> But does society suffer when businesses are so wed to capital efficiency? Does society benefit from corporate investment, period? Are earnest investments bene

> But does society suffer when businesses are so wed to capital efficiency? Does society benefit from corporate investment, period? Are earnest investments beneficial to society even if they don't work out? I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but I think there's an argument to be made that companies are a bit too comfortable with simply giving cash back to shareholders rather than using it to improve their position, I think effectively the interests of the company and the interests of the shareholders aren't aligned in this situation. When you give it to shareholders in the form of buybacks, there's no guarantee you'll ever be getting it back, and like we saw in 2020 the times you most want to have a lot of cash are the same times investors aren't really interested in buying your stock. > Basically, how does the money distributed from buybacks impact society, and could that be improved? This one is somewhat easier to answer, because the majority of stocks are owned by the wealthy (a quick google suggests the top 1% own 40% of stocks, and bottom 80% only own ~7% of stocks). How they then use that money is a different matter, which would depend on a lot of other stuff and the economy at the time.