[grzm]

There can easily be more than one yardstick.

Edit: Yes, a company needs to survive. Which products or services a company provides are simple examples of choices that are not purely based on profit. Similarly, there's plenty of variety in how companies are run while still being able to survive. Maximizing profit at the expense of all else is a choice some do make, but that's not the only way to run a business.

[ArkyBeagle]

Since we cannot disentangle rents from non-rents profits, I doubt there will ever be a coherent set of ideas on the subject.

[grzm]

Would you elaborate? I think it's often the case that complicated, entangled subjects can be understood once an attempt is made to do so. First attempts may miss the mark, but eventually useful progress can be made. And such disentanglement doesn't need to be complete or perfect to be useful. Or am I completely missing the mark?

Do I understand you to mean that as there's currently no method for disentanglement that one can only use profit as a yardstick? That other values a business owner may have, such as employee satisfaction, or health, or retention, can't be measured or discussed? I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm trying to unpack what you've said.

[ArkyBeagle]

All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that - but with one caution - one must still be "competitive".

The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.

This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.

"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.

This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.

[grzm]

Thanks for taking the time to put all this down. I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're disagreeing with what I've said above or adding additional context. In particular, I think I've been clear that one must still be "competitive" is something that needs to be taken into account. (That said, I can imagine a company put together with the explicit goal of "going out of business" when it's other, non-profit goals have been reached.) Indeed, I think implicit in what I've been saying is that going into business can (and probably should) include determinations of ethical behavior.

[ArkyBeagle]

And thank you for your thoughts as well. Your last sentence caps it; what I am saying is that there is a broken tool in the toolbox - we should be able to make profit an ethical value - as an estimator of how much good we do on the world - but because accounting practices don't isolate rents ( SFAIK ) from consumer surplus, then that makes profitability a shakier ethical metric.

But yes - the ethics of a company are a serious part of the architecture. Good ethics are of self-interest even more than they are a collective good.