Somehow that wasn't always the case in the past, so presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future. If we have the audacity to imagine a different world, it is fixable through organizing and demanding that incentives be aligned with our values rather than with the spiraling fortunes of a handful of extremely self-centered people.
Yes, that's correct. The movement of stock ownership to mutual funds largely took place in the few decades after WW II.
> presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future
Yes, but the changes that would have to take place are quite drastic. I don't think disallowing mutual funds is an option. But the only other mechanism of control (aside from market forces--see below) would be to drastically change the regulations concerning corporate governance, and it's not even clear that that would do more than exchange one problem for another, since regulatory capture is a thing.
The only other way to change the incentives facing corporate governance structures is to change the market, either on the producer side or the consumer side. On the consumer side, consumers would have to stop buying goods and services from companies that overpay their CEOs and underpay their workers. Unfortunately that would mean consumers choosing to take a huge economic hit, since those same companies provide huge economic value to consumers. (And in some cases, such as Google and Facebook, consumers don't even have the option of not paying, since the services are free; they would have to stop using the services altogether even though they're free, which is probably even harder to make happen than getting consumers to stop paying for something.)
On the producer side, new companies that are structured differently in terms of governance (for example as worker cooperatives) would need to enter the market and out-compete the existing companies. Sooner or later that might well happen, but it could be quite a long time.
I didn't say it would be easy. What I said is that the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle.
> regulatory capture
Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage. It is class struggle. The only solution is to struggle back.
> the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle
I don't think this is a useful way to view it. I would say the potential for change is in people shifting to a more long-term viewpoint instead of always chasing short-term gain and satisfaction.
> Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage.
If you don't think of yourself as a capitalist, you are dooming yourself to always be on the losing side of interactions with those that do. Particularly if they are predators.
Regulatory capture is just one way that predators use the system to their own advantage at the expense of everybody else. But not all capitalists are predators. The immense wealth our society has was built by people who were both capitalists and cooperators: wealth building is positive sum, the aggregation of win-win interactions over time. But sustaining wealth building requires taking a longer term view in order to preserve the social institutions and social trust that are necessary for it to happen. Unfortunately, the current trend is in the opposite direction.
That is simply untrue. Sure, some capitalists have good PR, touting their non-capitalist efforts in ways that intentionally confuse them with capitalism for the purpose of increasing PR value. The increase in PR value is just a more oblique means of wealth extraction. The actual act of being capitalist, i.e., extracting excess value from labor by leveraging capital (piles of money, factories, infrastructure, etc)... that is inherently predatory in nature. Capitalists use the fact that they own stuff, and the fact that workers need food, shelter and healthcare, to grift the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of public good, PR notwithstanding. It's codified into the cornerstone concept of shareholder value. Capitalism itself is distinct from any charity or other social good that a capitalist or company might engage in, and all capitalism exploits labor. Not every act a capitalist does is predatory, but every capitalist is a predator.
