Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.
A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.
You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.
Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.
The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
Value =/= Work.
no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.
The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?
In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.
In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.
By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.
