Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)

I see some parallels to Curtis Yarvin and the Boys that follow his philosophy. The funny part, with all this boys is, that they do not recognise, that there utopia e.g. new society/state, does not work without the current society that sponsors them.

Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry (infrastructure, resources, education, labour, health system) and give almost nothing back (except for a few workers and too few taxes). I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

> I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

At which point in history was it not about exactly that?

> Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry

Not that I found corporations great, but there is no indication that society was doing really well before global corporations existed.

> I think the American dream is over.

“The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

It got real, only because a - at the time seemingly viable alternative reared its head. So, ironically, the system that won the system-competition we call the cold war, only works- when under stress in systemic competition.

I think 1960 NE (Nostalgic Era) was great.

Read more Graeber & Wengrow

Definitely...as long as you were a white Christian heterosexual man.

Probably the homesteading era. Although only if you don't count Native Americans...

I feel like that makes sense actually. One core tenet of the "free market" is the need for competition, otherwise complacency and rent seeking happen and things get bad. If that apply for corporations, why not economic systems too?

I think we are mixing up timelines here the rent seeking and financializing happens in 1981 onward not starting at 1991 when the USSR dissolves

There is just not any real accountability to the next generation of stock holders its classic optimizing toward the local minimum and is why some many private equity firms annihilate companies and sell them for parts. We use to have unions than Regan eliminate tons of union power and bars the governments union's from arguing. We have structural barriers in existing laws against sector wide unions, so the remaining unions have no incentive to build competitive sectors just competitive wages without respect to economics.

I think companies have just pushed and pushed for labor laws that favor larger companies and players. That hollowing of the rule set has dropped a bomb in companies optimization functions. You cannot choose not to do stock buy backs now because the stock holders complain and leave for a someone more willing to inflate assets. If you want the clearest picture look at Intel they spent tremendously on stock buy backs because it was good for investors and let there RnD budget cratered when compared to its competitors. They basically aren't a respectable company anymore but those stock investors aren't destroyed they moved to Nvidia and Apple.

The market of markets must be free, or the idea of a free market is a myth. Which it is. Capitalism cannot simply be removed, it must be outcompeted by a superior usurper.

Even then, it wasn’t an easy life, they just had different challenges. That’s why we have the right to pursue happiness, and not happiness itself. One can always pursue it, regardless of circumstance. Some would argue that the pursuit is where the happiness is actually found; it’s not a destination.

> Curtis Yarvin and the Boys that follow his philosophy

Curtis has done a good job of getting people to forget his white nationalism, though he insists he isn't one, but he's quite comfortable with it.

> It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.

And though he later wrote articles saying "I'm not a white nationalist", they were largely sympathetic to the "cause" and then just said "but I'm not one."

But why did the USSR dissolve? A lot of it had to do with citizens’ dissatisfaction with what was available in the Soviet economy, compared to media images of what was available in the 80s-early 90s American economy. And, well, the fact that their government was, in fact, quite democratic, reflecting the wishes of the people.

But again… a lot of these images American prosperity of the 80s were caused by marketing, and corporate structures like Jack Welch’s, which were ultimately unsustainable (per the whole conversation here).

Basically: Soviet citizens saw we could have bananas year round. But they never saw the conditions of people living in banana republics, or really even of the American poor of the time.

Yeah I'd argue Jack Welch didn't create that value rather he found a way to extract from the corporate mines and give to shareholders and himself very effectively. It has caused the collapse of some but not all those corporate mines. GE is a good example that maximized shareholder value until the shareholders left and there was nothing left for the company.

I also wouldn't read to heavily into the USSR collapsing because they saw rich American's they saw that for the entire history of USSR. USSR is complex it honestly worked for people for a little bit during the war (the ones that lived but they did live) but when the pressure of WW2 dropped the optimization functions all went haywire, the same way they were haywire before the war see Ukraine famine 1933. War is a strong optimization function for economies because the cruff is drained but not a constraint you want to live under long term. I am not trying to cheerlead the USSR but I think this is just not really a good metaphor for comparing economies and needs much fine examination to really get into.

As someone who grew up in 5th percentile or higher of Soviet citizens (Moscow, 2 engineer parents) I can tell you that American poor live much better. Think 700sqft flat considered good for a family with 2 kids, not really being able to afford a car, grandma constantly reminding us to not throw away any glass jars - containers to preserve vegetables for the winter were hard to come by.

And that's Moscow. Most of the country could be summarized by a riddle - long, green, smells like sausages/groceries, what is it? An intercity train departing Moscow.

The Soviet citizens wanted American lifestyle because Soviet lifestyle sucked. The only poor who might be worse off in the US are the completely dysfunctional ones like alcoholics or whatever. At least in the USSR it was hard to sell your flat and drink away the money. But, to me that's not even a tradeoff, it's an additional benefit.

> “The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

It was fairly real up until about the 1970s: every generation had it better than the one before it. After the 1980s, Gen-X and everyone after them started having a tougher time.

>> It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

> At which point in history was it not about exactly that?

Up until (at least) the 1960s. In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:

> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”

* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...