There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
The distinction between business and capital is pretty blurred right now, and it shouldn't be. Operating a charity that delivers donated food to orphaned victims of war is a business in the broad sense of the word, and there are many things that go into operating it well, including things like management and finance. Those things do not, inherently, have to be in the pursuit of capital growth; there are many humanistic ends they can be directed to. But in our world as it stands they usually aren't - they're directed towards capital growth and that fact corrupts them like it corrupts everything else.
Or, put another way, there is a difference between "making enough money to run a sustainable business" and "making all the money it is possible to make". Many large businesses run reasonably substantial profit margins, and every dollar of profit a business makes is a dollar it could afford not to make in the pursuit of more humanistic ends if it so chose.
There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
Just as people should specialize, institutions should too.
We should not have this whole movement to jawbone companies into being “nice.” All we are going to get is a creepy facsimile. See, e.g. greenwashing.
Instead we should understand that profit maximizing firms operating in competition with each other is an incredibly powerful but one dimensional tool. We in our sovereign capacity should set the incentives and rules such that those tools are used to accomplish the things we collectively desire to see in the world.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable. A “better businessperson” is just transient luck.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable.
I wish this were true. But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against these things and attacks any sort of institutional infrastructure or notion of accountability whenever it's politically expedient to do so. In a less obvious way, that movement is also dedicated to the dismantlement of the administrative state - ostensibly in the name of returning legislative power and accountability to the Congress, pragmatically because it adheres to a vision of commercial activity with far less legal restraint.
But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against …
The point is you have to convince these people. That’s the whole and only ballgame.
Trying to pressure companies into wearing skinsuits via external or internal pressure might be satisfying but it’s a waste of effort.
Convince one company not to work with UAE and another one will gladly take its place. Elect a President that takes human rights into account in foreign policy and now you might get somewhere.
But to do that you have to actually go talk to people that disagree with you. Not just post preaching to the choir posts about how terrible those other guys are.
People (including me) have been trying that for years; but dialog only works if both parties approach it in good faith. When you have a political movement that leans heavily on orthodoxy and loyalty, and whose response to repeatedly losing elections is to simply insist they're rigged and the results are invalid (absent any credible evidence) discussions based on mutually agreeable priors and conventional logic are not fruitful.
The prevailing orthodoxy in this group is that losing elections or court cases is a priori evidence of fraud, violent action to overturn negative outcomes is often permissible, and that this right is reserved for future negative outcomes. They're not willing to be convinced, and loudly advertise their belief that it's OK to impose their point of view on others by force. I mean, if you're dealing with someone who avers that you should be fed into a woodchipper, it's not wise to put one arm in pursuit of a compromise.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's too controversial to say that those checks are not working very well right now. Changing the nature of regulatory capture isn't in my power. Starting a company and trying not to be crappy is.
the issue is as soon as you enable the power for some to set incentives and rules to see certain outcomes, it gets taken over by the rich entrenched status quo that is easily able to use the tools of modern propaganda to drown out any true grassroots opinion, and see to it that their horse is the one to win the race. It almost takes a total reset event like a gigantic war to shake up the economic status quo but even then, what forms in the dust is almost naturally these oligarchs like stardust accumulating into black holes after the big bang.
How can you separate capital from human interest when the majority of people on earth spend the majority of their time in pursuit of it? Less people starve today than ever in the past, and that is because we have more capital, not because we are more charitable than back then. Charity is not any less corrupt, it is just more emotionally appealing because of the illusion of selflessness and a whole lot less effective.
You say "your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions." But I claim that it's not your average businessperson it's your average person with business people just being a subset of that.
And that's not even getting into the problem of how does anybody really know how to make the world a better place. In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
I agree with you that this is not unique to businesspeople, although I suspect it's probably disproportionately represented there - both because business is attracted to people pursuing self-interest ruthlessly and because it often presents excellent conditions for tilting people towards self-interest even if not naturally inclined to it. But I would also make a distinction between what a business does and what businesspeople are. It's not hard to build incentive structures that turn good people towards bad ends.
I tend to think, for example, that your average Boeing engineer probably wanted to do a good job and not have doors fall off their planes. But when you put multiple layers of abstraction in the way and have leaders looking through business metrics, it isn't hard for everyday crappiness to maneuver its way to the point where that isn't prioritized. Almost no one in the chain really thinks they're sacrificing safety, they think they're doing their job and improving efficiency by cutting redundant steps.
> In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
Sure, because there's a difference between a performative "mission", a self-obsessed founder who makes their own success a story about the future of Earth, and someone who makes concretely difficult decisions when the chips are down.
This is kind of what I mean by the corruptive effects of growth. Having a mission is a good thing, but most companies' "missions" are implicitly always secondary to their financial growth, or worse, a cynical ploy for employee engagement. When people write crappy press releases about how "this will enable us to serve more of our users" (read: expand our market), that's not a statement about how serving users is bad, it's just that for most businesses it's necessarily with an asterisk of "we want to serve our users* *as long as it pleases our investors".
Do the majority spend their time in pursuit of money because they want to or because the rent is so damn high? Because it’s what we’re educated to do? I don’t mean academic education either. I mean Main Street social norms where there’s no longer being friends with neighbors. But they’ll mow your lawn for money if you’re ever too busy (had that exact conversation with a neighbor recently; we aren’t going to be friends/friendly but will serve you for $).
1. work for a business man
2. become a business man yourself
3. do some other job to support yourself and think / tinker only as a hobby