual corporations on a short time horizon--if the corporations don't make their numbers, the mutual fund trades their stock away. That means corporations have no incentive now to look at profits on a long time horizon--even though their shareholders do.
When was this mythical time when "corporate governance worked"? Most countries are still dealing with the same problemss of long working hours, healthcare coverage, racial and gender discrimination, lack of pensions, etc.
> When was this mythical time when "corporate governance worked"?
When most shareholders were individuals instead of mutual funds and other financial institutions, and held shares on fairly long time horizons. Things gradually evolved away from that during the post-WWII boom.
Which means we should be spending resources on making our society more robust: getting more people out of poverty and making our infrastructure more resilient. That will make it easier for people to adapt as compared with those previous times when virtually everyone on the planet was poor and there was no infrastructure at all to speak of.
But climate change alarmists aren't telling us to do that; they're telling us to take all the resources we could be spending on those good things, and instead squander them on draconian efforts to curb CO2 emissions based on models that have been falsified by the data.
That’s the kind of short sighted thinking that’s going to kill most of us. I say most, because, while I expect humanity will adapt, civilization as we know it may not.
> That’s the kind of short sighted thinking that’s going to kill most of us.
No, the kind of short sighted thinking that might cause civilization to collapse is trumpeting gloom and doom based on inadequate knowledge and failed predictions. The climate models on which the alarmist hype is based have been falsified by the data. And nobody even has predictive models for economics on that time scale.
If this isn't standard-issue denialist ignorance, misdirection, and spouting of repeatedly debunked claims... then show us your reliable and qualified sources for this ground-breaking information.
I don't think "whatever is profitable" pins it down enough. They do what is profitable on a short time scale. They don't do what is profitable over long time scales like 30 or 50 or 100 years. If they did, they would not be able to get away with, for example, privatizing profits and socializing costs, because what enables them to do that is that the profits show up in the short term but the costs only show up in the long term.
Back when corporate governance worked, shareholders were mostly individuals and they typically held shares on a long time horizon. That created obvious incentives to judge corporations by profits on a long time horizon. But now, most shareholders are mutual funds who judge individual corporations on a short time horizon--if the corporations don't make their numbers, the mutual fund trades their stock away. That means corporations have no incentive now to look at profits on a long time horizon--even though their shareholders do.