[hzay]

Aswath Damodaran speaks of a life cycle for companies. In his view, companies do decline and shut down after sometime. He makes it seem like a fact of life -- if it's true, then stock markets aren't so terrible after all. The declining companies often pay good (but declining) dividends, and wind up gracefully.

[lenerdenator]

The problem isn't that they decline, it's that they decline in a way that leaves a ton of bagholders.

If you're a rank-and-file employee at the company, no amount of dividend payout on your shares (if you're lucky enough to be given any) is going to make up for the fact that the CEO has decided that he'd be able to buy a new beach house with the bonus he'd get from closing your division. Slightly enhanced earnings-per-share won't make up for the fact that you no longer have an income or benefits, and the fact that the local economy has just lost an employer. And yet, that's what will happen, because the CEO has more shares and can make that decision.

We make the assumption that only a select few can possess the ability to be motivated by profits as expressed by increases in share value, and that, to an extent, is true: only a few shareholding employees have enough equity to see real benefit. That's only because we make it that way.

If you spread out the shares over more employees and involved them more in these decisions, they would still be motivated: they would want higher profits for their own benefit. It'd just have to be expressed as some other store of value than stock shares, and this doesn't feed the ego of the executive class. Imagine Elon Musk being told he's now effectively a public servant to Tesla who has to play politics with a far larger group of employees if he wants to keep his job, and that he'd have a very limited equity advantage over anyone else at the company. He'd walk out the door and not come back.

[ihumanable]

It's also interesting to consider the things that we are making that are destined to decline and die. They aren't agentless pieces of the environment, a company with $3,000,000,000,000 does not go quiet into the night.

If you are on the path towards decline and you have a lot of money, you can then go buy a lot of power, and then you can make the ramp you are declining down point in a different direction.

So besides the bagholders, it feels like there's very few mechanisms for society to protect itself from massive companies that faced with pressure to grow or die decide to use their money and influence in ways that are net-negative to society.

[jimbokun]

A society where no corporation could ever reduce employee count would cause a lot more problems than it solves.

Of course many tech companies already give substantial equity to employees as part of their compensation. Maybe there are government policies to encourage this to be more wide spread, but I'm not sure what those policies would look like.