The following extensive comments were submitted by William Lazonick, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network and UMass professor of economics emeritus, in response to my review of Predatory Value Extraction. This is dialogue a reviewer can only dream of, especially after already recieving a response from co-auther Jang-Sup Shin. More such exchanges with Shin, Lazonick, and others interested in […]
Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored (Kindle/Hardcover), by William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, chronicles how agency theory and ‘maximizing shareholder value’ (MSV) led to looting of publicly traded companies. As many of us sit home waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic, […]
The principal-agent conflict is endemic in employer-employee and supervisor-supervisee relationships. KK Fung’s cartoon talks about ownership and being one’s boss… alignment of work and rewards. (more…)
I stumbled upon an interesting article in the Vol. 52, No. S3, Supplement to the April 2011 edition of Current Anthropology, which gets to the heart of the schizophrenic way we have organized capitalism. While many of us work to make the world a better place, our investments externalize costs and jeopardize everything we hold […]