[ajkjk]

What confuses me is how many people are evidently in the job of "ruthless exec" and then they do it amorally. I can't think of any time in my life that I've seen an exec say: no, we could do that, but we shouldn't because it's wrong. No doubt because anyone who acts that way gets naturally-selected out of the job.

But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!

So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.

[Earw0rm]

Financial companies figured out how to do this in the run-up to the GFC, and everyone else learned it from them in the immediate aftermath.

"They did all that, and literally none of them went to jail? We got to get us some..."

Post-2008 tech companies were built that way from the get-go.

[ajkjk]

I think it's useless to believe that the explanation behind everything is "greed". It's so easy to blame greed; it's amorphous and meaningless; it gives you nothing you can do; it's the logic of a people who are sure nothing can change, that the way things are is inherent: the rich are greedy, the bad things in the world are powerful people taking advantage of us for benefit, sad for us.

It seems pretty clear that the forces at work are designed to incentivize, reward, and rationalize "greed", and so if one just does their job, so to speak, they will end up doing the greedy thing at every turn. And really we are fine with it! -- what we value more than anything is value creation (on paper). No matter if the actual world is getting worse as long as it appears to be getting better: the economy/investment accounts/stock grants are going up.

[Earw0rm]

There is immorality, there is amorality, and then there is architecting systems intentionally so that none of the actors within the system are constrained by their personal mortality.

"We were only obeying orders" all the way up. And even when you get to the top, they're only obeying the orders of the market.

At least, that's what they'll tell you, and that's what they tell themselves.

[staunton]

The two paragraphs seem contradictory to me...

The fist paragraph seems to say: "greed is not a good explanation", while the second seems to claim: "greed explains everything and we are all OK with it".

[ajkjk]

No, I'm saying: greed is not a good explanation; what looks like greed is essentially required by the world we've built; blaming it on greed alone is an attitude of hopelessness. The problem is our ambient value system, which demands corporations act greedy.

[navane]

There seems to be a new system in place which takes these amoral CEOs and does make them accountable.

[hackable_sand]

It's the truth, and we've had these systems since the dawn of civilization. Idk why people are acting surprised now when we've been doing this for thousands of years.

If people in power don't provide and protect a democratic process to removing poor leadership then they do not get to complain when people make those decisions on their own.

[Earw0rm]

Exec., meet exec.?

[int_19h]

I think the cause and effect here are reversed. Thing is, in a society like ours, you pretty much have to be a shitty human being to become a CEO of anything even remotely big. It inevitably requires walking on heads and abusing people to the extent that no moral person would be comfortable with.

So we have a system that puts selection pressure on economic elites to be sociopathic. And then those same people write the books on "how to be a good CEO" etc, so of course they are going to say that you're not supposed to do things that they themselves don't do.