theory of the firm

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Domain Shift

Brian Arthur tells us that technology most often advances in the form of domain shifts.  In his narrative technologies cluster in related groups he calls domains.  So individual technologies might advance through a tweak here or there, but the economy advances through a shift from one cluster of technologies to another.

I like this idea.  Especially when we then broaden the topic to use technology as a background against which we view a particular slice of history.  Thus we can think, legitimately about the “steam era” and such.  Adding insight to this, Arthur situates all technologies as extensions of natural phenomena.  So he characterizes a technology as a phenomenon being “captured and put to use”.

All good.  This gives us a practical definition of technology and helps map its evolution onto the changes of society itself as it became more and more infused by technology.

Arthur also tries to make us embrace a very broad notion of technology.  He insists that a great number of social structures can also be defined as technologies.  So a modern business organization is a technology, as is any other institution.  I agree.  When we go further and identify that most, if not all, technologies can be segmented into sub-technologies we start to see commonalities that might elude us in a more holistic analysis.  This does not imply we can predict the higher level organization from the sum of the component parts, but it does allow us to see common ancestors to many of our contemporary technologies: they are rooted in lineages in the same way that the natural world is.

Let’s stay with this.

If a modern business corporation is an instance of a technology and is comprised of sub-technologies drawn from a common domain then we can identify the notion of shareholder value as one such component.  It is a technology.  That it has come to play such a prominent role in the overall construct of the corporation needs explanation.  How come other components didn’t reach the same dominance?

I was prompted tom ponder this by a short article by Daron Acemoglu in which he discusses the emergence and issues of what he calls our supply chain mess.

Extensive supply chains became the norm during the past few decades.  Corporations after corporation disaggregated it’s various processes and distributed them along these chains of activity.  Sometimes the chains were simply logical.  Most often they were expressed physically, and we ended up with a vast logistical network drawn across the globe each node of which depended on the operation of a multitude of others.  Just in time became the rallying cry of consultants and managers intent on squeezing what Acemoglu calls efficiency from the disaggregation of business activities.

Acemoglu sticks close to the standard explanation economists apply to this disaggregation.  By taking a business process apart and shifting some of it outside of the original firm’s boundaries so that it now occurs in a market context we are told efficiency rises.  This is taken as axiomatic.  Trade, in the standard telling, always increases efficiency.  The two sides both benefit in some way, so there is an aggregate gain.  Society is better off.

In the world of business management theory this breaking apart of business processes and the subsequent movement of pieces into the market is a consequence of the idea of core competencies first promulgated by Prahalad and Hamel back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I remember the emergence of this idea well: it caused quite a stir and was quickly taken up by all manner of firms intent on removing activities from their internal control that were not specific to their “mission”.

It is clear from this apparent coincidence between the standard ideas of economics as referred to by Acemoglu and of business as presented by Prahalad and Hamel that the notion of efficiency had jumped from economics into business practice.  Business theorists had adopted a key idea from economics and then turned into a practical measure to be applied by managers who wanted to be seen as cutting edge.  Our theories of the firm coalesced around this centrality of efficiency.  This is despite the controversial nature of what, exactly, we mean by efficiency.  More to the point: how do we even measure it in the face of endemic uncertainty?  Just what is an efficient firm?  How do we know when we hit that mark?

Of course, Prahalad and Hamel were riding a wave.  Their ideas were another indication of the invasion of business thinking by neoclassical theory.  Perhaps so-called agency theory is an even better instance.  It sprang to prominence during those same decades.  Its core idea was that there was an agent acting on behalf of a principal in many economic circumstances, and it then subjected that relationship to all the usual somewhat cynical  views of human relationships that populate standard theory.  Managers were suddenly agents of someone else rather than being administrators of an organization that was, itself, an independent being. And, given the neoclassical turn in economics at the time, they were agents of capital providers rather than anyone else.  Capital suddenly owned things rather than simply financing them.  Managers had to pay attention only to capital in the way described by Milton Friedman.

This brings us back to Arthur.  All these neoclassical ideas moving from economics into business practice represented a domain shift.  The previous set of technologies defining a business firm, its intentions, its social role, and the best methods for management, were all replaced by a new set drawn from the same root as neoclassical economics.  The underlying objectives of economics became the underlying objectives of business.  Instead of economics being the study of what goes on in the real world it became the source for what goes on.  It went from being a study to being an active agent in the landscape it sought to describe.  It became performative.  Economics, in this form, thus lost its independence.  It was designing the economy according to its current notions, no matter how controversial those notions might be.  Efficiency being one such.

So here we are in this tangled supply chain mess that Acemoglu describes but does not get to the heart of.  The mess is largely a consequence of the failure to account for uncertainty.  Which is an error of standard economics.  When, towards the end of his article, Acemoglu describes shareholder value as an ideology, he misses the opportunity to collapse standard economics into that same bucket.  After all the two occupy the same domain.  They co-exist as components within the same cluster of technologies.  If one is ideological, so is the other. The supply chain mess is a wonderful real world example of how economics fails in its relevancy to the problems that exist there.  The efficacy of global networks is subject to the uncertainties that all business faces.  The problem is that economics denies the importance of this uncertainty.  In its effort to simplify the world for tractable analysis it ignored real world features that turn out to be extremely important.  And when it then exported that simplification back into the real world in the form of business management theory it exported its naivety and led business astray.

Yes,  Arthur is correct.  Technologies are best thought of as clusters with common ancestors.  Shareholder value and neoclassical economics belong in the same family.  I just wish Acemoglu had been more clear in saying that.

One last thing. Talking of domain shifts: I wonder whether Arthur’s taxonomy needs a higher order or layer.  I agree that technological domains are a good analytical tool for studying the evolution of the economy.  But what of the larger scale?  What about a shift from a predominantly material economy towards a predominantly digital one?  If our institutions are technologies conceived to solve particular problems  and draw on a lineage of older technologies, what happens when a whole new lineage becomes possible?  What about the possibility of a technological Cambrian explosion?  One of the problems we face is that the opportunity to redraw our institutions based upon a strictly digital basis is being missed because we are over-invested in the older physical lineage.  The entire industrial era can be taken as one “epoch” manifested in all manner of social, political, and economic constructs.  Is the digital future a similar epoch?  Does it need new institutions?

Now that would be a domain shift to watch out for!

 

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Personhood

Critics of large corporations very often center their anger on the notion of “personhood”.  The concept gained much more notoriety after the terrible Citizen’s United case a few years back.  On the left the idea that a corporation should be a legal person has become an anathema.

They are wrong.  Personhood is a valuable concept that needs to be preserved.  Our criticism ought not be about the legal nature of a corporation, it ought to be about the lack of regulatory enforcement of the contract with society that is a function of our giving corporations that privileged status.  In a nutshell: we have forgotten that the state is the creator of corporations.

There are very few economists who grasp the difference between a firm and a corporation.  I have attempted to describe that difference on more than one occasion and feel I haven’t made much progress!  Personhood is an aspect of the difference and is, in fact, central to it.

We use the word “firm” to describe an economic entity.  A firm is a cooperative structure created to oversee the complicated production processes demand by our increasingly complex economy.  It occupies a space in the economy that opens up because the market can only mediate simple transactions.  As the information content of transactions rises we need to create new institutions to mediate them — institutions that can marshal and channel the information appropriately.  Markets cannot do that without incurring prohibitive transaction costs.  Besides, and beyond transaction costs, the very act of cooperative production implies the need to assemble capital, people, machinery, and expertise of various kinds through time.  That is an order of complication that a market just cannot sustain.

That, of course, is just my version of it, but the general idea is constant.  A firm is an economic concept.

But, during the early years of industrialization, when the need to put economic activity outside the marketplace in order that it could be realized became obvious, early firms looked around for a method to mitigate the risks inherent with that assemblage of assets and, especially, with the problem of time.  Fortunately for those early pioneers there was an existing legal form they could place the firm within.  That form was the legal person known as a corporation.  Being a legal person bestowed on a firm all sorts of vital privileges that went a long way towards solving the business risks that were beginning to pop up in the early industrial era.

Corporations had been around for millennia.  The Romans had their own version.  The Catholic Church had become particularly attached to the idea of legal personhood.  The attraction was, in particular, the longevity of a legal person: it doesn’t die.  So assets owned by a legal person can continue to be in use long after a generation of custodians of those assets has passed away.  The disruption caused by having to dissolve the association and dispose of the assets at the death of a partner, or other custodian, is obviated if the person owning those assets has an infinite life!

Similarly, a legal person is an entity that can appear in court, it can enter into contracts in its town name, it can be sued and it can sue.  These rights massively simplify the social impact of the entity housed within the corporate shell.  Outsiders can easily identify who to sue.  They don’t have to go to the expense of chasing down a whole bevy of miscellaneous actors, they can target just one.  And so on.

Then there is the limited liability of the contributions to the assets housed within the legal person.  Since those assets are not owned by any one individual, but are owned by the corporate person, the financial contributors to the cost of those assets and, crucially, to any liabilities that accrue to the activity of those assets, are shielded from direct personal responsibility for those liabilities.  This is a huge advantage and makes it much more easy to raise sufficient funds to procure the assets needed to undertake large-scale industrial activity.  It also insures against the specificity of those assets: since many industrial assets have only one use, it is a very high risk to fund them.  Limited liability was a significant risk reducer and thus encouraged development that might not otherwise have happened.

So legal personhood was neither a modern notion, nor a creation oof capitalism.  It was a pre-existing notion, much used by medieval and earlier institutions, precisely because it solved major management problems that are not specific to industry.  In the words of Pope Innocent IV during the thirteenth century:

“Cum collegium in causa universitatis fingatur una persona”  The entity is in corporate matters figured as a person

Personhood is a vital piece of legal technology that allows much of modern business to exist.  We ought not decry it.

What we need to do is to focus, instead, on enforcing the state’s supervision of corporations because their ability to use personhood is a gift from the state.  They all exist because they have a state charter allowing them to exist. Society has, therefore, a right to ensure that corporations fulfill their side of the bargain.  They need to behave in a socially responsible manner or risk losing their charter and the benefits that come along with it.

Oh, and that charter creates the corporation.  Which, much to the annoyance of mainstream economists, means that the corporation exists prior to receiving any funding.  Thus the contributors of funds, we often call them shareholders, cannot own the corporation.  It existed before they showed up.  They simply contributed funding to a pre-existing entity.  Corporations, being legal persons, own themselves, they are not owned by outsiders no matter how much funding those outsiders may have contributed.

Which kind of blows up the entire body of thought known as “shareholder value”.  Milton Friedman was in this, as in so many other things, an ideologue and not a very good analyst.

But that’s another story.

 

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Corporate Reckoning

The aftermath of a coup attempt is one of those moments when a nation gets a really serious insight into its values.  Do, for instance, its politicians rally around some higher set of principles, or do they slide quickly back into the day-to-day argy-bargy of political positioning and infighting?

Ours are perilously close to the latter.  And this after their own place of work was invaded and trashed while they hid and cowered in sundry hiding places.  Profiles in courage are few and far between right now within our politics class.

The reason is obvious: one of major political parties is complicit in the ruin of democracy and in the rise of a far right version of populism based on white supremacy, nativism, and grievances of various sorts.  Perhaps this was the inevitable consequence of forty years of false doctrine and anti-social agitation during which the very word government became reviled and scorned by those swept along by that doctrine.  Perhaps it was the inevitable consequence of the highly planned and disciplined attack on democracy orchestrated by the panoply of right wing think tanks and media outlets established during the late 1970s for the specific purpose of ruining the ability of the middle class to protect itself from our oligarchs and big corporate interests.  Or, perhaps, it was simply neglect and complacency on the part of a voter population who bought into the saccharine and sanitized history fed them after World War II — a history in which Americans always wore the white hats and in which the constitution was not a piece of paper to be updated to suit each generation’s context, but which was beyond reproach and beyond amendment.  Is it a coincidence that the last amendment to the constitution came right at the rise to ascendancy of the neoliberal elite?

Our bookstore shelves groan under the weight of recently published screes describing the imminent demise of American democracy.  The topic has become an obsession in leftist circles throughout the country.  These books all purport to describe how democracy ends, and they all target the rise of far right sentiment within the Republican party.

But these books are wrong.

The end of democracy was a long time ago.  It came about when both our political parties succumbed the the false doctrines of extreme thinkers like Hayek and Friedman who both harbored deeply anti-social sentiments draped within a cloak of intellectual righteousness.  The end of democracy began with the publication and circulation of the infamous Powell Memorandum amongst the members of the US Chamber of Commerce.  That terrible, ideologically driven, document became the manifesto of the far right and of its corporate paymasters.  The alliance forged between right wing economists and the corporate sector, which remains solid until today, is a significant aspect of the quiet revolution orchestrated by our oligarchs and supported by the veneer of intellectual rigor provided by economists driven by market sycophancy.

The demise of our middle and working classes was inevitable.  The stagnation of wages was inevitable.  The corruption of our government was inevitable. And the rise of Donald Trump was inevitable.  As was the recently failed coup attempt.

That Powell memorandum set in motion a cascade of capture of the citadels of academia by the false doctrines of Hayek and Friedman.  It encouraged the work of eager academics who were trying to make reputations for themselves rather than pursuing true rigor.  The result was a steady trickle, within the business organization literature, of ideas that sought to cement the libertarian worldview and to supplant the earlier, more nuanced, post-war view.

The rise of this neoliberal order found a welcoming and well funded home in corporate America.  The destruction of the myth of opportunity for all began right there. The blindness of the academic elite that proselytized liberty whilst abetting oligarchy is an astonishing feature of the past forty years.  Still today ardent advocates of whatever it is they describe as liberty fail to see the loss of freedom that their ideas inevitably create.

So, here we are at a point of reckoning.

The decisions made over the next few days and weeks will determine whether America slides further into failed state status, or whether it pulls itself back from the abyss.  Judging by the complete surrender of a large part of the Republican party to anti-social thought, and to their embrace of extreme methods in their attempt to maintain power, the odds of a full recovery are poor.

I have seen commentators talk about the kind of agenda we need to lift ourselves back up.  First, they say, we need to occlude any chance for Trump to will political power in the future.  That is obvious.  He needs to be accused and convicted.  He needs to be banished.  Second, they say, we need to address the long term and deep malaise caused by the neoliberal ideology that has strangled our discourse.  Good.  Let’s begin with economics.  Third, they add although tentatively, we must reform our system of government to protect its values and to make real its claim to be open to all equally.  It never has been open to all: even after the passage of the civil war amendments the reality of racism was allowed to flourish throughout the nation.

I want to add a fourth: we need to revise our relationship with our large corporations.  They are the source of political corruption with their flood of money and lobbying in Washington.  They are the creators of most of our social-economic policies regarding the workplace, work/life balance, affluence, the distribution of wealth, and the pace of technological change.  They play a pivotal political role.  They are major political actors.  Any healthy democracy needs to recognize this fact and regulate accordingly.

Our economy is administered.  It is situated within, and is an artifact of, the rising complexity of life brought about by the steady accumulation of information humanity creates simply by living, interacting, and sustaining itself.  The division of labor long since rendered obsolete any theories dependent upon a simple worldview of individual transactors inhabiting a low information landscape.  Corporations are a necessary feature of the need to administer the mediation of economic activity in a landscape featuring a much more dense information concentration.  We cannot avoid the need for administration.  Business firms housed within the legal shell called a corporation are here to stay.  It is our obligation, and our right, to call them to task for their attack on democracy.

We need corporate reform just as much as we need political reform.

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Under Pressure

I am learning that it takes a while to come to terms with the trauma of an attempted coup.

Various people are reacting differently depending on their state of mind prior to the attempt.  What catches my eye, given my own perspective on the role of business in society, is the pressure emerging on our large corporations.  Having spent the past few years busily ignoring the moral corruption and ineptitude of the Trump regime business leaders are suddenly trying to appear pious.  Many of them are suspending their support for political groups and individuals.  Others are suspending social media platforms that were used to organize insurrection and ferment violence.

This is all too little too late.

The equivocation that allowed major corporations to support Trump whilst overlooking his manifest moral failings simply so that they could benefit from tax cuts and reduced regulation stains those corporations forever.  It is an example of the transactional thinking produced by a rigid application of the flawed notion of shareholder value permeating the business world.

Let’s set the record straight: corporations are wards of the state.  They exist because the state says they can exist.  That’s what obtaining a corporate charter implies.  Actually it is an explicit, not implicit, relationship.  In return for being given a charter a firm, which then becomes a corporation, commits to providing socially beneficial services.  It is a classic example of a state/private sector partnership.  The charter brings with it a variety of benefits available only to corporations.  So as firms accept those privileges they surrender their market purity: they become hybrids, they become agents of the state.

It is the inability of most economists to understand the vital difference between a “firm” and a “corporation” that has bedeviled the development of our understanding of institutions and their role in mediating transactions in the face of radical uncertainty.  Firms and corporations may look similar when viewed through the narrow lens of economics, but they are very different structures with very different consequences for economic development.

This is not the place to opine further on that difference, except to point out to anyone interested, that, as wards of the state, modern corporations are obligated to act socially responsibly.  That includes not funding politicians who advocate violence or who seek to undermine democratic elections.  So acting responsibly is not some amazing attribute of a “woke” corporation.  It is an expected attribute.  It is something we ought to demand.  Indeed: acting otherwise ought to bring with it the potential loss of the charter that is so central to the corporations survival.

This is a moment when getting rid of our muddled thinking about what appear to be arcane definitions of what a “firm” is becomes vital.  We need to shift this discussion out of academia where it is doomed to wallow in endless hair splitting, and get it into a more open domain where we can build pressure on our corporations to be sensitive to the socio-economic consequences of their actions.

Finally: let’s also be clear.  We have for far too long outsourced swathes of socio-economic policy making to the business sector where a transactional attitude born of a false theory has produced a level of inequality, insecurity, and inequity that has undermined the nation and torn its social fabric wide open.

We need to take back into the democratic domain that policy making so that we can all invest in the outcomes.

So it is good that business is under pressure.  It has run free too long.

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The Firm, Yet Again

There is a new eBook published by the Stigler Center which is an offshoot of the Booth Business School at the University of Chicago.  The publication contains a number of short essays either attacking or defending the infamous pronouncements by Milton Friedman on the role of the corporation.  This year, you may recall, is the 50th anniversary of the newspaper article in which Friedman described his view that the purpose of the corporation is too maximize shareholder value.  The subsequent decades have seen that view permeate the business and  legal systems such that to argue against it is seen as oddball in the extreme.

Steve Kaplan leads the defense of Friedman with the opening essay and slides almost immediately into a humdrum general defense of capitalism rather than staying on the specific topic of the corporation.  Thus we read this:

“Many observers, including the organizers of the Stigler Center’s Political Economy of Finance Conference, believe that his view has been extremely influential. It has been implemented in the US and globally starting in the 1980s, encouraged by scholars like Michael Jensen (a Booth alum and my thesis advisor).1What has been the result of corporate shareholder value maximization mixed in with globalization? Let me cite Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times, who wrote at the end of 2019 (and pre-pandemic): “For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.” People living in extreme poverty fell from 42 percent of the world’s population in 1981 to below 10 percent today. That is 2 billion people who are no longer suffering extreme poverty. Absolute poverty declined substantially in the US, from 13 percent in 1980 to 3 percent today. And this is more or less what Friedman predicted. The pandemic will affect these numbers, but I am hopeful that the effect will be temporary.”

Notice that the reduction in world poverty is, apparently, a consequence of the acceptance that corporations ought to devote themselves exclusively to enriching their shareholders.   This extraordinary over-reach is best left to you to absorb and think over at your leisure.  Just make sure you are sitting down when you do so.

This claim follows a subtle revision of Friedman’s intentions.  In order to immunize against what he clearly thinks is a vulnerability in the Friedman line of thought, Kaplan adjusts Friedman’s use of the word”profits”: the word is narrowed to mean “long term shareholder value” as if the specification of the longer term somehow eliminates the corrosive worry that corporations have become ever more short term in their focus.  Of course they have.  The average share is owned for a paltry four months.  There are fewer long term shareholders than there were in Friedman’s day, and the manic search for that little extra profit is one of the root causes of the much criticized short term nature of most management nowadays.  But, the longer term view is, we are assured, what Friedman “surely meant”.

Then he ought to have said so.  Friedman was never one to avoid saying what he meant.  So I think when he said “profits” he meant exactly that.  Kaplan’s revision is simply an attempt to soften a potential fatal blow against his idol.

It gets better: Kaplan suggests that all those who argue for a return to the older stakeholder focus for management are creating insurmountable difficulties.  Just how, he asks, is management supposed to choose between all those competing ends for whatever their limited resources are?  Worse still, since, he goes on, corporations compete against other value maximizers, any corporation who fails to maximize will likely invest less efficiently and operate worse.  Notice the weasel word “likely”, it sounds as if Kaplan is a little unsure of himself.

And that’s it.  That’s all we need to know.  Without shareholder value as a single point of focus, our managers will dither, dally, and the world will slide into oblivion.  Kaplan’s convinced:

“To conclude, Friedman was and is right. A world in which businesses maximize shareholder value has been immensely productive and successful over the last 50 years. Accordingly, business should continue to maximize shareholder value as long as it stays within the rules of the game. Any other goal incentivizes disorder, disinvestment, government interference, and, ultimately, decline.”

Oh no!  Disorder? Disinvestment? Government interference? Decline?

Enough.  This is old ground.  The fact that the shift towards shareholder value exactly coincides with the stagnation of wages, the helter-skelter dive into globalization, the decline in domestic investment, and the rise of populist politics is just, well, a coincidence.

As ideas go shareholder value has been a failure for most households.  CEOs have done well though, and they probably will continue to direct their generous support to the Stigler Center, and the various academics it houses, in return

It is an irony that I came across the Stigler Center eBook this morning just as I was about to comment on the continuing confusion in economics over the firm.  It is a stunning omission from mainstream economics that there is no well worked through story of how business sits within the economy.  The continued effort to flatten business into the pre-existing, and more easily mathematized, structure of aggressive individualism, distorts reality out of all recognition.  It’s as if physicists theorized the universe only as an assemblage of atoms.  No stars, galaxies, or even planets, just atoms.  Imagine the lack of insight that would result from such an approach.  Yet that its exactly what economics does.  No intermediate structure is tolerated between the individual and the market [whatever that is].

This is laughable.  But that’s what economics is.

When economics tries to engage with the firm is is almost invariably through the lens of contracts and the cost of transacting.  This is familiar turf for economists, so they attempt to bash the firm into a shape they can deal with using their preferred methods.  They ignore anything that gets in the way of this wholly unscientific approach.

Just too add to the confusion, economists are prone to use the. two words “firm” and “corporation” interchangeably.  This is a monstrous error.  The two are totally different animals.  Confusing them leads to all sorts of subsequent errors.  One of which is the notion of shareholder value.  Friedman might not have expounded as he did had he grasped the difference between a firm, which is an organization created to undertake economic activity, and a corporation, which is a legal person created as a shell within which a firm may, or may not, sit.

The impact of understanding this separation of the two concepts is profound.  One of which is that a corporation is decidedly not owned by shareholders.  The entire Friedman project unravels at this point.  Corporations are not owned by anyone.  They exist at the whim of the state to perform functions that further the ends of the state.  In return for so doing they are given all sorts of legal capabilities such as that of limited liability, the ability to sue and be sued in court, to own and dispose of assets and so on.  Shareholders are peripheral.  They own pieces of paper that give them access to financial rewards as defined by the board of directors.  After the initial influx of capital at the launch of the corporation, shareholders contribute nothing.  They benefit from the upside potential of the stock price, but are immunized against personal losses if the corporation fails or goes bankrupt.  It is rare to hear economists comment on this monumental example of moral hazard.  Which is odd because they like to rabbit on about it elsewhere.

Legal personhood is an extremely valuable asset that the state endows a corporation with.  It is an ancient concept — the Romans had corporations precisely because of the benefits the concept bestows.  It is a privilege to be a corporation.  It allows economic activity to be defined and protected against risks that might preclude that activity otherwise.  Indeed the modern use of the corporate form since industrialization is a recognition of the immense value legal personhood brings into commerce.  It is a vital technology the absence of which would most certainly have hampered modern economic development.  We all benefit from the existence of corporations.  They mitigate risks as they help stave off uncertainty.   Everyone associated with a corporation receives these benefits, not just shareholders.

On the contrary, shareholders rank low within a corporation.  Least of all do they “own” the corporation.  In David Ciepley’s words:

“And all of the rights over the firm’s assets that we normally think of as bundled into the right of ownership – such as rights to exclude, use, lend out, collateralize, sell, or profit from the use or sale of an asset – are held by the legal entity and exercised on its behalf by the board and its hirelings. The stockholders possess none of them, which makes them very odd “owners.”

Odd indeed.

Perhaps Kaplan and his hero Friedman need to revise not just the word profit, but also their entire notion of ownership.

No one owns a corporation.  It is a ward of the state.

 

 

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