Off the top of my head, for the manufacturing company, why not have people invest in it? If it is doing something good, people will buy shares, and the company will gain the money to expand. For the farmer, if the issue is harvest instability, why not amortise the cost accordingly?
That sounds tidy in theory, but in practice it’s rarely that simple. Investors don’t just fund “good” companies, they fund opportunities with risk/return profiles that make sense relative to alternatives. Plenty of companies doing socially useful things struggle to raise capital because the payoff is long, messy, or uncertain.
Same with farming. “Amortize the cost” only works if margins and credit markets allow it. A small farmer facing price volatility, weather risk, and thin margins doesn’t have the same access to capital markets as a Fortune 500 manufacturer.
The whole point of efficient markets is to reduce those frictions, to better allocate risk and capital so that good projects (whether in manufacturing or farming) don’t just work “in theory.”
For me, no better system exists in the world. It’s not perfect but until there is something that works better I will have the agree with it.
Exactly what I am lamenting in my original comment. Investors chase returns, i.e. money for its sake.
As long as that is conceptually a thing, it is a no-brainer to fund a bad company if you are sure its shares will go up in price during the term of your investment; it is also in your interest (and acceptable within the “money for its own sake” framework) to ensure its shares do go up by helping hype it up; etc.
This all, I believe, is a source of strong and far-reaching negative externalities, which I am far from sure are trumped by its potential benefits.
> A small farmer facing price volatility, weather risk, and thin margins doesn’t have the same access to capital
Why do you need access to capital in order to price in the risks or the cost of relevant insurance? (That’s what I meant by amortising, I might have used a wrong term.)
Why are you “facing thin margins” like it is not an open market where you set your prices and your margin is your choice?
Returns-chasing isn’t some moral failure, it’s the mechanism by which capital gets allocated. If you strip that out, you don’t get fewer “bad” companies, you just get less disciplined pricing of risk and more capital scarcity overall.
On farming: margins aren’t simply “a choice.” Prices are set in global commodity markets, not by a farmer unilaterally. Thin margins are structural, and access to capital or insurance is exactly what helps them survive volatility rather than get wiped out.
I am not sure why you think farmers get to set price on a commodity item. They don’t and because of that will often leverage future contracts or other hedges to bake in prices early.
I think it’s up to every participant’s discipline and that’s fair enough. If one sets prices in too much, another local farmer will sell more. If another local farmer undercuts on price, they’ll suffer more when times are tough and weather is bad.
> more capital scarcity
If there is a lot of capital knowingly feeding ethically problematic and/or incompetent companies due to an expectation of return (and then ensuring that return by promoting those companies), then less capital is absolutely better.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I’m not as advanced in this subject, so to me you seem to only list more issues with the system as is.
