> The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else

I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money.

I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty seat at a taverna in her village on the weekends. They barely had any money, and few around her were employed, but they had certain priorities.

Meanwhile in the US, I had a teacher condescendingly tell me that the Greeks were lazy (ignorant of the history that led to 2008). It can be hard to see through certain cultural biases. Particularly when the primary goals are so different.

To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market.

But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.

You are making normative arguments, but the question is wholly empirical -- the metrics being applied here are the ones that actually measure the success and viability of firms, not metrics selected to fit the observer's emotional attachments.

Firms that are optimized for turning market demand into revenue streams will naturally outcompete firms that are optimized for other goals, regardless of what ideals or preferences anyone bears. This isn't something that anyone can decide upon, so a call to action based on one's own "ought" preferences isn't really meaningful.

Well maybe "taking over the market" is also a monopolistic and anti-competitive practice and if we had say, working regulation that forbade the existence of these behemoth companies then the landscape of value would look a little different.

You are responsible for optimizing your own happiness. A company can't and shouldn't do that for you. Unhappy with your job? Find a different one. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and dictate to you how you need to live to achieve that and neither should you presume to do that for me.

Some people are happy focusing on their family. Some people are happy working hard in their career. Some people just want a job to pay the bills and plenty of time to play video games. These are all fine and valid choices and no company is going to optimize for all of them.

Better still, optimize for social value provided. If taxes and regulation are right, companies that provide social value will make profits and their owners will get rich. The proposed changes would make that less likely to happen. If nothing else, (a) individual companies all optimizing their own workers' welfare does not add up to optimizing the welfare of all workers and (b) non-workers are left out of the equation.

How does this work in practice, though. It's easy to say what you're saying, or go slightly further and say "let's stop optimising for work and start optimising for everything to be free".

What's the actual plan?

> we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better.

Sure, you're free to optimize for anything you like. As am I and everyone else. I don't think there are any legal hurdles to set up a company that is fully owned by its workers.

> we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better

In the US, you are free to set up a company any way you like.

Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers.

Maybe, you want to rethink that.

"The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good."

It's possible companies with lower profits don't survive when they can be outcompeted by the higher earning companies. This sort of competition has killed plenty of companies.

The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that. A competitor would wipe out that profit if there existed a cheaper option that delivered the same value to customers.

The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the world) and asking to be disrupted. This is good.

In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds (either via their personal retirement or public pensions). In fact, the largest shareholder in almost all public companies is some index fund.

So workers do own the companies, in proportion to how much value they deliver to the world due to market cap weighting.

The system we have now has evolved out of thousands of years of humans battle-testing various other systems. The current form has taken pretty much the entire world out of devastating poverty at breakneck speed. Seems like we shouldn’t redesign it based on the whims of armchair internet commenters.

If every company that offers goods or services prioritizes "worker happiness", by for instance refusing to excise unproductive divisions, then the result will be a world where everything costs more and takes longer. Not just consumer goods, but any sort of public infrastructure project, R&D, etc. If you think it takes too long or costs too much to build a school or fix a road in America these days compared to a few generations ago, it would only get worse. Every single sector of the economy would start dragging its feet with no regard for efficiently getting shit done.

If only some companies are coops, then those have to compete with companies that aren't and consequently they have to work efficiently or fail. The idea behind making them all be coops seems to be removing this pressure to perform. Bad idea.

Would those companies be able to compete in a global market?

How do you make decisions where firing 10% of the workforce is good for 90% of the company’s happiness?

Apple has 160k employees - biggest holder of Apple stock is Vanguard that has 50M customers who are de facto owners. Let’s skip other investment companies to make it easy and assume every Vanguard customer owns piece of Apple.

By the virtue of your argument we should optimize owners wealth because there are more owners than employees.

World is much much more complicated to be throwing simple arguments like that :)

I think this is just your anti-capitalist bias showing. “Market” is meant in purely game-theoretic terms.

> The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead.

All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are better at optimising workers happiness than cooperatives (maybe they pay better? Maybe they enable more job hopping?)

Yep! ..and when workers are owners, optimizing either ways works !

Even I as a somewhat skeptic of capitalism and supporter of coops can tell you this is not a USA only thing but a certain interpretation of said capitalism.

>> optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better

Companies should not deliberately make workers lives bad. But, optimizing for the worker seems fundamentally unworkable as this would essentially mean financial independence at the time of hiring followed by bankruptcy.

Overoptimize on worker happiness -> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust -> workers lose their jobs -> no worker happiness

Why are there so many more startups in the US compared to Europe?

While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.

If coops make it harder to raise capital, then they make it harder to invest in new tools, which makes it harder to increase productivity.

Workers keep more of the profits but there's less produced so there's less to buy? That doesn't actually make workers' lives better.