> Another thought I keep coming back to is dividends. A proper investment gives returns without having to sell your stake. Lets provide incentives for companies

> Another thought I keep coming back to is dividends. A proper investment gives returns without having to sell your stake. Lets provide incentives for companies to share profit rather than pump stock prices, then everyone can get excited about the right things. the psychology behind dividends is not on your side here. dividends are viewed by knowledgeable investors as a company admitting they have run out of good ideas to generate even more profit (aka growth). while dividends can be issued for a host of reasons, the common case is that dividends are issued when reinvestment in the company would generate diminishing returns. typically returns diminish when the company is no longer in a high growth phase, so the company gives the money back to investors to find better returns elsewhere for their risk. this is why dividends are largely issued by larger, mature companies rather than growing ones. you just won't get most companies to issue dividends because it hurts their growth potential. you have to change structural incentives to make people care about the long-term. one fundamental reason for this is that many people on wall street want to get rich quick, so there's enormous pressure for companies to be that vehicle, in exchange for which, the companies get rich quick too via their stock price (underlying fundamentals be damned). why do people care so much to get rich quick? (rhetorical question) i personally don't respect such people, but apparently plenty enough do that my opinion simply doesn't matter as they seem to get the prestige and power they seek. if we all genuinely respected ingenuity, determination, and the ability to make things (not shuffle money around), we wouldn't use income & wealth as a proxy for those things and we wouldn't have perverse incentives that make companies seek short-term pops (high-minded, i know).