Big companies are reliant on institutional investors on a punishing schedule which leads to ruthless behaviour. This form of capitalism with this structure and incentives will never deliver sustainability.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the dependence of large companies on institutional investors, suggesting it promotes unsustainable practices.
Tim Jackson's quote addresses the conflict within capitalism where big companies often prioritize short-term gains to satisfy institutional investors. This relentless pursuit of profit leads to behaviors that are detrimental to long-term sustainability, indicating a flawed system incentivized by immediate financial returns rather than ethical or sustainable practices.
In practice
In a corporate strategy meeting discussing sustainability initiatives.
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.
Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.
In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.
Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.
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