Would you elaborate? I think it's often the case that complicated, entangled subjects can be understood once an attempt is made to do so. First attempts may miss the mark, but eventually useful progress can be made. And such disentanglement doesn't need to be complete or perfect to be useful. Or am I completely missing the mark?
Do I understand you to mean that as there's currently no method for disentanglement that one can only use profit as a yardstick? That other values a business owner may have, such as employee satisfaction, or health, or retention, can't be measured or discussed? I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm trying to unpack what you've said.
All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that - but with one caution - one must still be "competitive".
The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.
This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.
"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.
This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.
grzm|9 years ago
Do I understand you to mean that as there's currently no method for disentanglement that one can only use profit as a yardstick? That other values a business owner may have, such as employee satisfaction, or health, or retention, can't be measured or discussed? I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm trying to unpack what you've said.
ArkyBeagle|9 years ago
The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.
This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.
"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.
This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.