Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
Non monetary transactions aren’t actually free here. So Facebook users are very much their customers.
Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook.
As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
The three point safety belt was famously invented, and made a standard feature by Volvo who then let anyone use the patent in the name of safety in 1959.
This was decades before laws requiring seatbelts became a thing.
Safe cars sell. What makes you think that car safety is anything but a business strategy? There is of course the story of Volvo's handling of the patent for the 3-point seat belt, but that was over a half century ago and was notably not an American company. Has there been anything like that in recent history?
Toyota offered a ton (20,000+) of EV power train related patents for free in 2019, with the stated goal of combating climate change. Tesla did someone similar in 2014.
There’s a surprising number of such cases over time.
Fair enough, but you only gave examples without addressing the root of my question. What evidence is there that these aren't business strategies? How do we know these companies aren't just getting a nice press release in exchange for releasing a relatively low value patent or hoping to benefit long term when their technology becomes the industry standard? Is there actually evidence that these innovations would have been incredibly valuable to these companies if kept private but are instead being given away for the betterment of humanity? Because the original point wasn't that companies can never do anything good. It is that when given a choice between the betterment of humanity and profit, they almost always choose profit.
Be careful of those weasel words like almost always.
Any dollar not made is profit lost. So, every charitable donation would need to be a net gain for your preposition to be true. Obviously companies make sub optimal choices all the time even when aiming for profit.
A more realistic view is large companies are only loosely aligned with any one goal and people inside them regularly direct the companies resources for their own ends. This may mean using suppliers that wine and dine middle management, but it can also mean supporting whatever causes individuals with power feel are important.
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires."
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
It is a principle that applies to every kind of employee. If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.
>If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
It is frustrating how these things are always discussed. "The company" is used to deflect blame on any individual as if "the company" is some organism that acts of its own free will. When "the company" makes an immoral request of you, a person is doing that. You can respond to that person by telling them "no". In my experience, I have found this effective. And if I ever run into a situation in which it wasn't effective, that isn't the type of place I would want to work anyway. Sure, this is a stance somewhat made out of the privilege of the financial security my career has provided me, but the original company being discussed here is Meta, the average person making these decisions is likely much better off than me.
> It is frustrating how these things are always discussed.
I did not discuss things in the way that you say you are frustrated with.
If I had, then I wouldn't have said that your duty to the company will sometimes meet a higher duty. Or that you have the option of leaving the company if you do not agree with what it is doing. Or that I've actually done so.
Try giving it a closer read. In the end I'm defending capitalism as a lesser evil. And not saying that it justifies doing bad things.
You said "you have a duty to do what the company wants you to". "The company" doesn't have "wants". Maybe you have a duty to do what your boss wants, but assigning those wants to "the company" is perfectly in line with the type of behavior I was criticizing.
Assuredly you have encountered the idea that an organization with a culture, incentive structure, and specific financial incentives, will act sufficiently like a living being that people find it helpful to talk about it as one. While understanding the actual complexity of what is going on.
Apparently you've chosen to willfully refuse to understand what others mean when they such language. The result of which is a guaranteed miscommunication, and your ability to insist to yourself that you're right.
I will not bother attempting to discuss this further. If you choose to not understand why it is that organizations frequently and predictably act in ways that are not under the control of any individual within them, that is your prerogative. If you refuse to understand the kinds of language that people usually use to convey that idea, that's up to you.
What a weird response. You went from denying that you were discussing things this way to saying I'm willfully ignorant for not discussing things this way.
> The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation.
Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?
> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did
I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.
It always astounds me how stupid economists are. Like only an economist would use reasoning using terms something like epsilon to infinity to describe something that is a context dependent feedback loop in a closed system. Like these guys are literally idiots that studied real analysis then said maybe we can just apply that to an oil and gas company, without thinking about how it requires people and social consensus etc. to actually carry out these activities and they exist in a finite closed system with feedback.
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.
Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"
Friedmans theory is basically a non-statement. It’s so banal as to be vacuous, except as a justification. It’s like saying the point of life is to procreate. Like no shit, but that’s not all that it is.
To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.
But the change is not just cultural, after Friedman et al. came a wave of deregulation and changes in the tax system. Deregulation that allows businesses to get away with bad business practices, and a tax system that resulted in the skyrocketing of CEO pay. CEOs became not just well-paid employees anymore, but actual part of the shareholder class.
We need to at least get back to post-war capitalism where businesses were more regulated, the tax system was progressive, and the economy grew more than ever.
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy.
China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways.
It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved.
Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets:
An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.
Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
The person you're replying to isn't at the opposite of your stance. They complimented China on several occasions. All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you. This isn't just about western-style capitalism vs. semi-planned Chinese capitalism, it's also one-party authoritarianism vs democracy. You just tossed a crass, ideological one-liner back at them, as if "big number = very good" with no nuance refutes what they said.
China does some things right. Our current system encourages deception, abuse and rent-seeking. But that doesn't mean that there's no self-serving interests in China or that we should follow them like a perfect ideological beacon. There's got to be more options to tame our system than full authoritarianism.
> All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you.
Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.
Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:
Respectfully, you should follow recent events in TW and realized they're slightly behind or slightly ahead of US in political shitshow schedule, and it's no small part due to Audrey Tang / DPP crafting a pro/anti PRC culture war political machine that exploded into great recall drama last month... which contained some not very democratic tactics by DPP (Tang's party). TLDR is DPP thought they could sustain domestic politics by hammering antiPRC narratives without delivering on the home/economy front... and eventually constituents saw through the bullshit when they realized mainstreet was not improving and political system likely not capable of delivering mainstreet improvement. It actually maps pretty aptly to US situation, except instead of rotating through villlians TW/DPP had the luxury of just focusing on PRC for a few years post HK crackdown. But now TWers realize villainizing PRC (however legitimate) hasn't actually improved their economic well being. Something I think US will learn eventually too, as in there's probably "legitimate" reasons for US to villainize PRC for geopolitical competition, but unless US policies deliver on the homefront, it's only going to distract for so long, i.e.make the underlying economic system is work for masses.
I will be interested to read about lessons learned from all perspectives. As it stands, the open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock with tangible legislative results that benefit ordinary citizens. Surely there have been competing interests along the way to set them off course, but I trust they will prevail.
>open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock
TW democratization started in 90s, the system is young by democratic standards, IMO more accurate to say sufficient time has passed that TW system has now accumulated gridlock problems like other consolidated democracies which partisan politics are increasingly unable to resolve. Hence partisan brawls, long delays in budget bills, stalled constitutional reforms. The patient is getting sicker.
On one hand, the recall failure is sign that system is working, on the other hand it's your generic democracy is referendum on incumbent, i.e. voters can express dissatisfaction of party in power, but that really doesn't resolve the underlying problem that structurally intractable issues likely also can't be resolved by alternate parties because addressing them is too politically costly - switching leadership will get you back to square one because no party can square the political calculus of doing difficult things without rapidly losing power. So they don't, choosing to slowly bleeding power as voters get disenfranchised and realize there is no change coming. Which is not to say they can't, but IMO one of the reasons why norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things.
Your second paragraph suggests you don't have any familiarity with the novel design of the digital systems that were built to work around the inadequacies you described.
Nearly impossible for anyone who isn't proficient in Mandarin to do this. Western journalists tend to be extremely biased in favour of the DPP, because DPP's anti-PRC rhetoric aligns with the West's own anti-PRC biases.
