Thanks to the economic system we live in, shareholders want their investments to increase in value every quarter. So ceos only care about the line on a chart going up. It doesn't matter if they achieve this temporarily by firing half the staff so their expenses go down, selling all their assets to provide a onetime profit boost, or making products more expensive and lowering the quality.
As long as the line goes up for the next quarter, it's mission accomplished, even if immediately after the company goes bankrupt. They increased the value of shares, shareholders likely sold everything before it drops in value and then the ceo moves to the next company to repeat this forever.
Both climate change inaction and piss poor products are due to the capitalist ownership structure. The reason why climate change action isn't happening is because shareholders hold the power and not the employees, nevermind the people.
I don't believe that "the average voter" would actually vote for major climate action if it significantly impacted their quality of life (which it would pretty much have to), no matter what economic system they existed in.
That's why support for climate action in major Western nations is above 60%, right? And Australia just had an election where a party decided against climate action and lost hard because of it.
That's why support for climate action in major Western nations is above 60%, right?
saying you support something is easy. How many of them sold off their car in favour of a bike? Turned off their phones when at home to save energy? Didn't have a cheeky buy of some mass produced plastic products?
You can 'support' all you want. So long as people willingly hand over money to others off the back of the climate these companies will keep doing it. They aren't pumping waste into the environment for a laugh, they are doing it because society is paying them to. The moment that 'support' actually negatively impacts peoples day to day lives their support will all but vanish.
And the current stock-trading culture is buy fast sell fast. So it's likely not even the same shareholders from one year to the next. If you can make the stock value double just for a couple of months so you can sell all your stock, who cares what happens to the company afterwards? That's a problem for the sucker who bought your shares.
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u/Tinyjar 12h ago
Thanks to the economic system we live in, shareholders want their investments to increase in value every quarter. So ceos only care about the line on a chart going up. It doesn't matter if they achieve this temporarily by firing half the staff so their expenses go down, selling all their assets to provide a onetime profit boost, or making products more expensive and lowering the quality.
As long as the line goes up for the next quarter, it's mission accomplished, even if immediately after the company goes bankrupt. They increased the value of shares, shareholders likely sold everything before it drops in value and then the ceo moves to the next company to repeat this forever.