23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

by Ha-Joon Chang

  Therefore, countries typically granted limited liability only to exceptionally large and risky ventures that were deemed to be of national interest, such as the Dutch East India Company set up in 1602 (and its arch-rival, the British East India Company) and the notorious South Sea Company of Britain, the speculative bubble surrounding which in 1721 gave limited liability companies a bad name for generations.

  By the mid nineteenth century, however, with the emergence of large-scale industries such as railways, steel and chemicals, the need for limited liability was felt increasingly acutely. Very few people had a big enough fortune to start a steel mill or a railway singlehandedly, so, beginning with Sweden in 1844 and followed by Britain in 1856, the countries of Western Europe and North America made limited liability generally available – mostly in the 1860s and 70s.

  However, the suspicion about limited liability lingered on. Even as late as the late nineteenth century, a few decades after the introduction of generalized limited liability, small businessmen in Britain ‘who, being actively in charge of a business as well as its owner, sought to limit responsibility for its debts by the device of incorporation [limited liability]’ were frowned upon, according to an influential history of Western European entrepreneurship.2

  Interestingly, one of the first people who realized the significance of limited liability for the development of capitalism was Karl Marx, the supposed arch-enemy of capitalism. Unlike many of his contemporary free-market advocates (and Adam Smith before them), who opposed limited liability, Marx understood how it would enable the mobilization of large sums of capital that were needed for the newly emerging heavy and chemical industries by reducing the risk for individual investors. Writing in 1865, when the stock market was still very much a side-show in the capitalist drama, Marx had the foresight to call the joint-stock company ‘capitalist production in its highest development’. Like his free-market opponents, Marx was aware of, and criticized, the tendency for limited liability to encourage excessive risk-taking by managers. However, Marx considered it to be a side-effect of the huge material progress that this institutional innovation was about to bring. Of course, in defending the ‘new’ capitalism against its free-market critics, Marx had an ulterior motive. He thought the joint-stock company was a ‘point of transition’ to socialism in that it separated ownership from management, thereby making it possible to eliminate capitalists (who now do not manage the firm) without jeopardizing the material progress that capitalism had achieved.

  The death of the capitalist class

  Marx’s prediction that a new capitalism based on joint-stock companies would pave the way for socialism has not come true. However, his prediction that the new institution of generalized limited liability would put the productive forces of capitalism on to a new plane proved extremely prescient.

  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries limited liability hugely accelerated capital accumulation and technological progress. Capitalism was transformed from a system made up of Adam Smith’s pin factories, butchers and bakers, with at most dozens of employees and managed by a sole owner, into a system of huge corporations hiring hundreds or even thousands of employees, including the top managers themselves, with complex organizational structures.

  Initially, the long-feared managerial incentive problem of limited liability companies – that the managers, playing with other people’s money, would take excessive risk – did not seem to matter very much. In the early days of limited liability, many large firms were managed by a charismatic entrepreneur – such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison or Andrew Carnegie – who owned a significant chunk of the company. Even though these part-owner-managers could abuse their position and take excessive risk (which they often did), there was a limit to that. Owning a large chunk of the company, they were going to hurt themselves if they made an overly risky decision. Moreover, many of these part-owner-managers were men of exceptional ability and vision, so even their poorly incentivized decisions were often superior to those made by most of those well-incentivized full-owner-managers.

  However, as time wore on, a new class of professional managers emerged to replace these charismatic entrepreneurs. As companies grew in size, it became more and more difficult for anyone to own a significant share of them, although in some European countries, such as Sweden, the founding families (or foundations owned by them) hung on as the dominant shareholders, thanks to the legal allowance to issue new shares with smaller (typically 10 per cent, sometimes even 0.1 per cent) voting rights. With these changes, professional managers became the dominant players and the shareholders became increasingly passive in determining the way in which companies were run.

  From the 1930s, the talk was increasingly of the birth of managerial capitalism, where capitalists in the traditional sense – the ‘captains of industry’, as the Victorians used to call them – had been replaced by career bureaucrats (private sector bureaucrats, but bureaucrats nonetheless). There was an increasing worry that these hired managers were running the enterprises in their own interests, rather than in the interests of their legal owners, that is, the shareholders. When they should be maximizing profits, it was argued, these managers were maximizing sales (to maximize the size of the company and thus their own prestige) and their own perks, or, worse, engaged directly in prestige projects that add hugely to their egos but little to company profits and thus its value (measured essentially by its stock market capitalization).

  Some accepted the rise of the professional managers as an inevitable, if not totally welcome, phenomenon. Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-born American economist who is famous for his theory of entrepreneurship (see Thing 15), argued in the 1940s that, with the growing scale of companies and the introduction of scientific principles in corporate research and development, the heroic entrepreneurs of early capitalism would be replaced by bureaucratic professional managers. Schumpeter believed this would reduce the dynamism of capitalism, but thought it inevitable. Writing in the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born American economist, also argued that the rise of large corporations managed by professional managers was unavoidable and therefore that the only way to provide ‘countervailing forces’ to those enterprises was through increased government regulation and enhanced union power.

  However, for decades after that, more pure-blooded advocates of private property have believed that managerial incentives need to be designed in such a way that the managers maximize profits. Many fine brains had worked on this ‘incentive design’ problem, but the ‘holy grail’ proved elusive. Managers could always find a way to observe the letter of the contract but not the spirit, especially when it is not easy for shareholders to verify whether poor profit performance by a manager was the result of his failure to pay enough attention to profit figures or due to forces beyond his control.

  The holy grail or an unholy alliance?

  And then, in the 1980s, the holy grail was found. It was called the principle of shareholder value maximization. It was argued that professional managers should be rewarded according to the amount they can give to shareholders. In order to achieve this, it was argued, first profits need to be maximized by ruthlessly cutting costs – wage bills, investments, inventories, middle-level managers, and so on. Second, the highest possible share of these profits needs to be distributed to the shareholders – through dividends and share buybacks. In order to encourage managers to behave in this way, the proportion of their compensation packages that stock options account for needs to be increased, so that they identify more with the interests of the shareholders. The idea was advocated not just by shareholders, but also by many professional managers, most famously by Jack Welch, the long-time chairman of General Electric (GE), who is often credited with coining the term ‘shareholder value’ in a speech in 1981.

  Soon after Welch’s speech, shareholder value maximization became the zeitgeist of the American corporate world. In the beginning, it seemed to work really well for both the managers and the shar
eholders. The share of profits in national income, which had shown a downward trend since the 1960s, sharply rose in the mid 1980s and has shown an upward trend since then.3 And the shareholders got a higher share of that profit as dividends, while seeing the value of their shares rise. Distributed profits as a share of total US corporate profit stood at 35–45 per cent between the 1950s and the 1970s, but it has been on an upward trend since the late 70s and now stands at around 60 per cent.4 The managers saw their compensation rising through the roof (see Thing 14), but shareholders stopped questioning their pay packages, as they were happy with ever-rising share prices and dividends. The practice soon spread to other countries – more easily to countries like Britain, which had a corporate power structure and managerial culture similar to those of the US, and less easily to other countries, as we shall see below.

  Now, this unholy alliance between the professional managers and the shareholders was all financed by squeezing the other stakeholders in the company (which is why it has spread much more slowly to other rich countries where the other stakeholders have greater relative strength). Jobs were ruthlessly cut, many workers were fired and re-hired as non-unionized labour with lower wages and fewer benefits, and wage increases were suppressed (often by relocating to or outsourcing from low-wage countries, such as China and India – or the threat to do so). The suppliers, and their workers, were also squeezed by continued cuts in procurement prices, while the government was pressured into lowering corporate tax rates and/or providing more subsidies, with the help of the threat of relocating to countries with lower corporate tax rates and/or higher business subsidies. As a result, income inequality soared (see Thing 13) and in a seemingly endless corporate boom (ending, of course, in 2008), the vast majority of the American and the British populations could share in the (apparent) prosperity only through borrowing at unprecedented rates.

  The immediate income redistribution into profits was bad enough, but the ever-increasing share of profit in national income since the 1980s has not been translated into higher investments either (see Thing 13). Investment as a share of US national output has actually fallen, rather than risen, from 20.5 per cent in the 1980s to 18.7 per cent since then (1990–2009). It may have been acceptable if this lower investment rate had been compensated for by a more efficient use of capital, generating higher growth. However, the growth rate of per capita income in the US fell from around 2.6 per cent per year in the 1960s and 70s to 1.6 per cent during 1990–2009, the heyday of shareholder capitalism. In Britain, where similar changes in corporate behaviour were happening, per capita income growth rates fell from 2.4 per cent in the 1960s–70s, when the country was allegedly suffering from the ‘British Disease’, to 1.7 per cent during 1990–2009. So running companies in the interest of the shareholders does not even benefit the economy in the average sense (that is, ignoring the upward income redistribution).

  This is not all. The worst thing about shareholder value maximization is that it does not even do the company itself much good. The easiest way for a company to maximize profit is to reduce expenditure, as increasing revenues is more difficult – by cutting the wage bill through job cuts and by reducing capital expenditure by minimizing investment. Generating higher profit, however, is only the beginning of shareholder value maximization. The maximum proportion of the profit thus generated needs to be given to the shareholders in the form of higher dividends. Or the company uses part of the profits to buy back its own shares, thereby keeping the share prices up and thus indirectly redistributing even more profits to the shareholders (who can realize higher capital gains should they decide to sell some of their shares). Share buybacks used to be less than 5 per cent of US corporate profits for decades until the early 1980s, but have kept rising since then and reached an epic proportion of 90 per cent in 2007 and an absurd 280 per cent in 2008.5 William Lazonick, the American business economist, estimates that, had GM not spent the $20.4 billion that it did in share buybacks between 1986 and 2002 and put it in the bank (with a 2.5 per cent after-tax annual return), it would have had no problem finding the $35 billion that it needed to stave off bankruptcy in 2009.6 And in all this binge of profits, the professional managers benefit enormously too, as they own a lot of shares themselves through stock options.

  All this damages the long-run prospect of the company. Cutting jobs may increase productivity in the short run, but may have negative long-term consequences. Having fewer workers means increased work intensity, which makes workers tired and more prone to mistakes, lowering product quality and thus a company’s reputation. More importantly, the heightened insecurity, coming from the constant threat of job cuts, discourages workers from investing in acquiring company-specific skills, eroding the company’s productive potential. Higher dividends and greater own-share buybacks reduce retained profits, which are the main sources of corporate investment in the US and other rich capitalist countries, and thus reduce investment. The impacts of reduced investment may not be felt in the short run, but in the long run make a company’s technology backward and threaten its very survival.

  But wouldn’t the shareholders care? As owners of the company, don’t they have the most to lose, if their company declines in the long run? Isn’t the whole point of someone being an owner of an asset – be it a house, a plot of land or a company – that she cares about its long-run productivity? If the owners are letting all this happen, defenders of the status quo would argue, it must be because that is what they want, however insane it may look to outsiders.

  Unfortunately, despite being the legal owners of the company, shareholders are the ones who are least committed among the various stakeholders to the long-term viability of the company. This is because they are the ones who can exit the company most easily – they just need to sell their shares, if necessary at a slight loss, as long as they are smart enough not to stick to a lost cause for too long. In contrast, it is more difficult for other stakeholders, such as workers and suppliers, to exit the company and find another engagement, because they are likely to have accumulated skills and capital equipment (in the case of the suppliers) that are specific to the companies they do business with. Therefore, they have a greater stake in the long-run viability of the company than most shareholders. This is why maximizing shareholder value is bad for the company, as well as the rest of the economy.

  The dumbest idea in the world

  Limited liability has allowed huge progress in human productive power by enabling the amassing of huge amounts of capital, exactly because it has offered shareholders an easy exit, thereby reducing the risk involved in any investment. However, at the same time, this very ease of exit is exactly what makes the shareholders unreliable guardians of a company’s long-term future.

  This is why most rich countries outside the Anglo-American world have tried to reduce the influence of free-floating shareholders and maintain (or even create) a group of long-term stakeholders (including some shareholders) through various formal and informal means. In many countries, the government has held sizeable share ownership in key enterprises – either directly (e.g., Renault in France, Volkswagen in Germany) or indirectly through ownership by state-owned banks (e.g., France, Korea) – and acted as a stable shareholder. As mentioned above, countries like Sweden allowed differential voting rights for different classes of shares, which enabled the founding families to retain significant control over the corporation while raising additional capital. In some countries, there are formal representations by workers, who have a greater long-term orientation than floating shareholders, in company management (e.g., the presence of union representatives on company supervisory boards in Germany). In Japan, companies have minimized the influence of floating shareholders through cross-shareholding among friendly companies. As a result, professional managers and floating shareholders have found it much more difficult to form the ‘unholy alliance’ in these countries, even though they too prefer the shareholder-value-maximization model, given its obvious benefits to them.

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sp; Being heavily influenced, if not totally controlled, by longer-term stakeholders, companies in these countries do not as easily sack workers, squeeze suppliers, neglect investment and use profits for dividends and share buybacks as American and British companies do. All this means that in the long run they may be more viable than the American or the British companies. Just think about the way in which General Motors has squandered its absolute dominance of the world car industry and finally gone bankrupt while being on the forefront of shareholder value maximization by constantly downsizing and refraining from investment (see Thing 18). The weakness of GM management’s short-term-oriented strategy has been apparent at least from the late 1980s, but the strategy continued until its bankruptcy in 2009, because it made both the managers and the shareholders happy even while debilitating the company.

  Running companies in the interests of floating shareholders is not only inequitable but also inefficient, not just for the national economy but also for the company itself. As Jack Welch recently confessed, shareholder value is probably the ‘dumbest idea in the world’.

  Thing 3

  Most people in rich countries are

  paid more than they should be

  What they tell you

  In a market economy, people are rewarded according to their productivity. Bleeding-heart liberals may find it difficult to accept that a Swede gets paid fifty times what an Indian gets paid for the same job, but that is a reflection of their relative productivities. Attempts to reduce these differences artificially – for example, by introducing minimum wage legislation in India – lead only to unjust and inefficient rewarding of individual talents and efforts. Only a free labour market can reward people efficiently and justly.