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It sucks even more now, though. Back when my parents were kids, the economy worked for everyone. Companies paid their workers decent wages, and their executives weren't lavished with more money than King Solomon. For the most part, they made good, reliable products; my parents bought some Kenmore appliances from Sears back in the early 80s and they worked just fine for over 20 years (the microwave still works). The government wasn't afraid to regulate a company guilty of producing negative externalities. But a combination of technological advancements and a move towards "shareholder capitalism" that began in earnest in the 80s has produced the system we see today. A system where planned obsolescence has been given steroids and where the right to repair increasingly shoddy products has been undermined at every turn, where subscriptions and other forms of unnecessary monetization are making everything from the internet to video games a worse experience, where executives get paid increasingly large sums while their employees deal with stagnant wages and disappearing benefits, where the right of workers to organize has been effectively destroyed in most sectors of the economy. Every single shitty business practice is all the same bullshit, a con job designed to squeeze as much money as possible out of everyone while giving as little back as possible. We haven't reached a "Gilded Age 2.0," but we're getting there. I'm not opposed to the idea of someone running a private for-profit business in an of itself, but I am opposed to this modern shareholder-focused, growth-focused style of corporate capitalism where the world is being run into the ground just to make some rich assholes richer at the expense of everyone else. |
Preach.
Not trying to derail the conversation into a political one, but I agree that the shareholder focus has really screwed up the idea of a capitalistic economy. And what's sad is that people are more focused on blaming underprivileged people for entitlement programs or not getting a better job, when executives are making a thousand times more than the guys at the bottom who are doing all the work. They are even getting bonuses when they fail, but people have been trained to turn on each other instead of the people at the top lobbying for these corrupt policies that have shrunk the middle class while simultaneously creating more billionaires in the US than has ever existed before.
A few good reads on the subject are The Growth Delusion by David Pilling and The 7 Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy by Warren Mosler.
OT, It's a shame about boxofficemojo, because I always use that website. Now, it's almost worthless.
