I keep thinking about this post from Joyce: "This Drucker book I'm reading, which posits that capitalism as we have understood it is as dead as a parrot -- but post-capitalist society is not yet clearly delineated. The classic capitalist was someone who used accrued profits (or sometimes rent) to procure and direct the essential means of production -- meaning machinery -- and labor, which was supposed to be as fungible as possible. Today, the essential means of production is knowledge residing with the worker. Machines are simply tools under the control of the knowledge worker -- often relatively cheap tools, like PCs -- rather than unattainable bottlenecks. But perhaps most importantly, the capital is ultimately coming from the workers themselves, in the form of deferred wages invested in pension funds.
"Many of the functions of the capitalist have been split up between the professional managers of the corporation on the one hand, and of the investment fund on the other. The nominal owners of the fund's assets, the people who actual provide the capital in the first place, are now the group with the least control over business activities. Pension fund owners have not yet learned how to exert control over fund managers; and fund managers have not yet learned how to exert control over corporate managers. The mechanisms we have can mostly reward or punish short-term performance without doing anything effective about what a pension fund should care about most -- which is long-term performance.
"The purported reason that VCs are upset with public revelation of their performance numbers is that they feel ordinary long-term investors are unable to understand the logic of long-term (which for them means 10 - 12 years) investment. Oddly enough, when workers in VC controlled firms complain about VCs, the main problem is always about the unrelenting focus on the quick flip at the expense of institution-building. I can understand why private equity firms would resist opening their books, especially in such a politically-charged atmosphere -- but no one can fight structural change forever."
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