The structure and governance of American corporations has utterly changed for the worst, The new paradigm of running AT&T's solely for the benefit of shareholders, Instead of having vertically integrated companies that produced everything they sold, AT&T have outsourced as much as they could at the expense of the US workers.
There’s probably nothing that can be done to force the markets to reward companies that create jobs. But at least we should stop pretending that increasing the number of listed public companies will automatically create more jobs.