Books
Corporations, the environment, and Atlas Shrugged
06/30/2011 12:14
Corporations are, by their nature, the enemies of sustainable environments. That’s not because corporations are from the “dark side,” or because the people in them don’t care about the environment. It’s because corporations are legally structured to meet certain goals. Specifically, to produce returns to shareholders (dividends from corporate profits) and to increase shareholder value (stock price). The realities of corporate finance and economics require corporations to focus on returning dividends or growth to equity on a regular — and for most corporations that means quarterly — basis.
The production of quarterly growth or profits to distribute to shareholders is incompatible, in unavoidable ways, with environmental stewardship, sustainability; or in many cases, ironically, even with long-term growth and profits. So unless there are other mechanisms in place to make sure the environment is protected and carefully used to the advantage of all the “stakeholders” in society, it won’t happen. You can’t blame corporations for failing to do something they were specifically designed not to do.
The typical corporation does not contain tools or mechanisms to allow it to focus on the long-term or on the social or natural environment beyond the thing it was particularly chartered to do: make a specific product for a specific market. That doesn’t mean corporations are evil, it just means that they’re limited. Society needs other organizations that are designed to address these issues.
Evil only comes into the picture, when corporations or their champions try to prevent anyone else from speaking on behalf of these other social interests the corporations were not designed to address. It gets a little sketchy, when the corporations try to use government to shut down unions, or to let them drive the agenda on health & safety or environmental issues that are clearly at odds with the short-term growth and profit goals they were designed to pursue.
But again, you can’t blame corporations for doing what they were built to do. No matter how sympathetic to workers’ needs or the environment a corporate manager may personally be, his job requires him to put growth and profits first. That’s called fiduciary duty. Managers are legally liable if they don’t choose the shareholder’s interests over all others.
So a corporation’s managers and spokespeople should be expected to object when someone proposes a union, consumer protection or environmental regulations that will reduce their quarterly growth or profits. But this isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. That’s their job, and it’s the job of society to make sure that theirs isn’t the only voice in the conversation.
It should be a social dialog, not a corporate monolog.
The Ayn Randian, Atlas Shrugged assumption that there are no problems that cannot be solved by rationally self-interested individuals negotiating with each other, denies the possibility of this social dialog.The Atlas Shrugged point of view assumes that if steel-industrialist Hank Rearden discovered that the building of a particular factory or the siting of a particular mine would, for example, lead to the extinction of a species of owl, that Hank would do the right thing. Actually, it defines “the right thing” as whatever Hank chooses to do.
If Hank happens to be a bird-lover, or values biodiversity, then he is free to (and right to) move the factory or mine to somewhere else, or find a different way to get the job done. If however, Hank doesn’t really give a crap about birds, he’s equally right to go ahead and wipe out the owls. “People” aren’t able, in the Atlas Shrugged world, to legitimately argue that Hank’s actions are detrimental to “society,” because those ideas are collectivist, and therefore off limits.
The reason this is important is, that underneath it all, a lot of the people arguing for the political right these days wish they were living in the post-strike world of Atlas Shrugged. They want to live in a world where there is no legitimate voice to speak against the voices of corporations. This is ironic, because many of these people are politicians, and they’d be the first to go if the Randian revolution ever actually took place.
The other thing that doesn’t work about the anti-collectivist Ayn Rand world-view, when you try to apply it to reality, is that concentration of wealth happens. And it happens, ironically, in a couple of very collectivist ways.
The first collective that the Atlas Shrugged world-view empowers is the family. And even Rand recognized this. James Taggart inherits the railroad empire of his grandfather, and is not worthy of it. Okay, Francisco is the “triumph of the D’Anconias,” but the contrast between James and Francisco, that Rand repeatedly calls attention to, only proves that the inheritance game is a crapshoot. Even Andrew Carnegie knew this, and recommended against leaving fortunes to your children in his “Gospel of Wealth” — although he did not take his own advice, in the end.
The second, more dangerous collective that’s enabled by Atlas Shrugged involves the way real-world wealth is often accumulated. In the story-world, of course, fortunes are always and only made by creativity, discovery, or working harder than your competitors. But when you try to apply Rand’s hyper-individualism to this world, something else happens.
Imagine a world where everyone was only allowed to act in his individual, personal interest. Ignore for the moment that corporations are groups of people (collectives) that legally “pretend” to be a single individual. Imagine that you can only act for your own benefit — that society rejects group interests, and only recognizes individuals.
What would this world look like? Going back to the Hank vs. The Owls scenario: there would be no way a group of people could argue that preventing owl extinction was worth more than a factory or mine. There would also be no way to say that workers should be paid a particular wage, or that the environment should be treated in a particular way. Why not? Because the pain is distributed, and the profits are concentrated.
This is the world that Atlas Shrugged’s anti-collectivist ideology leads to. Say a corporation (a legal individual) wants to dump its chemical waste into a river, causing each of the people living downstream to have to buy bottled water instead of drinking river water. The corporation saves the millions it would have spent cleaning up after itself, and the people are slightly inconvenienced — lets say, $25 a month each, in bottled water costs. Okay, now in a world of only individual action, who’s going to step up to battle the corporation to save themselves $300 a year?
The question for Randians is, isn’t making a lot of people’s lives a little shittier so that a few people can get extremely rich the worst form of collectivism?
Modern politicians sometimes call this “socializing the costs and privatizing the gains.” I’m not sure whether they really get it, or have a solution, though. And it happens more often than we’d like to admit. For example, studies are beginning to show that high fructose corn sweeteners are bad for people — a negative effect that is not only widely dispersed, but delayed in time and uncertain in its extent. So how do we talk about responsibility? And then, of course, there’s cigarettes.
But it’s funny, because this was also something Andrew Carnegie knew all about. He was a big benefactor of libraries and schools, but he also regularly cut his workers’ wages. Carnegie believed that cultural institutions like museums were important, and that the workers would just spend the money on something frivolous if he let them have it. So, he cut their wages, because he could, and built symphony halls with the money. Was society better off? Maybe. But let’s not pretend this was democracy — it was aristocracy. And that’s in Atlas Shrugged, too. Remember, Ayn Rand was originally Alisa Rosenbaum, from czarist St. Petersburg.
The production of quarterly growth or profits to distribute to shareholders is incompatible, in unavoidable ways, with environmental stewardship, sustainability; or in many cases, ironically, even with long-term growth and profits. So unless there are other mechanisms in place to make sure the environment is protected and carefully used to the advantage of all the “stakeholders” in society, it won’t happen. You can’t blame corporations for failing to do something they were specifically designed not to do.
The typical corporation does not contain tools or mechanisms to allow it to focus on the long-term or on the social or natural environment beyond the thing it was particularly chartered to do: make a specific product for a specific market. That doesn’t mean corporations are evil, it just means that they’re limited. Society needs other organizations that are designed to address these issues.
Evil only comes into the picture, when corporations or their champions try to prevent anyone else from speaking on behalf of these other social interests the corporations were not designed to address. It gets a little sketchy, when the corporations try to use government to shut down unions, or to let them drive the agenda on health & safety or environmental issues that are clearly at odds with the short-term growth and profit goals they were designed to pursue.
But again, you can’t blame corporations for doing what they were built to do. No matter how sympathetic to workers’ needs or the environment a corporate manager may personally be, his job requires him to put growth and profits first. That’s called fiduciary duty. Managers are legally liable if they don’t choose the shareholder’s interests over all others.
So a corporation’s managers and spokespeople should be expected to object when someone proposes a union, consumer protection or environmental regulations that will reduce their quarterly growth or profits. But this isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. That’s their job, and it’s the job of society to make sure that theirs isn’t the only voice in the conversation.
It should be a social dialog, not a corporate monolog.
If Hank happens to be a bird-lover, or values biodiversity, then he is free to (and right to) move the factory or mine to somewhere else, or find a different way to get the job done. If however, Hank doesn’t really give a crap about birds, he’s equally right to go ahead and wipe out the owls. “People” aren’t able, in the Atlas Shrugged world, to legitimately argue that Hank’s actions are detrimental to “society,” because those ideas are collectivist, and therefore off limits.
The reason this is important is, that underneath it all, a lot of the people arguing for the political right these days wish they were living in the post-strike world of Atlas Shrugged. They want to live in a world where there is no legitimate voice to speak against the voices of corporations. This is ironic, because many of these people are politicians, and they’d be the first to go if the Randian revolution ever actually took place.
The other thing that doesn’t work about the anti-collectivist Ayn Rand world-view, when you try to apply it to reality, is that concentration of wealth happens. And it happens, ironically, in a couple of very collectivist ways.
The first collective that the Atlas Shrugged world-view empowers is the family. And even Rand recognized this. James Taggart inherits the railroad empire of his grandfather, and is not worthy of it. Okay, Francisco is the “triumph of the D’Anconias,” but the contrast between James and Francisco, that Rand repeatedly calls attention to, only proves that the inheritance game is a crapshoot. Even Andrew Carnegie knew this, and recommended against leaving fortunes to your children in his “Gospel of Wealth” — although he did not take his own advice, in the end.
The second, more dangerous collective that’s enabled by Atlas Shrugged involves the way real-world wealth is often accumulated. In the story-world, of course, fortunes are always and only made by creativity, discovery, or working harder than your competitors. But when you try to apply Rand’s hyper-individualism to this world, something else happens.
Imagine a world where everyone was only allowed to act in his individual, personal interest. Ignore for the moment that corporations are groups of people (collectives) that legally “pretend” to be a single individual. Imagine that you can only act for your own benefit — that society rejects group interests, and only recognizes individuals.
What would this world look like? Going back to the Hank vs. The Owls scenario: there would be no way a group of people could argue that preventing owl extinction was worth more than a factory or mine. There would also be no way to say that workers should be paid a particular wage, or that the environment should be treated in a particular way. Why not? Because the pain is distributed, and the profits are concentrated.
This is the world that Atlas Shrugged’s anti-collectivist ideology leads to. Say a corporation (a legal individual) wants to dump its chemical waste into a river, causing each of the people living downstream to have to buy bottled water instead of drinking river water. The corporation saves the millions it would have spent cleaning up after itself, and the people are slightly inconvenienced — lets say, $25 a month each, in bottled water costs. Okay, now in a world of only individual action, who’s going to step up to battle the corporation to save themselves $300 a year?
The question for Randians is, isn’t making a lot of people’s lives a little shittier so that a few people can get extremely rich the worst form of collectivism?
Modern politicians sometimes call this “socializing the costs and privatizing the gains.” I’m not sure whether they really get it, or have a solution, though. And it happens more often than we’d like to admit. For example, studies are beginning to show that high fructose corn sweeteners are bad for people — a negative effect that is not only widely dispersed, but delayed in time and uncertain in its extent. So how do we talk about responsibility? And then, of course, there’s cigarettes.
But it’s funny, because this was also something Andrew Carnegie knew all about. He was a big benefactor of libraries and schools, but he also regularly cut his workers’ wages. Carnegie believed that cultural institutions like museums were important, and that the workers would just spend the money on something frivolous if he let them have it. So, he cut their wages, because he could, and built symphony halls with the money. Was society better off? Maybe. But let’s not pretend this was democracy — it was aristocracy. And that’s in Atlas Shrugged, too. Remember, Ayn Rand was originally Alisa Rosenbaum, from czarist St. Petersburg.
I love old books!
05/04/2011 12:26
I found this in an 1879 book called History of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts. Also, an illustration of the river valley, and a lot of interesting little biographies of regular people. I love these old books!
Book History
06/17/2009 17:58
In the Introduction to A Handbook for the Study of Book History, Ronald and Mary Zboray explain what they think the field of Book History is about:
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
