Books by "Michael C. Wicks"
3 books found
Stocks or Stakeholders: The Benefits of Considering Animal Interests
by Michael D. Briscoe
2025 · BRILL
Animals are typically treated as property in modern societies. Stocks or Stakeholders extends stakeholder theories to animals, arguing that full consideration of their interests will benefit humans. For example, one analysis in the book shows that more protected land is associated with fewer animal-vehicle collisions—events that currently cost millions of dollars each year and injure both humans and animals. Regardless of how readers personally feel about animals, Stocks or Stakeholders makes a compelling case for seriously considering their interests.
America is in trouble. Today’s young people seem destined to become the nation’s first generation poorer than their parents. A changing climate, dangerously overvalued financial markets and political instability (recent polling shows many Americans believe civil war is imminent) simultaneously threaten America. What has happened to us? What can we do about it? America in Crisis employs the new disciplines of cliodynamics and cultural evolution to explain how and why we have come to this place. Cliodynamics teaches that crises like this have happened before and stem from consequences of rising inequality. Cultural evolution provides the processes through which inequality and society in general change with time. The book tells the story of how and why America evolved from the previous crisis a century ago through a period of broadly shared prosperity and stability (both political and financial) to the current crisis. This story welds the ideas of cliodynamacists, evolutionary scientists, cultural historians, economists and political scientists into data-rich verbal and mathematical models illustrated with numerous charts and tables. From this synthesis come fresh insights concerning race relations, economics, foreign policy, and how addressing climate change can create a stronger and more prosperous America. The final chapter describes some ideas on how we might proceed going forward.
Prodded by economists in the 1970s, corporate directors began adding stock options and bonuses to the already-generous salaries of CEOs with hopes of boosting their companies’ fortunes. Guided by largely unproven assumptions, this trend continues today. So what are companies getting in return for all the extra money? Not much, according to the empirical data. In Indispensable and Other Myths: Why the CEO Pay Experiment Failed and How to Fix It, Michael Dorff explores the consequences of this development. He shows how performance pay has not demonstrably improved corporate performance and offers studies showing that performance pay cannot improve performance on the kind of tasks companies ask of their CEOs. Moreover, CEOs of large established companies do not typically have much impact on their companies’ results. In this eye-opening exposé, Dorff argues that companies should give up on the decades-long experiment to mold compensation into a corporate governance tool and maps out a rationale for returning to the era of guaranteed salaries.