the grabbing hands grab all they can

I was commenting to cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

(no subject)

Every once in a while I see something that just stuns me, and I can barely form a coherent response.

This is an example. To put it simply, virtually all growth in US prosperity in the last 25 years has been enjoyed by white households. A pattern like this cannot happen in a land where opportunity is truly free and open to all.

In examining data from 1984 to 2007, Brandeis's Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that the average white family now has accumulated $95,000 more in total wealth than the average African-American family. One quarter of African-American families, the report notes, currently have no financial assets to protect themselves from financial ruin.

The report's authors argue that, through a mixture of policy mistakes and discrimination, most of the wealth during that period flowed into the hands of white families.

In a study published last year, the University of California, Berkeley's Emmanuel Saez found that income inequality in the U.S. had hit an all-time high in 2007. But the Brandeis study points to a "broken chain of achievement" among African-Americans that, even at relatively moderate levels of income, creates large disparities.

"By 2007, the average middle income white household accumulated $74,000," the report's authors note, "whereas average high income African Americans owned only $18,000."