[SimianSci]

Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.

The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.

[Aromasin]

Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.

Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.

[vintagedave]

This is one of the most amazing comments I have read on HN.

You absolutely get to the core of why and how 'leaving it to the market' and money-oriented choices remove social cohesion, trust, and fairness.

[Aromasin]

Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.

[cucumber3732842]

I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".

You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.

[LorenPechtel]

One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.

[Aromasin]

The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'

[LorenPechtel]

You miss my point--it's the hypothetical child suffering.

Everything else on that list is putting better versions behind a paywall, this is purely removing a negative. They are fundamentally different issues.

[sdellis]

Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.

The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.

The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.

[abnercoimbre]

> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.

Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):

"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. -Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"

And if you would let me indulge one more:

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. -Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"

[sdellis]

Excellent quotes! Thanks for sharing.

[ThrowawayR2]

There is a very, very clear and specific problem: "free" advertising supported sites incentivizes farming user engagement. Farming user engagement needs be sharply curtailed because it's proven to be broadly damaging to society and the direct way to do that is to reduce the incentive, advertising revenue. It's as straightforward as that.

[phendrenad2]

Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.

[barbazoo]

> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people

People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.

[iamwil]

Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.

[legitster]

Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy.

"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)

Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.

As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.

[Aromasin]

Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.

[spacecadet]

Yes. Greed is king right now.