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IOL News
2 days ago
- Business
- IOL News
The metaphor of the lamb and the lion: understanding economic injustice
This article explores the metaphor of the lamb and the lion to illustrate the ongoing economic injustices faced by South Africa, highlighting the paradox of wealth accumulation and poverty. Image: Ron Lach/Pexels The story of the lamb and the lion bears testimony in today's experience of water runs upstream. The poor contribute continuously to the wealth of the rich, and are surprised by the unexplained riches of the rich against the wretchedness of the poverty in which they languish. Water continues to run upstream instead of downstream. Nothing ever trickles, let alone down under the trickledown economy of neoliberals. It only floods upwards away from the poor. When the story of the lamb and the lion was told under kerosene lamp to enthused youth with soot packed nostrils and mealie pap filled gums decades before Milton Friedman market fundamentalism of the Chicago School indeed were prophesy accomplished in their life time. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. 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Next Stay Close ✕ Decades later visited by crimson red gums with a dispersion of isolated lone brown teeth their fortunes of a river flowing up stream was real. For all they saw and witnessed was after years of dirt wages on the mines all they can see are pin striped suits donned by their counterparts who affirm that indeed water flows naturally upstream. As they should contend with their fate decades later, they have no other answer than the fact that the lion was correct all along after all – water flows naturally upstream. The tale is about a lamb that had lost its mother to a marauding lion. Little lamb was downstream drinking water when it got confronted by the raw upstream. You are dirtying the water just like your mother, the ewe. I am thirsty and I need to drink roars the lion. The lamb answers – how can I dirty the water when I am drinking down stream from you. I am just a lamb of yesterday. The lion roars just like the ewe your mother you are doing the same – dirtying my water as the lion charges towards the innocent lamb. This is the relationship the euphemistically referred to developing world when in reality they are constantly underdeveloped by the same lion that claims this developing world is dirtying their water. At no point was this so classically demonstrated than in the Just Energy Transition where South Africa was told in no uncertain terms that it was dirtying the world with its coal and it should stop. The Germans, French, Americans, and British have been drinking and dirtying the water upstream for ages, like the metaphoric lion told the lambs in the south that they are dirtying their water in the north. So obedient lamb, South Africa stood attention and stopped and Komati was killed with other coal fired power stations being continuously decimated merely for their age. De Ruyter the executioner was deployed for the mission. With metaphorical lads listening attentively under kerosene lamp are adult South Africans with crimson red gums and spaced brown spikes loosely dancing in their mouths today suffering from loadshedding driven by economics of Milton Friedman cohorts who are today saying South Africa is dirtying their water despite South Africa being downstream. Blessed is China, Malaysia and others who adopted a more measured approach to the roaring lion and told him in his face that they cannot be dirtying water when they are drinking downstream from those who dirtied years and years world without end. Little did we know that the lion will go back and dirty the water without being reprimanded. Germany ran for coal so is America under Trump. For how long should we stand this abuse of being told that we are dirtying the water when actually at all times we have taken water from downstream. At no time was this more irritating than seeing the 'graveyards' littering the roadside miles on end and the lion roaring that South Africa is dirtying its water through genocide and has decided to own the crosses and South Africa deserves punishment. Blatant lies are what lions are used to against lambs and when they have run out of tricks, they drag us into their stupid gimmicks. Time, we hold our own and respect our own and we should refuse to participate in this silly game of narcissists who have dirtied their water. Leave them to drink it. We should go for a different economic order, not the Milton Friedman Chicago School teaching that has caused the water to flow only upstream against all forces of gravity and the south is even blamed for being impoverished. We cannot continue to be bullied with lies under kerosene lamp as though we are the enthused youth with soot packed nostrils and mealie pap filled gums and live for decades on, visited by crimson red gums with a dispersion of isolated lone brown teeth letting our fortunes be of a river flowing up stream. That reality must be declared as one belonging to morons not us. The lion ate our parents and those before them. It should neither terrorise nor eat us for water we have not dirtied, let it die of its own sins. Africa is not Europe's or America's purgatory. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, among other hats. Image: Supplied
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Basic Corporate Error Of Maximizing Shareholder Returns
Word dividends on calculator display. Payments to shareholders. Profit from trading securities. ... More Business concept. Finance revenue. 3d render Chief executives typically look to improve the fortunes of a company and returns to shareholders. Many take to heart the argument Milton Friedman made in a 1970 New York Times op-ed that the 'social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.' That has been further interpreted as meaning the responsibility to maximize return on investment to shareholders. The presumption has become the foundation of many arguments of what businesses should do, the degree of legal constraints that ought to be taken removed from their behavior, This is both legally incorrect and strategically troubling and mistaken. Experts in corporate governance have, across many years, tried to find a legal basis for the prescription. It has yet to appear. In the 2014 Supreme Court decision in 'Burwell, Secretary of Health and Huma Services, et. al. v. Hobby Lobby Stores,' the Court addressed whether a for-profit corporation could give money to religious causes. 'While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so,' Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court. Corporate law and governance also recognize that a company's board and executives have duties to the company Are shareholders legally important in a corporate structure? Absolutely. They have rights and corporate law ensures them. The corporation has duties. Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh explains the concept of fiduciary duties to shareholders in an online course. 'Rather than require specific outcomes–such as achieving maximum share price–fiduciary duties are largely about conduct, process, and motivation,' she wrote. A company has the responsibility to provide relevant information about corporate performance, to act in good faith, to act with diligence and prudence. Corporate managers and boards are charged with strategy and operations for the company's benefit, shareholder's benefit being an offshoot just as profit is a result of intelligent business operation that makes customers happy. In basic calculus, math students learn that you cannot maximize for more than one variable at a time. That doesn't mean one factor cannot benefit while another does as well. However, the definition of maximization means that one thing requires precedence over others. Something has to come first; everything becomes subject to that desire. The tenet of shareholder interest maximization would require managers and boards to do things that were detrimental to the success of the company. They would need to consider shortchanging workers, business partners, and customers. Every decision would be based on how to extract more value from every source — actions that would ultimately turn every broader concept of stakeholder into enemies. Many of the best potential employees, partners, and customers would go elsewhere, a terrible outcome for a business. The maximization tenet also assumes that every shareholder has identical interests. This is far from true. It is perfectly possible for a company to have shareholders that vary widely in their investment strategies, like a Warren Buffett looking to hold shares for a long time and see the company develop, and a Carl Icahn who would be comfortable splitting a company up into parts and selling them off to get a quicker return. That's the irony of maximizing shareholder value, because it's impossible. Shareholders have different outlooks, want their investments to do different things, expect increased value through different ways. Why spend time defending and using something that makes no logical or legal sense?
Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Times
Why players must take stand against game concerned only with bottom line
Milton Friedman, the American economist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize, said something that has always stayed with me. If you increase the amount of currency in an economy by, say, printing more notes, you don't thereby become wealthier. Instead, you devalue the coinage. It is a point that was also made by John Locke, David Hume and dozens of others who understand the basis of true wealth. Football is devaluing its coinage. Fifa wants more matches, Uefa wants more matches, clubs want more matches, each in pursuit of the bottom line. They think they will become wealthier but the overall effect is a surfeit of games, coming thick and fast, all throughout the year, and often into what was once a sacrosanct summer break, such that it is not just the players who are exhausted and suffering from burnout and injury (look at the recent interviews with Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham) but increasingly the spectators, too. Perhaps I am just speaking for myself here, but don't you feel it too? The World Cup has expanded (the 2026 incarnation will have three hundred teams playing over four months, or something like that), as has the Champions League, the Euros, the Nations League, just as the pre-season friendlies have morphed into ever more formats, in different parts of the world, stretching as far as Australia and Singapore. And don't get me on this mad Club World Cup starting in June in the United States, featuring 32 teams, and which won't culminate until July 13. For sheer, grotesque excess only Monty Python's Mr Creosote (look it up on YouTube) comes close. I know there have been plenty of dramatic moments this season, but my sense has been of competitions petering out. The spark has gone. The Inter Milan-Barcelona European semi-final was a thing of priceless, life-affirming magic, but how many other moments and matches are burnt on the retina? The players keep improving — physically and, above all, technically — but one gains the sense (corroborated by multiple interviews) that they always have half their minds on conserving themselves during the grind of the season, since they know that they can't keep producing their absolute best week in, week out, without something giving. And things are giving more and more. Look at Rodri. Look at Kevin De Bruyne. Look at the growing injury lists. I read a paper in the British Medical Journal revealing that muscular microtears — which routinely accrue due to the intensity of the modern game — can take 72 hours to heal, perhaps longer. How on earth are top players supposed to ravish us with the precious currency of superlative performances when they are grinding through fifty to sixty games a season? How can Barcelona's Lamine Yamal keep going after 12 months when the teams he represents have won the Euros, La Liga, the Copa del Rey, made a deep run in the Champions League and so much more? I remember reading somewhere that as a rule of thumb top players have 500 elite matches in their legs across a career. This precocious genius has already played 125 at the age of 17. You'll say I'm whistling in the wind at the hope that football might rein it in. You'll say the commercial forces are just too strong. You're probably right. But can't we lament what might have been? A World Cup where we don't have dozens of meaningless matches. Continental competitions where each contest counts. Players gaining proper rest between matches so they can spark our collective imagination rather than spending an ever high proportion of their short careers on the physio's table. I'd suggest that a new approach would pay off commercially too. When Foden was talking to reporters in the mixed zone after Manchester City's win over Bournemouth, he sounded utterly exhausted. 'It's frustrating for me because a lot of people don't know what football players have to go through and play with,' he said. 'I've had a lot of ankle pain and I've been playing with it the past couple of months. 'It came after I was tackled by Casemiro. I somehow managed to play on with my ligaments done. That's the kind of person I am… I missed the next game or two, came back to training maybe too early.' This is a 25-year-old with potentially a decade ahead, who seems to feel more like a hamster in a wheel than a top sportsman. Sure, he could stand up for himself, but football has become such a treadmill that few question it any more. So let me offer a proposal for change. The players — the stars of the show, the people we all want to see — should lobby for a major reduction in the calendar and schedule. They should organise themselves. I am not an instinctive trade unionist (is anyone who grew up in the 1970s with its winter of discontent and insane militancy?), but on this occasion, I put aside my qualms. Footballers are extremely well paid, and I am not asking for sympathy on their behalf, but they are absolutely entitled to look after their health and viability, not to mention the integrity of the game they grace. Cut down the overall quantity of matches (I'd say by a quarter at least) and football would instantly expand in our hearts and minds. The currency and creativity of the game would appreciate. That, at least, is the main lesson I take from an exhausting and anticlimactic season. It's time for change.
Gulf Today
26-05-2025
- Business
- Gulf Today
Free suckers
The phrase "There's no such thing as a free lunch" popularised by economist Milton Friedman has been confirmed at a great cost by President Trump meme buyers. The biggest Trump meme coin 'investors' joined him for an 'Exclusive' Dinner, but why? The word investor has rarely been so misused given how these are very wealthy individuals who have paid up to $US115 for a memecoin now selling at about $US22. They are people who are buying an expensive ticket to probably a nice dinner and a minutes word with the President on the assumption of a four-hour meal for 220 people. One estimate was that $US148 million was spent to buy this access, which would have fed a million people for a week, at least. The word 'corruption' features in many of today's newspaper reports but everyone can make up their own mind about the matter. There is rarely a more apt comment than the one associated with P. T. Barnum, "There's a sucker born every minute.' Dennis Fitzgerald, Melbourne, Australia
New Straits Times
25-05-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
MONEY THOUGHTS: Harness this logical long-term wealth-building strategy
IN case you haven't noticed, even without raising our respective lifestyles, we generally need more money each passing year to buy the same amount of "stuff", which economists refer to as goods and services. The reason for this consistent phenomenon of rising prices is inflation. Do yourself a favour and make no mistake about: 1. Inflation's existence; and 2. It's inexorable capacity to erode our money's purchasing power. According to the winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics Milton Friedman, "Inflation is caused by too much money chasing after too few goods." Although this Sunday's Money Thoughts column is, surprisingly, not primarily about inflation, I introduced it here at the start of this piece to pile-drive home the foundational reasons anyone opts to invest, ideally over the bulk of a lifetime. We invest to TRY and grow some of our money faster than inflation, and taxes erode its purchasing power over the course of years and decades. The key differences between saving and investing are the levels of their targeted growth rates or yields, and, frankly, the stability of their price trajectories over time. Both are important, but for different reasons. SAVING AND INVESTING Savings stabilise our finances and, therefore, our emotions, as well. Investments, as mentioned above, are aimed at growing our money faster than inflation and taxes. (Those points are crucial enough to warrant repetition). Whenever I'm asked at one of my financial planning workshops or retirement funding seminars which is more important, saving or investing, I reply with a question of my own: For the human body, which is more important, our liver or our kidneys? The answer, obviously, is that we need both sets of organs to live well in a biological sense. Similarly, we need both disciplines, saving and investing, to thrive financially. We save money using cash repositories or instruments like piggy banks, envelopes, bank accounts and pure money market funds. And we invest in asset classes like fixed income, equities, investment real estate, and alternative investments (AI). Our savings grow slowly and steadily with no intermediate valuation dips. Our investments, on the other hand, fluctuate (up and down) over time; however, if they are successful over the long haul, they will rise in value faster than inflation and taxes erode the purchasing power of our money. Now please think for a moment about the price gyrations that go hand-in-hand with investing... Wouldn't it be amazing if we could — somehow, some way — harness that price volatility to further beef up our total investment returns? DOLLAR-COST AVERAGING Thankfully, there is just such a strategy. It's called dollar-cost averaging, and is often abbreviated to DCA. As I've written before, for DCA to work well, five criteria must be met when we embark upon a DCA-fuelled investment strategy. They are: 1. Only buy high quality assets — not rubbishy speculative ones; 2. Only buy assets that fluctuate in price — such price fluctuations give us the opportunity to buy more investments when prices are low and less when prices are high; 3. Use equal amounts of money — a key part of this discipline is to maintain an equal series of cash outlays; 4. Injected into those investments at equal time intervals — so that there is no element of pointlessly trying to time the market; and 5. Stay the course regardless of market conditions — which boils down to committing to this powerful wealth-building DCA strategy over the long haul, for a minimum of seven years, although time horizons in the 10- to 50-year range have a much higher probability of success. If you've never invested in such a manner, here's a suggested example for illustrative purposes: Criteria 1 and 2: Pick a high-quality stock or unit trust fund or entire fund portfolio; Criteria 3 and 4: Decide to set aside a fixed sum you can afford, say RM1,000 or RM3,000 or RM10,000, or any other RM amount — less or more or somewhere in between my suggested amounts — that suits your budget, and then regularly inject your selected amount at a convenient interval, such as once a month or a quarter; and Criterion 5: Stay the course and don't bail out simply because markets take a nosedive. It is when prices are low that the high-octane power of DCA truly kicks in. You might find it useful to reread this column straightaway and take down notes on how you might choose to use DCA for yourself. In next week's Money Thoughts column, I will explain the mechanics and specifics of an automated emotionless system to help you implement your personal DCA programme. I suggest, though, that you harness this proven strategy cautiously. By that I mean IF you've never embarked upon such a disciplined approach of investing, first reach out to a trusted remisier, unit trust consultant, banker or licensed financial planner to discuss your needs, wants, dreams, goals and plans. Then, with those in mind, start your personal (and personalised) DCA investment strategy, and stay the course — through good times and, more importantly, bad ones. Here's wishing you enormous financial success in the decades ahead. © 2025 Rajen Devadason
