Top Highlights

• Financial operations and the mentality they breed pervade industry, as can be seen when managers choose to spend a greater proportion of profits on share buy-backs – which in turn boost stock prices, stock options and the pay of top executives – than on investing in the long-term future of the business. They call it value creation but, as in the fi...
• What definition of value is used to distinguish value creation from value extraction, or even from value destruction?
• Plato recognized that stories form character, culture and behaviour: ‘Our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest. We shall persuade mothers and nurses to tell our chosen stories to their children, and by means of them to mould their minds and characters rather than thei...
• If value is defined by price – set by the supposed forces of supply and demand – then as long as an activity fetches a price, it is seen as creating value. So if you earn a lot you must be a value creator. I will argue that the way the word ‘value’ is used in modern economics has made it easier for value-extracting activities to masquerade as value...
• This is what philosophers call ‘performativity’: how we talk about things affects behaviour, and in turn how we theorize things. In other words, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.