The Corporation and The Public Good

Just a quick note. I put the documentary film named The Corporation on and have been watching it out of the corner of my eye. I've seen it before, so essentially I'm just passing time and know that it is very much anti-corporation in its agenda. But one thing that jumped up was in the first part of the film how they clearly articulate that the primary purpose and responsibility of a company is to create profit for its shareholders. The continue by contrasting this to the public good by stating that profits surpass even public good in the priorities of a corporation.

But, what is public good? Can it be quantified or measured? What generates more public good and what less? If Finland supports the bailout of Greece, does that create public good for the Greek and does it reduce the public good for the Finns? Is it a net positive or net negative change? With a brief amount of thinking, I tend to feel that defining public good is very problematic. If public good as a concept was clear and everyone could subscribe to it, very many problems would be solved. So in this context I think contrasting the profit-driven nature of companies with something as hazy as the "public good" is somewhat problematic. Especially when you consider at the core what companies do.

Companies are profit-driven by nature and by legal requirements and obligations to its shareholders. Of course companies can engage in many nasty red ocean strategy tricks and be very cutthroat. But at the end of the day the company must provide a good or a service to a person or group who is willing to pay money for it. If a company is unable to perform this, it will soon go out of business. So, if a company produces a good or a service for an individual who buys it and which results in the decrease of "public good", is it the company's fault or the customer's? I don't think it's the TV network's fault that TV is full of reality shows: I think it's us as the consumers who are to blame since we (or at least some of you) seem to want to watch them. But maybe the customer is tricked and doesn't know better. Maybe the state should look out for the "public good" and tell the individual that reality TV in fact decreases "public good"? But I'm not sure that it does. The concept of "public good" is most likely very much tied to the context, the values of the perceiver, and whatnot. So more often than not an elite, typically a political one, is imposing their concept of "public good" upon me. Fortunately, at least in Finland, it is often enough the case that the results aren't significantly net negative and occasionally they might be net positive so that I don't have to storm to the streets.

The environment is often considered important. It is argued that it is in the interest of everyone to reduce pollution and save the environment. I guess at the end of the day the planet itself doesn't really care what happens to it as it will always survive in one form or another. Humans, however, may not if we pollute the planet we inhabit to an extent where life becomes impossible. So from the perspective of humanity, preserving the environment in a state that allows us to survive is very much net positive. I think nobody contests that. But how to get there? Recently nuclear power has been decided to be opposed to the "public good". The people who want to further "public good" have instead seemed to decide that fossil fuel based energy production methods are a better way to go, or at least less net negative than nuclear power. But strangely enough there is also a healthy amount of literature suggesting that nuclear is in fact much better than coal, oil, or gas. In this case, again, putting some metrics down and trying to assess via those which route produces more "public good" might offer some more support on decisions. Perhaps a structured way of defining "public good" in this context would be warranted. Unfortunately I haven't seen this being done (then again, I haven't looked that much, so please send me links to articles if you know of anything interesting). So far my limited understanding is based on following the research of a friend of mine who seems to take a relative engineering view of the problem and writes pieces which appear quite transparent and coherent. And based on that I think that while nuclear may not be the ideal way to produce power, it creates more "public good" than the alternative of fossil fuels (based on direct deaths, CO2 emissions, cost, ...).

Linking back to the original point, as it's very much unclear in the power discourse what is in the interest of the public, declaring that companies are bad for putting profits ahead of the "public good" seems somewhat childish, especially when it seems that very often these two in fact appear to correlate. Especially when you consider the alternative proposed, i.e. public ownership. For some strange reason a strong government tends to historically lead to increased centralization of power and hey, let's face it, nothing bad has ever come out of that. No government has ever oppressed its citizens. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's look at the shades of gray a bit more, shall we?