DuPont is one of dozens of American companies that have abandoned a long-term approach to doing business after being the target of so-called activist investors. These investors buy up shares of a company and attempt to maximize the returns to their shares, usually by replacing members of the board of directors with hand-picked candidates who will push the company to cut costs. Activity by such investors has skyrocketed of late. In a 20-month stretch in 2005 and 2006, there were only 52 activist campaigns, according to John C. Coffee, a professor at Columbia University Law School. Between 2010 and early 2014, by contrast, there were 1,115 activist campaigns. “Hedge-fund activism has recently spiked, almost hyperbolically,” Coffee writes in a 2016 paper, “The Wolf at The Door: The Impact of Hedge Fund Activism on Corporate Governance.”

These campaigns are damaging to the long-term outlook of individual companies like DuPont and also to America’s economy more generally. They often result in big cuts to research and development, substantial reductions in the workforce, and a focus on outcomes—in particular short-term profit—that hurt a company’s ability to survive in the long-term. The threat of activism affects companies across the economy: Even public companies not targeted by activists often change their behavior and cut costs to avoid becoming a target. This may be one of the reasons why America is slipping in funding research and development projects when compared with other countries.

“You have to look after the goose that lays the golden egg,” Anne Simpson, the senior portfolio manager at California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), told me. CalPERS owns shares in DuPont, and opposed the Trian actions. “Cutting R&D can make everything look sparkly and bright for a while, but if you’re like us, and looking decades into the future, you won’t generate new products.”

Though he initially lost a battle to replace four members of DuPont’s board of directors with people of his choosing, Peltz has succeeded in changing the company. Trian seems to have convinced DuPont shareholders and executives that the company needs to focus on making more money. Beginning in late 2015, shortly after Peltz’s campaign to “optimize stockholder value,” DuPont made a number of changes. DuPont’s CEO Ellen Kullman, a company veteran, abruptly resigned. The new CEO, Ed Breen, is a veteran of dismantling large conglomerates, and plans to merge DuPont with Dow and then split the giant company into three different parts, a split Peltz had long wanted. The changes mean cutting back on research-and-development costs (R&D)—most significantly with the closure of the research lab that employed Ron Ozer—and eliminating certain departments, and slashing thousands of jobs. “This company is over 200 years old, and this guy who has nothing to do with the industry has basically got people on the board slashing R&D, just pumping money out of the company,” William Lazonick, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, told me. “And none of it is illegal.”