That's the only thing I take issue with here. Characterizing this as intentional misconduct muddies the waters. The line between cutting costs and benefiting from an increased share price is long and winding. Don't blame people; examine systems.
Where most of the money goes is back to keeping costs low for consumers, the same ones that are conscientiously keeping the tap water off.
Just because you can't easily put the blame on individuals doesn't mean they're not responsible. Our "system" is great at "blame laundering" or obfuscating ethical implications of decisions through diffusion of responsibility and removal of context at different boundaries. But the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way. Leaders who don't act to change the system are shitty leaders, and they are guilty.
> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way
Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing systems as solely the product of individual decisions is like viewing your brain solely as the product of the movement of individual atoms. You lose all predictive capability. If you do something immoral, is there some group of cells or atoms that I can directly 'assign blame' to?
A more nuanced and honest view would be to observe that certain structures predictably result in the some consequences, often regardless of the initial beliefs, desires, or moral righteousness of the individuals caught within them.
Sometimes the only way to change the outcome is to change the large-scale structure and incentives within the system. We can do that by changing laws, regulations, and also sometimes by naming and shaming certain individuals; but first we have to admit that systems do have 'a mind of their own'.
Actually measuring, or even hypothesizing about, the predictive capability of different models of varying levels of abstraction is something that happens disturbingly rarely in fields that aren't the hard sciences. I suspect an important (but not primary) reason for this is that most people simply don't have an opportunity to be exposed to the type of maths and analysis required for systems theory, and thus are extremely unlikely to surmise that something like systems theory is a distinct thing that can even exist.
If there is a hierarchical structure to the brain wherein some highly influential neurons direct the rest of the brain toward the immoral behavior, you can at least assign the lions share to them.
I do agree that carefully structured incentives and disincentives are the thing that can lead to the best outcomes.
Seminal systems theorist Donella Meadows mentioned in an excellent talk[1] that she (and other "systems thinkers") tends to avoid blame entirely, due to understanding the constraints and incentives people operate under.
> it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Capitalism is basically a force of nature, like evolution. Claiming anyone can orchestrate it is analogous to intelligent design.
I do agree that we all, and leaders more than most, bear responsibility to improve the system. But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person. If it were that easy to control complex systems, Obama would have closed Guantanamo.
Was one prison really so important to TPTB? I think not really. If Obama had actually done what he had claimed to have wanted to do, they wouldn't have implemented their "JFK solution" for that infraction alone. After all he dutifully expanded the murderdeathterrordrone program, just like the presidents before and after him. He persecuted more whistleblowers than any president before him, just like his successor is determined to do. If the spooks want to "get their torture on" near a beach, they can just fly to one of their "black sites" in Thailand or Indonesia. Insisting on a Caribbean beach is for jet-lag wimps.
It's instructive to compare Obama's Guantanamo promise to his successor's tariff and bigotry promises. There are far fewer intellectual objections to closing Guantanamo than there are e.g. to starting trade wars with allies or making racism the national immigration policy, and also it's unambiguously the ethical thing to do. Still, one leader is keeping his awful promises while the other couldn't keep his good ones.
And don't give me the "politics" crap. Democrats lost ground in every legislature in the nation, starting two years into Obama's administration and continuing into the present election cycle during which they will lose even more. [0] Whatever goal was supported by breaking his promise, it wasn't getting Democrats elected.
[0] Remember, once Republicans control 34 state houses (32 now) they can start passing whatever awful Constitutional amendments they want! Do you really want our Constitution to have something about who can use which public restroom? Because this total electoral ineptitude is how you make that happen... in 2020 we'll all have to vote Libertarian just to keep the Bill of Rights intact.
There is no "Powers That Be!". That's my whole point. Obama didn't do it because 1) he realized his entire presidency would be devoted on an uphill slog to better the lives of a couple hundred people, and 2) there was no simple answer as to where to put them. You can view the world through an us against them perspective, or you can actually try to understand how all the little bits of it interact with each other.
The simple answer is to let them go. You don't have to let them go in USA. If you can't bribe some Pacific island to take them along with all the Uyghurs, then release them in the benighted desert wasteland from where you kidnapped them. If the nominal government of said wasteland doesn't want them, use some of that good old CIA ingenuity to smuggle them in anyway. What better use of "Special Forces", than to fix previous screw-ups that used Special Forces?
The way to avoid "an uphill slog" is to just do it, via executive order. Obama knew about executive orders; he signed thousands of them while in office. That's a big reason why his successor has had such fun: while laws can only be changed by new laws, executive orders can be changed by new executive orders. Trump has staff whose only job is cataloging executive orders to overturn.
"National security experts" will tell us that the few hundred poor bastards we still have in the hole are some sort of existential threat to us a decade after we kidnapped them, but they are lying as usual. We are vulnerable to actual vulnerabilities, not random people with adverse sentiments. To lock up everyone who hates USA or the horrible things that USA does, we'd have to lock up about a billion people. To change the world, we must change ourselves.
Speaking more generally, this sclerotic way of thinking is why a cretin like Trump can get so deep inside the OODA loop of his political opponents. When they say "we just can't", it's because they can't find a lobbyist or think tank ghoul to tell them they can. When one considers all the truly awful things various politicians have decided they could do, it's a bit sickening.
I would replace "orchestrate" with "influence". It's obvious it can be influenced negatively, to make the situation worse in context of this discussion -- otherwise the concept of bearing responsibility to influence it positively, which you acknowledge, would make no sense.
As for "force of nature", that just sounds like what someone living under monarchy might say about monarchy, etc. Yes, trading things is very old and very useful, but from that doesn't follow that the whole package including "obfuscating ethical implications" is a "force of nature" (which to me doesn't really read differently than "the will of God" btw)
> But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person.
We're first and foremost talking about personal responsibility. To speak about "the system" we should "improve" while kinda skipping about that is like talking about a beach while ignoring the concept of a grain of sand. The system is the people, the beliefs they have about the world, the other people, and so on. If you take away the people, there is no system. With different people, there is a different system.
Yes, I cannot easily just change the behavior of others. However, I can change mine, and there are a lot of things I declined to do because I value being able to look at myself in the mirror more than temporary material profit. What force of nature? I only saw and see a bunch of mediocre, insecure people who failed to drag me into their games.
When a group of hooligans steals money from a beggar just to be cruel I may not be able or dare to do anything about it. But it's very easy for me to refrain from stealing from a beggar. It's actually way easier for me to refrain from it than to do it. Other people developed differently, probably had different childhoods and so on -- but we still live in the same "system", and "just" behave very differently in it. That matters.
I agree with most of what you said. I'm not saying capitalism is a mysterious force we can't understand or control, just that it has emergent behavior that is more powerful than any individual directive that can be handed down. Look for another post further down describing this very well.
Monarchy is based on social hierarchy, which is literally a force of nature. So there's that.
It's easy for you to not steal, and that's great. Just remember to credit your parents who raised you, a healthy environment of anyone that you grew up in, and the fortune not to be catastrophically impoverished at a young age. I'm not saying your environment could inside you to steal now (I don't know you), but I assure you, a childhood where you were raised in a lawless gang would not have gifted you the same set of moral values.
I understand what you are getting at, but it seems like "blame the system" is an effective excuse for capitalism to literally destroy the planet we live on.
If you subscribe to the "a fool and his money are soon departed" philosophy, which is essentially like, "well if they want products that destroy the world I will give them that" you are passing the moral accountability buck onto human society in its entirety.
We know that a human is smart, but that people are dumb. We also know that people are responding to norms that they are taught. So you can't teach people to buy your products no matter what with endless advertisements but expect them to change their lives for "the greater good" when your company would literally do anything possible to make a buck.
That's a disproportionate amount of responsibility when "people" as a rule are just doing what they do to get by, but you are doing what you do to get a mansion.
I don't disagree with you, but the systems-level view is important not insofar as it shows us who to blame, but because it shows us the kinds of solutions that might actually work.
The combination of incentives over the entire system must produce the correct emergent behavior. So, for example, instead of trying to get individuals to voluntarily use less carbon without changing anything else (this will never work), you can educate the public, pressure politicians, and end up with a large-scale carbon tax (although this particular case may be wishful thinking!).
That's the only thing I take issue with here. Characterizing this as intentional misconduct muddies the waters. The line between cutting costs and benefiting from an increased share price is long and winding. Don't blame people; examine systems.
Where most of the money goes is back to keeping costs low for consumers, the same ones that are conscientiously keeping the tap water off.