> And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500.
This should be kind of obvious -- if they are avoiding doing awful things in the name of money, then they are leaving something on the table. You can't have your cake and eat it too. This is why the real solution is some kind of governance/regulation, because otherwise the market incentivizes being awful.
I doubt there is a statistical correlation between stock market performance and "avoiding doing awful things," though obviously we would need some way to quantify "avoiding doing awful things" before we can evaluate this hypothesis.
If the definition of "awful" is broad enough, I imagine most public companies will fall in the "awful" bucket, probably with the same distribution of stock performance as the whole market. If "awful" is going to mean something truly extraordinarily bad like dumping mercury into a well or whatever, I would still guess there is no correlation as I've read horrifying stories of corporate behavior at companies with unremarkable stock performance.
well, eric's book tries to make the point that these good companies DO overperform the market. after reading the book this past week, im not convinced. feels like heavy selection bias.
I want to appreciate you for this comment, even though I disagree with it, because this is a really articulate version of the conventional wisdom that I think all of us have imbibed since before we could talk.
For that to be the case, wouldn't that mean that companies are awful not in the name of money but just because they're evil? Which I thought was the antithesis of your whole thesis, so maybe I should read your book.
Actually you can have your cake and eat it too. Market incentives aren't awful in most cases. The worst incentives are actually stock standard owner/manager misalignment (or "principal agent problem") whereby the agents are short term oriented because they are comped that way.
I don't understand your comment. Companies like Netflix, Old Dominion Freight Line, Nvidia, Comfort Systems USA, and Intuitive Surgical have all significantly outperformed the S&P 500. What "awful" things have they done in the name of money?
> if they are avoiding doing awful things in the name of money, then they are leaving something on the table
That doesn't stand as a reason at all. I think the big contrast isn't as you described. It's more about short-term versus long-term or conflict of interest between principals and shareholders.
But to be specific, Wells Fargo was mentioned, and their downfall was very much driven by doing awful things in the name of money, specifically.
There is a whole table of examples like the one you mentioned in the book. This has been going on a long time: companies being destroyed, all in the name of profit.
I'm not sure I agree. Certainly there are differences other than syntax, but that doesn't mean syntax is irrelevant. For instance, would Clojure programmers use maps as much if there was no syntax for map literals?
Syntax determines what parts of a language are within easy reach, and therefore affects how programmers use the language. Tools that a syntax make easy are used often; tools that syntax makes hard are used infrequently. This indirectly impacts how a piece of software is designed.
This is very much what I meant in the post (hi, I'm the author :P)! CL has maps, but they're a pain to use - not just because of the syntax, but because of the relative dearth of standard library functions to work with them compared to say, lists or even vectors.
The “Question? Answer.” format seems way overused, too. I don’t usually comment on “LLMiness” of blog posts, but here it seems to somewhat devalue the point the author is trying to make.
It is, indeed, heartbreaking to learn that the one person in a giant corporation that cared about your problem enough to pull some strings and fix it gets laid off. But if you truly care about them, why don’t you try and write about it yourself, in your own voice?
The obviously ai generated dramatic prose. The entire site has the veneer of AI generation as well. The gradient background, the glowing header text, the monospaced fonts, the dots next to the footer subnav items that serve no purpose. If i were writing a blog today i would take comfort knowing it has never been easier to stand out by simply being yourself.
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