[danaris]

I don't think this is fully accurate.

There's been a huge cultural shift over the past several decades, which I would broadly describe as moving from a philosophy of "companies are here to provide a good or service, and make money by doing that" to "companies are here to make as much money as possible, and most of them have to provide a good or service in order to do so."

Naturally, there were people and companies with the latter philosophy before, just as there are with the former now, but the overall attitude of our corporate world has moved more to the latter.

I think that to a large extent, this has correlated with the dismantling of regulations, the gutting of unions, the relaxation of antitrust enforcement, and the rise of the unchallengeable power of wealthy corporations. (Causality is definitely murkier, and probably goes both ways to some extent.)