It's not like Shareholder Value Theory single-handedly destroyed the world. I'm no fan of Milton Friedman, but "maximize profits for your shareholders" isn't crazy-talk. More importantly, it's easily quantifiable:

DID YOU MAKE MONEY? _X_ YES ___ NO

HOW MUCH MONEY DID YOU MAKE? _____ DOLLARS

Compare and contrast:

Ethical scorecards

Annual reports to that focus on what matters to employees of the corporation

Corporate purchasing for employees

Bringing democracy and transparency into corporations through

- Jury trials (of peers) within organizations for organizational violations

- Employee oversight of lobbyists

- Customer and employee participation on boards of directors

- Free presses within organizations (very different from a newsletter)

- Minimum values standards for vendors

- Efficient capital markets for non-profits

Go ahead and quantify "employee oversight of lobbyists."

The author would have you believe that everything was grand until Ayn Rand cranked out her pablum, Milton Friedman couched it in academic terms and the whole of Wall Street suddenly became short-term locusts. Yet he uses the example of the original Tea Party to demonstate rapacious corporations... 100 years before Ayn Rand was born. The real problem is that corporations have always been about maximizing profits (short or long-term) but since '71, we've had a massive Capitalist influx of neoliberal zeal (Milton Friedman among them) that has hacked away at the regulations designed to keep corporations in check.

I mean, you can try and make the world a better place by asking corporations to be nicer. Or you can, you know, actively restrain them from being dicks.

A corporation exists to make money and protect its owners and shareholders from liability. That's it. It is not a moral apparatus, no matter how hard you try. If you want a better society, don't ask the shark to stop biting... take away its teeth.

The Shift Index shows that the return on assets has declined over the last 50 years. But GDP is up, so where did it go? Lower consumer prices, and talent (read: creative and managers). So what The Shift Index actually argues for is exactly what the essay is arguing for in the first place: altruism in the pursuit of profits.

Ayn Rand was wrong. You can be selfish and altruistic. You may not know it, but that's what happens when you hire on someone else into a company to create your next big product. You, as the leadership in a company, have brought wealth to a new person and their family, and you have taken that from the shareholder bottom line in order to do so. Of course, talent in this case also considers higher management and leadership which some people say is overpaid. But the shift index also points out that competitiveness has more than doubled in the last 50 years, and so you would expect those who claim to be adept at navigating such an environment would become commensurately paid with their scarcity, whether or not they end up delivering.

The problem with the Shift index is that right away it assumes that return on assets is a valid measure of what has happened in the overall economy. Even in the linked article it is argued that short-termism is the cause of this. If short-term profit seeking was an overall negative to the consumer, you wouldn't see lowered cost, higher quality, and more varied and novel goods as you have been seeing for the past 50 years. Literally all of these products are a direct and traceable result to short-term profit chasing and competitive advantage seeking. So even though you don't see the results in return on assets, you do see an enormous net good for the consumer.