[solidsnack9000]

Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

[ryderm]

> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about.

If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

[intended]

It’s not.

Profit is achieved primarily by selling people goods.

people want cheap meat, coffee and toys.

We found ways to give people that.

There are other effects where corporations cheat the laws, corrupt government, and pillage the environment - true.

But the system has always been about you and me getting more choice and more options at better prices.

Your toothpastes offer different flavors, and come in a magic immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes.

Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number.

That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone.

We just have to Examine the price.

I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism.

Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such.

Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs.

[johnny22]

You're making too many assumptions in almost every statement here. If you're going to continue with this line of thinking then please back it up with evidence.

[intended]

Well yeah, if someone is going to try and simplify how the world economy works in one paragraph, I would expect large amounts of simplification.

[toofy]

Indeed. We need a new and more comprehensive set of metrics by which we measure value add or success.

When considering how successful a thing, a person, or a project is, innovation and market success certainly should be weighted heavily but we really need some other metrics to include.

[kareemsabri]

It's really not. People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. They are answerable to their friends, family, community etc. If that were the case, why would people be resigning from Google over moral issues?

[hasbroslasher]

This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.

[kareemsabri]

No, they said our society and economic system incentivize profit over all else. Neither of those things are true.

Lots of people make principled decisions every single day. You think only rich engineers can afford to put morals over money, and everyone else is selling their soul for a paycheck? Where do you live?

[solidsnack9000]

It's the other way around -- if only we didn't expect the economic system to serve every social need.

Business and the economy are doing what they are supposed to do. It's our expectations that are out of line.

[longerthoughts]

If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them? Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?

[solidsnack9000]

If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them?

They aren't exempt from serving any social needs -- that's taking what I said further than I said it. Business do serve many social needs. They just can't serve every social need. They are a limited institution with a limited function.

It's not just government and individual people that come together to make a robust society that can counterbalance business interests; and business, government and the individual are not all we have at our disposal to meet the broad challenge of maintaining a just, livable and inspiring society. The wide variety of "civil society" institutions that, at one time, characterized the American polity -- unions & professional associations, men's and women's organizations, benevolent societies, church groups and religious federations -- are important avenues to political participation outside of (a) government, (b) the individual and (c) business. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order & Political Decay, highlights the great significance of civil society organizations in the survival of democracy in America, and the eventual adoption of it in England, Denmark and many other countries.

Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?

They need to be regulated so as to (a) "...prevent them from taking actions that damage society" and (b) encourage them to stick closer to action that is beneficial to society. Were businesses to determine on their own what those things mean, it would effectively be undermining the political will of the rest of society. Businesses are paid to do a job.

Please consider that your reply was a little exaggerated, taking what I said further than I said it. This is quite characteristic of American politics at present; and perhaps of hacker politics in general. It doesn't serve us, though: it neither helps us to understand one another, nor to come to a workable agreement that improves public life.

[CamperBob2]

Any better suggestions?

Ones that actually work as intended in the general case, and don't frequently malfunction by getting a bunch of people exiled, consigned to real poverty, or killed?

[WalterSear]

> Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

The problem isn't that people are expecting businesses to be charities. It's that survival and solvency make abuse of the commons a business necessity.

People want jobs that don't involve abusing the commons.

[solidsnack9000]

The parent comment does mentions several key areas of public benefit where they'd like to see business step in.