100% agreement with how you put it. I believe it’s crucial to empathize with everyone. Sympathy is fully separate, and not something that I have for the relevant management staff at Boeing/WellsFargo/etc. But empathy is what allows us to understand why somebody wants to do something, which is pretty necessary if we intend to alter that behavior.
That Wells Fargo article you cite above vilifies low-level bankers as the true bad actors:
> “The real crime here is that low-level retail bankers set up fake accounts in order to scam Wells Fargo out of their modest paychecks” just doesn’t work as a story of the scandal, even if there is a certain partial truth to it as a mechanical matter.
Meanwhile, the upper managers who put in place the incentives that guaranteed fraud would occur by low-level bankers are only guilty of "mismanagement":
> In the case of Wells Fargo, though, I suppose it’s possible that the attorney general thinks the shareholders really were the victims. They didn’t benefit from the fake accounts, and it is not crazy to say that they were harmed by Wells Fargo’s mismanagement.
Carrie Tolstedt took home tens of millions of dollars for inducing fraud, but only the scapegoats who did the dirty work for her are held morally culpable. The author doesn't even notice that just like those low-level retail bankers, Tolstedt scammed shareholders out of her (enormous) paycheck.
It's a perfect example of extending excessive empathy to executives while hypocritically withholding it from others.
And that is exactly what's happening in this thread. Executive malfeasance gets endlessly excused away as the product of poor incentives, because in your quest to humanize executives, you succumb to the perfectly natural human foible of "to know all is to forgive all".
Now, I'm not saying you're a mustache-twirling villain. But people who are unable to apply their principles when the chips are down and hold executives accountable are at the root of the problem.
Even the quote you cited doesn’t “vilify” anybody. It points out exactly what I described above: Wells Fargo execs created a situation with perverse incentives, no oversight, and reckless disregard for both, which led to low-level bankers predictably misusing the system. It’s not in dispute that the low-level bankers were the ones creating the fake accounts, and as the article notes, this wasn’t even desirable for the execs: they wanted the accounts because accounts lead to income, but faked accounts do not lead to income.
Your comment again points to some perceived inability on my part to “hold executives accountable”, citing some flaw with my principles. I’d invite you to review the site guidelines and my comments: at no point have I suggested that the executives aren’t culpable in both the Boeing and Wells Fargo examples. You seem to be inferring that empathy is incompatible with judgement, and that misconception is basically the heart of what I’m trying to call attention to in this exchange.
> they wanted the accounts because accounts lead to income
Why is it a given that low-level retail bankers wanted faked accounts for the sake of their income, yet it is outside the realm of possibility that Carrie Tolstedt wanted faked accounts because they led to income for her — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?
Why is it utterly inconceivable that Carrie Tolstedt is corrupt?
You seem pretty dead set on imagining that the only options are cartoon villainy or total innocence. I’m not sure how else I can frame the above points, given the continued selective quoting and misreading of the cited articles (notably, the Wells Fargo incident was not net-profitable for Wells Fargo, and was barely profitable at all even before all the government-imposed penalties).
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about the strength of my principles.
