The idea that companies, if not all economic activity, exists to maximise the wealth of shareholders or owners, dominates the world of corporate governance and much else. Bankers and traders believe it. Industrial managers have been led to accept it. Universities and business schools preach it. It is part of the free market ideology, often identified by its origins, as the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American approach. And its many adherents claim it is the only system that really works. Shareholder value is, for them, the acid test, all that matters. All this is despite clear evidence to the contrary from Germany, Japan, China, India and many other jurisdictions.
Much of the literature on corporate governance argues that these other approaches are in fact converging on the Anglo-American model and even assesses the level of their maturity in terms of how closely they comply with the Anglo-American line. It’s all nonsense.
Before the British coalition government’s proposed cuts were announced they were greeted by 39 top business people writing to the Daily Telegraph confirming that they would create the necessary jobs so as to make the public sector cuts work. That way tax rises might be avoided and long-term cuts in public sector activity achieved. For them, any reduction in tax and spend would be a Good Thing. Well, business people would say that, wouldn’t they! But were they expressing a seriously thought through strategy, or merely expressing the currently dominant free market fad?
The Economist, an increasingly dogmatic apologist for the free market ideology, invited for its current issue, six academic economists to identify how they thought the financial crisis had changed the subject of economics. The answer is not a lot. So far as methods of teaching and research are concerned, nothing has changed, or is likely to change any time soon.
Since Adam Smith’s example of the pin factory, economists have never been able to produce a satisfactory theory of the industrial firm. They’ve thought of it as a black box, expressed it as a production function involving such illuminating variables as price and quantity, and they’ve reduced it to the agency relationship falsely claiming managers to be the agents of shareholders (see other postings on this site). This inadequacy may be part of the reason why, despite Adam Smith, mainstream economists give markets pride of place over the firm.
Belief in the extreme power of market forces, so long as they were free from regulation or any other form of interference, led to the curious belief that the market could produce any item at some cost: the costs of transactions in the market. Only if a firm could produce cheaper than the cost of market transactions, would the firm be justified in production. This fertile thread of economic theory, originated in an article by Coase in 1937, but was developed in the 1960s by a group led by Williamson – last year’s joint Nobel laureate. It challenged the legitimacy of managerial decision makers, arguing the power of market forces to decide.
“The directors of … companies, being the managers of other people’s money rather than their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance … Negligence and profusion must always prevail … in the management of the affairs of such a company.” So wrote Adam Smith 250 years ago. And that remains a core concept in the right wing free market fundamentalism that drives us today.
Keynes recognised that the legislation protecting worker’s rights might lead to powerful trades unions, motivated by political ideals rather than the long term interests of their members, being the cause of wages led inflation damaging economic activity. His mistake was to argue that it was a political problem for governments, rather than a problem for economics. So no action was taken till the advent of the Thatcher government.
Today the boot is on the other foot. Free market fundamentalism is no less political than the unions were 30 years ago. The fervent ideological belief in private industry being good, public bad, regulation bad, and above all, the primacy of shareholder property rights and the purpose of industry being to maximise their value … all that is equally damaging to industry, perhaps even more so, than was unbridled union power.
Industry has always depended on credit. Without it we would not have had an industrial revolution. When Adam Smith described his pin factory which, through the division of labour, increased production from, at most, 20 pins per day per operative, to more than 48,000, all that was needed was a market for that massive increase in production. Markets had previously been small and localized affairs, requiring little in the way of transportation. Industrial markets required mass transportation which was first achieved with canals and turnpikes. But canals took many years to build before they could ever earn a penny return. That required a great deal of money and at that time money was scarce. Wealth was accrued in land and property rather than in spare cash. The only way such projects as canals could be financed was to get money from huge numbers of people whose repayment would come out of the future earnings of the projects themselves. The same applied to the later railways, and the whole industrialization process. So banks have always played a central role in the financing of industry.
Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy 