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Re: CO2 Treaty Dead On Arrival



Todd M. Bolton (tmbolton@erols.com) wrote:
: John McCarthy wrote:
: > 
: > Bruce Koerner includes the sweeping statement
: > 
: >      Remember, economic interests (such as corporations) will not
: >      address ANY problem, no matter how severe, until it impacts
: >      the bottom line.
: > 
: > Can he offer evidence, not just renewed expressions of prejudice
: > that this isn't an enormous exaggeration.
: > --
: > John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
: > http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
: > He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

: Can you, without using Ben and Jerry, refute the claim?

Ben and Jerry's supports the claim, actually. All of their socially
conscious principles are just pure PR at this point. Their CEO
now earns many times what the average worker does, and all their
initiatives are now regarded in the light of the bottom line only.

They ceased to be an example of anything unusual except an unusual
marketing position when they went public. Their only interest is
in the stockholders' finances, just as with any publicly traded
corporation. 

If B&J still had their heads screwed on, they'd have tried to teach
other people how to link local ice cream markets with local dairy farms, 
rather than trying to take over the world and in the process becoming 
irrelevant. Public corporations are intrinsically value-neutral, but
shifting from a closely held structure to a publicly traded one
is not value neutral if the closely held company had any goals beyond
profit.

I think Koerner's comment is self-evident as it affects publcily held
corporations. Any publicly traded company that puts anything ahead of the
bottom line will lose profitability as a result, its share prices will
drop, and it will be taken over by more "rational", i.e., short-run
bottom-line interests. This is the efficiency of the marketplace in
action. I suggest McCarthy discuss this question with some of his
economist acquaintances. They will likely claim that anything that
doesn't affect the bottom line is *by definition* not a problem, and
hence that the assertion to which McCarthy is responding is, while
phrased in an emotional way, not merely uncontroversial but tautological
in substance.  

mt