| > Founders have the board's trust to make decisions that look brutal in the short term. Hired CEOs do not. A hired CEO cutting 20% of headcount in a single round risks getting fired by a board nervous about optics. A founder cutting 20% writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and gets called brave. So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives. We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook. Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia. This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are. That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all. That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing. This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire. |
> a company might have outside of those to shareholders.
Leadership must do this by law. Fix the laws to fix the behavior. How? I'd say we need to fix corporate governance issues (shareholders need more rights to pay leadership less). Share buy backs need to be fixed, right now a leader can take investors dividends/profit and use it to reduce the outstanding shares, making their options in the money. Companies need to be barred from buying back their own shares and should be required to distribute _all_ profit back to the investors. They can issue shares if they want more capital to "reinvest", i dont think we'll overflow int64s for share counts xD.
> pay off their debts
Too many people are buried in consumer debt (not asset/school debt). They've made themselves vulnerable by keeping up with the times / jones / hedonic treadmill.
> Those at the top are the ones making the rules,
We (the people) voted for citizens united, it has to go. I'd love to see Andrew yang's[1] idea of giving every voter $5 to $25 as a political campaign funding. It would easily drown out the corporate lobby profitability. America is very corrupt the past 15+ years with interest group lobby, politician insider trading etc.