Comment by dustingetz

It's not the accountants' fault. The only force binding together the thousands of people that make up a corporation is the accounting (accountability). Before the advent of accounting, there were not corporations, as any concentration of capital would be immediately diffused through fraud. It would be great if society could figure out how to be accountable to metrics other than profit and revenue, but so far we haven't figured out how to measure anything else, so we can't optimize for it.