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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking to public for-profit corporations to, of their own volition, take some sort of ethical stand, you're going to be disappointed more often than not.

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So we shouldn't hold anyone accountable? Just give up?

Yesterday Hackernews talked about how Apple was just focused on making money and they should ignore any moral implications, today we are supposed to feel compassion and understanding for poor Tim Cook? It just sounds like everyone has Apple as their idol and they can't do any wrong.

I'm just saying that there is always this idea that companies will do the right thing out of the kindness of their hearts when in reality they usually need to be compelled to do so. That's why, for instance, they passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act instead of kindly asking companies to stop bribing foreign governments (not that that is bulletproof.

We can, but you end up as signal within a vast amount of noise (Gandhi's "first they ignore you" phase isn't always passed).

If you eventually do get contact it will end up with a kind of theatrical act where we are acting that they should care and are being heard, and the CEO may end up acting as if he does care. Perhaps even with more than mere actions.

Maybe he even cares as a human being (if he doesn't -> psychopath), but with his CEO hat on he certainly does not.

> Maybe he even cares as a human being (if he doesn't -> psychopath), but with his CEO hat on he certainly does not.

Aren't CEOs and managers even trained to think that way in business school? For instance the "shareholder value maximization" idea, which teaches the sole responsibility of a corporation is to make the most money it can for its shareholders, and damn everything else.

That's a problem the Chinese have managed to avoid, even if it's been in a corrupt way. It seems like they make the local companies prioritize the policy objectives of the authoritarian government ahead of absolutely maximizing the profit interests of their shareholders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

  So we shouldn't hold anyone accountable? Just give up?

What's needed here is a coalition.

If N companies pulled out of China and it didn't liberalise, they've incurred a cost for no benefit. If N+1 pulled out and it did trigger China to liberalise, they'd benefit from doing it.

The trick is finding the N+1 companies and convincing them they're enough to be the trigger.

> If N companies pulled out of China and it didn't liberalise, they've incurred a cost for no benefit. If N+1 pulled out and it did trigger China to liberalise, they'd benefit from doing it.

> The trick is finding the N+1 companies and convincing them they're enough to be the trigger.

It seems like China has been pretty successful at preventing the actual dependence on foreign companies needed for that strategy to have its indented effect. For instance, if Apple pulls out, Chinese who can afford an iPhone are just going to have to settle for a Huawei.

The only chance I see is a general reduction in trade or foreign-driven manufacturing hurting the overall Chinese economy, but that would take a lot of companies to accomplish.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/05/23/iphone-market-share-gartner-q...

The funny thing is, not doing this is just kicking the can down the road. Chinese companies with their protected access to the gigantic and prosperous Chinese market, will eventually be "good enough" to crush all others, across virtually all markets.

I mean it's probably more effective to make it more painful for them not to act than to act.

It's less straightforward than you're letting on.

China is slowly, slowly liberalizing. The trendline is towards more civic freedom, less inhumane practices. If they started to do something destabilizing or genocidal, that is the time to pull out.

Not really. If anything it's the opposite. They're clamping down on Hong Kong ahead of schedule and Xi is going in a more authoritarian direction. I think China is actually demonstrating the fallacy of our idea that as a country develops it has to become a liberal democracy.

Yeah, they played the West. The Communists got what they wanted (technology transfer), while keeping everything firmly under their control.

> I think China is actually demonstrating the fallacy of our idea that as a country develops it has to become a liberal democracy.

I don't think that's necessarily been proven a fallacy, the idea that liberalizing China would be simple and automatic certainly has been. The Chinese Communists aren't stupid: they've been carefully studying things like post-Communist Russia and the Arab Spring in order to avoid mistakes that might cause them to lose power. If China liberalizes, it will take a unique path that the Communists probably couldn't see.

Things in China are dramatically better than they were 30 years ago. Yes they played the west wrt techology, and we should have hit back harder after Nortel got nailed, but overall Chinese people are more knowledgeable about the world around them and their middle class would never put up with the types of things that Mao got away with. Harmonizing HK with the rest of Chinese policies doesn't really change my mind.

Economically things have been liberalized. Politically they have not. This has worked out OK for a lot of people (although it must be said others have been left behind), but it is not really the model people predicted for China.

China is officially the largest national economy after the United States. Seems like a lot of development has already happened.

Were you responding to a different comment? I was writing about political development, not economic.

Then what political development do you mean?

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody" return on investment, Cook said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-companies-...

Ultimately of course, these things do have a return, even just in PR. How Apple operates in China has some effect on its US sales and market position... so I guess Tim has to play a careful game.

It's easy to not consider ROI when one's talking about investment with non-negative gains strictly under your control. If you have money to spare, making your devices accessible will not reduce your profits, and there's a chance it'll increase them.

OTOH, pissing off China could mean huge losses for Apple, and that makes it a different story altogether.

Exactly. Even if Cook stands up for his (or our) ideals, the pressure China is going to apply to Apple will result in Cook getting ousted by the board, replaced by a favorable "Cook".

Companies (for profit or not) answer to their major stockholders. Even politics in a (democratic) country (EU or U.S. or X, place possibly your country where X) follow a similar mechanism: politicians conform with the wishes of the major coalitions that will keep them in power. Sure one can leave footprints of their ideals, but after some threshold they are intrinsically bound by their power base (usually lobbying).

I think the point many people are making is that "I will be replaced by someone willing to do this morally reprehensible job" is not an excuse for doing the job yourself, as that 1) increases the pool of people who are willing to do the job and allows more bad things to happen and 2) as people are not purely replaceable, it isn't clear that the Board of Apple will be in a good place to find someone as competent at supply chains as Tim Cook to replace him... particularly someone who is both competent and willing to play with China.

Cook realized that his board or shareholders would fire him for getting Apple locked out the Chinese market (both for sales but also for the manufacturing). Not an easy position to be in.

> Cook realized that his board or shareholders would fire him for getting Apple locked out the Chinese market (both for sales but also for the manufacturing). Not an easy position to be in.

They could conceivably diversify their manufacturing base, but that's a longer term strategy. Given Apple's reputation for control, it's conceivable that they're not as dependent on the Shenzhen ecosystem as your typical manufacturer. It doesn't have to be domestic US production, just not China.

Is a sarcastic way of framing this then: he is taking from the Chinese and giving it to the blind?

Which is why I find a joke to force employees to do some kind of company values training, with certification, because in the end they get thrown out the window the moment the money sings, regardless of how noble they state "better loose a deal that give up on the values".

Thats the wrong way to look at it - Its not that value training stops the world from being as it is.

Instead imagine a world without even the lip service necessary for value training.

In other words consider an unfettered race to the bottom.

Agreed. We should expect governments to take ethical stands not for profit companies that only care about profit. Unfortunately western governments are also being totally hypocritical when it comes to China.

You act as though business is this totally seperate thing to life. Business is some fancy legal words wrapped around the activities of groups of people. Saying businesses are only driven by profit is not fundamentally different from saying "employees and shareholders of Apple are greedy people who put personal gain over the moral principles of our society"

It's a practical point of view, not theory of society. It's great when companies put morals over profits, but they generally don't - companies don't gain much from being good and don't lose much from being evil; the impact is not big enough to offset the importance of being effective on the market. Companies that fail to be effective get outcompeted and die.

In the shorter term they are likely to face pressure from investors if they're doing something like taking a stand that shuts them out of a huge market like China.

Organizational dynamics frequently lead to organizations behaving in a way that their members probably would not conduct themselves in their personal lives.

Hypocracy is a bikeshedding dimension. China and the US both serve the politically-connected first and the people last; China does it by force and the US does it by manufacturing consent. Regardless of political system, the people must rise up and demand a fair government and insist on sensible regulations and justice with eternal vigilance. Power never cedes anything without a fight.

I think it's getting carried away to say there's no different. The US isn't quite what we'd like it to be, but you will not be kidnapped and charged with a trumped up crime for running a book store that sells books critical of the United States government. Noam Chomsky remains a free man.

Companies only care for profit inasmuch we allow them to do so.

A couple laws would deal with the problem quite rapidly but we first need to get this social-darwinistic neoliberal ideology out of our collective arses...

What are the proposed "couple laws" that could help here?

I fail to imagine how laws can convince a profit-maximizing entity to stop behaving like profit-maximizing entity.

Well, just off the top of my head - IANAL not an economist - but it would suffice to change by law the set of stakeholders that have a legal say on the company and you’re done.

Yeah! For example, the government could become a stakeholder in all companies to ensure that the populace's interest is taken into account in addition to profit... wait a second, that's what China's doing

> jpetso: Yeah! For example, the government could become a stakeholder in all companies to ensure that the populace's interest is taken into account in addition to profit... wait a second, that's what China's doing

What kind of stupidity is this? The Chinese government is an authoritarian oligarchy and doesn't give two shits about "ensuring the populace's interest." It cares about maintaining its power and control.

I think you need to cleanse yourself of your free-market straw men. It's not a bad idea for there to be more stakeholders in control of companies than just the shareholders. For instance, you could split the board between shareholders, employees, and customer representatives. That's not a radical idea either. IIRC, German unions have long had seats on their employer's board of directors, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Yeah, why not... corporate has a powerful influence in the Government's decisions about the populace's interests, I don't see why not formally establish reciprocity.

Besides, in Germany Unions such as IG Metal _do_ sit on the Board.

I don't know how practical that is as a solution to social ills, but whether China is doing it or not doesn't really make it good or bad.

Yes, that's true. What I wanted to point out is that a good idea in theory can quickly turn into an instrument that's being used for other purposes.

China is a great example to be studied in this regard. Their changes do indeed ensure that profit will only be one of several considerations for company policies in China; this will undoubtedly result in more consumer-friendly corporate behavior, but it also tightens central control and is likely to deepen the kind of censorship measures that I personally would not want to wish on any person or company.

Letting all people (of a given country) have a say means involving the government in which the company's headquarters are located. I'd rather not have national[istic] interests working from within companies, I feel laws and regulations are better suited to get a fair & transparent outcome.

The German model that the sibling comment brought up is quite sane in comparison. It limits the stakeholders to only those who actively participate in production, which provides a kind of decentralization enforced by laws, but not directly steered by central interests. In terms of overall benefit to society, it's hard to argue against that model and it has served the Germans well. (However, it's also worth noting that having unions sit on the board doesn't prevent the company from making unfavorable decisions outside of the limited national and workplace-environment-related interest of the extra stakeholders, and often those changes can only be deferred / slowed down but not outright avoided.)

I am not sure. I think the problem there is that the Chinese government is actively involved in enterprises, like censorship, that most of us would agree the government shouldn't be doing. I don't think it's anything inherent to the idea of fully or partially state-run enterprises (especially when you consider how many services have been degraded upon being privatized).

That's because corporations don't have volition and don't take actions. People in them do. And the responsibility remains with those individual people.

As long as there is a correlation between reputation and profits, there is leverage to shame them into behaving properly.

thanks for pointing the obvious!

Now you are going to say that the world is also full of criminals?

oh my god! who would have thought?

It doesn't seem to be that obvious to everyone.

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