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If you watch Noam Chomsky's 'Requiem for the American Dream' on Netflix it talks about how the heads of all these companies used to be engineers but at some poi

If you watch Noam Chomsky's 'Requiem for the American Dream' on Netflix it talks about how the heads of all these companies used to be engineers but at some point all the finance/MBA type of people started dominating these positions. This also happened in Washington and now essentially the whole world is owned/run by Finance/MBA types who focus on short term earnings instead of value creation.

dv_dt 10y ago
Focus on is maybe slightly missing the point, they may not even have the background to appreciate or imagine the possibility of value creation that is not in their area of expertise. So certain possibilities are essentially invisible to those companies. It's made worse because it's the large successful corporations that actually have the resources to fix problems that few other players can even imagine (even with venture funding....). So those companies (and the market, and society) may miss out on fundamental exploration and expansion of real-world productivity. Perhaps, this is a contributor in the curious drop in economic productivity despite, in theory, so much availability of new technology.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  At points during the last decade, 40 pct of profits were made by the Finance sector. And companies like GE can make a billion dollars by lobbying for tax loopholes rather than creating new products. So this seems like the type of stuff they focus on.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    GE gets too sweet of a tax deal, but out of many corporations to choose as an example, I don't think my comment applies as strongly to GE. Though they do work with financial matters, they've been backing away from finance as a central profit center, and refreshing their technology core (as exemplified by their divestment of a banking asset). Recently, GE is focused make strong investments in R&D and actually have been on a bit of a binge buying up many startups with advanced manufacturing capabilities. So they seem to have a strong technical vision that they're building towards. Disclaimer: am an individual GE stock holder so that may color my view here.

dv_dt 10y ago

Focus on is maybe slightly missing the point, they may not even have the background to appreciate or imagine the possibility of value creation that is not in their area of expertise. So certain possibilities are essentially invisible to those companies. It's made worse because it's the large successful corporations that actually have the resources to fix problems that few other players can even imagine (even with venture funding....). So those companies (and the market, and society) may miss out on fundamental exploration and expansion of real-world productivity. Perhaps, this is a contributor in the curious drop in economic productivity despite, in theory, so much availability of new technology.

oculusthrift 10y ago
At points during the last decade, 40 pct of profits were made by the Finance sector. And companies like GE can make a billion dollars by lobbying for tax loopholes rather than creating new products. So this seems like the type of stuff they focus on.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  GE gets too sweet of a tax deal, but out of many corporations to choose as an example, I don't think my comment applies as strongly to GE. Though they do work with financial matters, they've been backing away from finance as a central profit center, and refreshing their technology core (as exemplified by their divestment of a banking asset). Recently, GE is focused make strong investments in R&D and actually have been on a bit of a binge buying up many startups with advanced manufacturing capabilities. So they seem to have a strong technical vision that they're building towards. Disclaimer: am an individual GE stock holder so that may color my view here.