I've heard that, strictly speaking, even in the USA, business corporations don't have to be run purely to maximise shareholder returns: it is not a legal requirement. And it has often been recognised that to do so leads to 'short-termism', at odds with the corporation's long-term survival (e.g. Kodak, Boeing). In some European countries a supervisory board exists to prevent the constant drive to maximise profits and shareholder returns. In America, at that time, this principle was called putting the "going concern" ahead of shareholder returns, and it was more or less the prevailing view of the New Deal era. Thus, in his 1946 classic 'The Concept of the Corporation', written with the assistance of General Motors, Peter Drucker wrote that:

"In the social reality of today, however, shareholders are but one of several groups of people who stand in a special relationship to the corporation. The corporation is permanent, the shareholder is transitory. It might even be said without much exaggeration that the corporation is really socially and politically a priori whereas the shareholder's position is derivative and exists only in contemplation of law…. the essence of the corporation is social, that is human, organization. "(pp. 20–21)

This was (as the saying goes) our grandparents' capitalism, somewhat more paternalilstic and long term in focus than today, and the problem is precisely that an increasing focus on absentee shareholder returns has come increasingly to the fore, almost without anyone noticing or questioning it, other than in those European countries where they have supervisory boards.

The most extreme example I am aware of is in New Zealand where I live, where electricity generation and retailing used to be planned by the state for the purposes of economic development off the back of cheap hydroelectricity, but has since come to be run for profit as a price-goucing oligopoly of joint generator-retailers called 'gentailers' (partly state owned still, but run strictly for profit so taxes can be cut). Lots of productive firms are closing down and workers being thrown onto the streets because NZ currently has the most expensive wholesale electric power in the world, or nearly so, due to hydro shortages: i.e. the opposite of the old policy. According to a recent report called 'Generating Scarcity', (with a referemce I have not included),

"Since the partial privatisation of Genesis, Mercury and Meridian, the gentailers (including Contact Energy) have distributed $8.7 billion in dividends to shareholders, $3.7 billion more than they earned in profits over this period. This has starved the network of the investment needed to fund new generating assets while keeping existing gas and coal-generating facilities on life support."

It goes without saying that paying out 174% of profits to shareholders is the very opposite of maintaining a "going concern." This sort of thing could be compared, I suppose, to the gradual loss of civic virtue that is said (by some) to have been the root cause of the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire, whether that is true or not: could it be that 'De te fabula narratur est?'