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by justinboogaard
2010 days ago
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I like to think that "ethical" bad decisions are also "short term thinking" bad business decisions. Two small examples that come to mind: (1) Investing in clean energy is both ethical and cheaper in the long term. This one is straightforward.
(2) Apple not turning ads on in iMessage. I assume they could, they just don't. If I was them I wouldn't because then it would start degrading consumer trust in the security of their products, losing that as a differentiator in the long term despite minting money in the short term. Happy to be wrong though. Some data that I think could weaken my argument is if there are counter-examples of large companies that have been around for a long time that have sustained ethical compromises that haven't see hits to their bottom line because of it. |
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More broadly, if a business decision is good for the short term but bad for the long term, but the person making that decision doesn't expect to be around for the kind of "long term" that would show how bad it is...then that person is incentivized to make that kind of decision, absent a) regulations of some sort changing those incentives, or b) actually caring about human beings in some meaningful way.
And partly because of the general short-term-thinking-ism, it's very common—almost expected—for people of all levels to jump ship for a better paycheck after 3, 5, maybe 10 years, tops...and, of course, for the bigger short-term thinking problem (climate change), a significant percentage, if not a supermajority, of the people making the decisions that affect that don't expect to be alive long enough to see the serious effects of it, whether or not they believe they will actually happen.