Post by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiOn the other hand, I can trust that if Coca Cola calculates that
it's cheaper to assassinate Colombian union organizers than it
would be to pay higher wages there, then the company will have them
assassinated.
First, we cannot assume that the leadership of Coca Cola
is a collection of sociopaths.
Right. In their everyday lives, they probably aren't sociopaths at
all. But it isn't at all necessary to assume that they should be.
It sort of amazes me that so many people can be trained to get into a
plane, fly it over a country that they know nothing about, and press
buttons that will drop tons of unguided explosives on whomever happens
to be standing around down there. If all those people were
sociopaths, the United States would be destroyed by its own citizens
in one afternoon. But I've met some of them, and they didn't kill me
and take my wallet. So I know they must be very nice people.
The leadership of Coke has definitely been trained to get financial
results. We could even call that a "Selection pressure". If they
hadn't gotten good financial results in the past, they wouldn't have
been promoted to leadership positions; and if they don't continue to
get good results, then they won't stay there. Simple enough.
We can't assume that the shareholders of Coke -- the bosses of the
leadership, in a sense -- are sociopaths either. Most of them
probably have very nice goals, like sending their children to Harvard,
so that they can achieve up to their full potential. Those investers
have nothing personally against the trouble-making union organizers in
Colombia, and certainly wouldn't shoot one if they met him/her. But
they're not going to waste their time reading Human Rights Watch
reports on Colombia, either. These investers are serious people, with
real-world concerns: not a bunch of long-haired, pot-smoking, liberal
idealists.
You see where I'm going, yes? The investers pay attention to the
financial state of the companies they've invested in, because that's
how they'll pay off their son's new car -- he's a great kid, and he
shouldn't look like a bum compared to his friends. So they make sure
that the people in charge will make the stock prices keep going up,
and not worry too much as long as that's happening. There's more than
enough to worry about in life without seeking out problems to get
upset over. What do people expect, anyway: "World peace"?
Post by Les CargillSecond, even sociopaths will
avoid a crime that has significant downside risk.
I looked up "Downside risk," and still don't know what you mean. But
if you think the stock prices might go down because some union
organizers in bottling plants in Colombia are getting killed, and Coke
contracts out their bottling to those plants ... well, nothing in the
mainstream culture will make that happen. Do you think the New York
Times will run an expose of this unethical behavior, and face the
certainty of law suits which they would definitely lose? Because
really, Coke *isn't* responsible. They told the owner of the plant to
get results, or they'd contract out to someone else. They never said
to "Kill" anyone!
Sure there are a few memos from Coke employees saying things like "The
organizing efforts must be stopped at any cost ... if you need help
with the Colombian government, our corporation has certain links which
we could exploit on your behalf..." But *really*, any suggestion that
the company condones violence is utterly slanderous! (I'm making most
of this up, naturally.)
Same with sweatshops; coffee; etc... If you don't think so, then
explain why coffee growers get payed $.30/lb for coffee which sells in
the American market for $7/lb? Isn't that strange? Why don't they
get together and demand higher wages?
Post by Les CargillThis is *clearly* Bad Business. This is how mineowners thought
in 1900, and they've been repeatedly proven wrong.
If you're talking about doing business within a "Developed" country
like the US, where some people can afford lawyers and such, then I'm
sure you're somewhat correct.
Post by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiPost by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiLets try an example, just for fun. Suppose I run an advertising
company, and my research shows that kids are very insecure about
what brand of shoe they wear. If I'm being properly competitive,
I see this as an opportunity, *not* as a social problem. I ask,
"How can we make kids even more insecure about whether their shoes
are trendy enough, and then position one brand as the solution?"
I don't think that's very imaginary - we've seen the rise of NIke
and Reebok through this. Very effective. Buncha bovine
defecation, but still extremely effective.
Exactly.
And?
So it's easier to market products to insecure people. Since the
economic indicators mostly represent that as a good thing, insecurity
shows up as a benefit in the statistics.
I'm arguing that this is a fundamental problem with the system; not
some little anomaly that shows up now and then. Long-term happyness
in the population is bad for anyone who wants to sell more and more,
all the time. Contented people are harder to manipulate into buying
what they don't need.
Which might not matter, except that many corporations have the
resources to make people unhappy. You can hire a bunch of behavioral
psychologists, and say "Design a commercial that will sell our
deodorant". The psychologists aren't naive: they won't come back and
say, "We could do that, but we'd have to create a lot of anxiety in
people, and that would be unethical. Are you marketing people
*really* sure that you want us to do this bad thing, just so the
corporation can make even more money?" No no: the children of
psychologists have to go to Berkeley, or else how will they ever make
their way in this nasty world?
Post by Les CargillIt's not coercion. It is manipulation. Fine line.
It is a fine line. The ideology I see in most economics classes
*encourages* any amount of manipulation, short of coercion.
Post by Les CargillWell, sure. That's the Madison Avenue pheonomenon ( although it
was antedated by print ). It's fairly old hat; you younger guys
just don't have a Rod Serling and Paddy Chaefsky around to
*remind* you. Go find "The HIdden Persuaders" in a library,
or rent "Network".
Well, I'm old by college student standards.
I know that a lot of this isn't new at all. I recently went to an
old-style market, with the craftspeople at the booths, all trying to
sell their wares. Of course there's a component of manipulation
involved, and has been for longer than anyone can remember.
What's frightening is to see it all dressed up like a science, and
crammed down people's throats in classrooms. "Efficiency," and all
these other exalted concepts. There's a pretense that it has nothing
to do with politics at all: that people just *are* these consuming
machines, and statistics in labour markets, and holders of "Human
capital". A world view disguised as scientifically revealed truth, is
how it often feels.
Post by Les CargillI know what you are saying - this is often treated as though Wealth
of Nations were Holy Writ. It's not - it's a damn good theory which
has sevred well. But it's *served* us, not the other way 'round.
Yes, it should.
Post by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiI went to a lecture once, given by a former torte lawyer who'd quit
practicing law to become an organizer for the Sierra Club. She
said that in order to have any chance of making a tort case like
the one we're talking about stick, you would need clear proof that
the contaminant released by the company had caused the diseases
being experienced. In other words, if people were just getting
cancer, there'd be practically no chance of proving that any
particular thing had been responsible.
I hope that's the standard, and that it continues to be the
standard.
As a former science student, I really believe that "Scientific proof"
is an oxymoron. You just don't "Prove the theory right," even in a
lab. Especially in biology.
Post by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiI also remember watching spokespeople for the tobacco industry on
TV, as a kid, explaining that there was no proven link between
smoking and cancer.
Um, the links are still much more tenuous than perhaps they should
be... and it took a long time to get *that* close.
Sometimes we need the precautionary principle. Just because I can't
prove that eating feces would be bad for me doesn't mean that it would
be okay to try it. Same with global warming: we have wide-spread
consensus among the people who've studied it, but the only way to
prove it definitively would be to wait and see. Even then, we could
go on pointing out that the storms and temperature shift might be
coincidental anomalies right up to the end. A scientist doesn't
expect God to come down and put it in writing -- which might be proof,
of a sort.
Post by Les CargillWhat makes me queasy is that the management of Big Tobacco has been
proven right by their adversaries. And that the truth is the first
casualty of war....
I can't guess what you mean, except that your perspective is probably
quite different. ;)
Post by Les CargillThe words that should scare you most of all are "but it's
for your own good...".
That's what I hear from the economists I've met. That I *am* happiest
when I'm consuming the maximum amount, so whatever system encourages
efficiency will be the best one for me.
Post by Les CargillPost by Steve MurgaskiWhen I want to give myself waking nightmares, I think about how the
Nazi program seems very compatible with economic theories I've
learned.
I'd recommend a good course of readin', there. Start with "Rise and
Fall", work yer way out. Get soem Orwell in there, too...
Solzhenitsyn.
I do read some of that.
But I suppose your point is that there aren't concentration camps or
gulags here. People aren't picked up in the middle of the night for
writing subversive things like this post, or for not having
identification papers. True enough.
But you agree that Stalin and Hitler were able to accomplish a great
deal of what economists consider success, speaking in purely
statistical terms? They both inherited terrible economic situations
from previous wars, and were able to increase almost everything. Sure
it meant killing large numbers of people, but that's not an economic
statistic -- except that it probably helped make unemployment go down.
I don't think it should surprise anyone that harsh dictators can look
really good in an economic assessment. The whole idea is that people
should be as machine-like as possible -- except for the innovators in
management. Machines are simply more efficient than we are, in
general. The closer we can immitate them, the better it looks from
that perspective.
In the long-run, yes, it is better if the guys on top innovate. The
Soviets had some systems that tried to encourage that, but apparently
they weren't as effective as our system of producing wide-spread
anxiety through advertising, and then exploiting that to make everyone
feel that they need more and more in order to be safe. So the motive
force behind this machine is probably more effective.
But if/when the thing does quit performing, for some reason, we're all
set to make good economic arguments for becoming a dictatorship. It
would be in everyone's best interests (excepting maybe the ones who
die, and no longer show up statistically).