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Re: CO2 Treaty Dead On Arrival

Michael Tobis includes:

     I think Koerner's comment is self-evident as it affects
     publcily held corporations. Any publicly traded company that
     puts anything ahead of the bottom line will lose
     profitability as a result, its share prices will drop, and
     it will be taken over by more "rational", i.e., short-run
     bottom-line interests. This is the efficiency of the
     marketplace in action. I suggest McCarthy discuss this
     question with some of his economist acquaintances. They will
     likely claim that anything that doesn't affect the bottom
     line is *by definition* not a problem, and hence that the
     assertion to which McCarthy is responding is, while phrased
     in an emotional way, not merely uncontroversial but
     tautological in substance.

This is based on an idealized model of a corporation.  Real
corporations deviate from it in at least the following ways.

1. Many corporate executives and boards of directors have
concepts of being a good corporate citizen.  When asked about it
by stockholders, they will say that being a good citizen
contributes to the bottom line.  However, individual acts of
"good citizenship" will not have associated with them specific
estimates of how they contribute to the bottom line.

2. Supporting "good causes" is often considered to be in the long
term interests of the corporations.

3. Even things nominally done for publicity are done without
detailed calculations of what the publicity is worth.

Example of the latter: I asked a medium level IBM executive about
IBM's sponsorship of the Deep Blue matches with Kasparov, and he
said it had been justified on the basis of the institutional
reputation it gave IBM.  However, he was quite sure that no-one
at IBM had the slightest idea of how to calculate how much the
enterprise was worth to them.  Of course, they had, or at least
could calculate if the wanted to, rather precise estimates of how
many millions of dollars the undertaking had cost them.

There was separate technological justification of the cost of
developing the machine and the methods of programming such machines.

-- 
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.