Interesting idea. Every time a vote goes your way, you accumulate more holding time on your stock. Those who lose votes will have negatives added against any compulsory holding time they’ve accumulated (since they are misaligned with the direction in which the company is headed). Status quo for those who don’t vote or lose don’t have such restrictions.
I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).
Sounds interesting on the surface, but a common reality is that the more moving parts there are, the more opportunity for things to go wrong or against intended use.
I've never understood this idea that we shouldn't a fix problem we know about, on the grounds that we might introduce a new problem we don't know about. I think the best approach is to try to figure out everything that might go wrong, address those things, and then go ahead and try to make things better, instead of just giving up and accepting the problems we have. That's how civilization advances.
This particular problem is heavy on game theory, which is a pretty well-developed field at this point. So I think there are grounds to believe we might be able to predict consequences with some accuracy.
Linus Torvalds calls this trading new bugs for old bugs. And I agree with the idea in principle: don't replace buggy working code with untested new code. People already know how to deal with the old bug.
And look how it turns out every time that principle is broken, albeit in userland and not the kernel: KDE 4, PulseAudio, Systemd.
I'm fully aware of the differences between a product (airplane) and software, but the 737 Max is born of the same principle being broken. The problem that was being fixed was fuel efficiency. So Boeing replaced the engines and associated structures with more efficient engines, which required different structures to hold them, which required MCAS, and now the whole thing is untested, as compare to the old setup with decades of proven reliability despite 1.6% more fuel consumption.
So never change any laws and or invent new things? I can't imagine many people really think that's the answer.
I'd also point out that arguments like this, while often well-intentioned, can also be abused, by people who don't like a particular new idea but can't articulate a defensible reason. It's easiest then to just fall back on conservatism.
The real answer is to invent new stuff and try not to be idiots about it. Use good design principles, don't cut corners, do the testing, roll out gradually when that's feasible, etc. For the Torvalds principle you mentioned "untested" new code, and Boeing definitely cut corners.
The first step of not cutting corners is not ignoring obvious flaws.
If you are adding complexity into a very complex system, in order to govern it, it is very likely that the change will make the system harder to control. So you must have a pretty good certainty that this will give you governance and not destroy it.
Shareholder voting is not that complicated, it's just a simple majority vote weighted by number of shares held. My suggestion is a modest extension of that, to address a specific problem.
Can you come up with specific ways it might fail? I can definitely think of issues that would have to be addressed, but so far all the critical comments in this subthread could apply, unmodified, to thousands of unrelated ideas, rather than just this one.
If corporation governance were simple, we wouldn't see that kind of failure.
> Can you come up with specific ways it might fail?
It's trivially exploitable by the executive team by just behaving in a sustainable way for a while, and then changing it suddenly when every other shareholder is locked-in.
The reason the comments apply to thousands of possible suggestions is that the problems appear on thousands of possible suggestions, and nobody wants to keep writing thousands of comments debunking each bad idea.
Finally, a criticism that is not completely generic conservatism. It's a good point that this would work better for shareholder votes on policy decisions rather than board elections.
Then you immobilize some long term holders with many proposals for them to vote, and after they can't do anything anymore, bribe the employees directly into doing the shortsighted action.
Again, it's an extra bonus to the unethical ones, because they are the only ones that can sell, and will take all the profits from the short lived stock pump.
Do you also have a home-made encryption algorithm you'd like to push?
Cryptography is a well-developed professional field with rigorous peer review. Their products do what they're supposed to almost perfectly, and many people use them.
Perhaps you could point me to an equivalent field for making society better, with a well-developed utopia that lots of people live in today.
I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).