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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

The business literature of previous generations often talked about "service to mankind" as an ingredient of success. This essay sheds some light on what they might have meant by that.

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One issue, though, is that "good" seems to have a different definition for many of the really successful startups, i.e. being "robin hood." But, I am still not comfortable calling piracy a form of beneficial stealing. I do think such a thing exists in the realm of necessities for life, but free proprietary media is not a necessity. Such a business model is actually parasitic since a lot of capital is necessary to create high quality media. If you undermine the capital, you undermine the art.

So, the question in my mind is whether most of the do gooders are providing their own efforts for free or the efforts of others. Making money by giving away someone else's hard work and calling it good because it is free is distasteful.

But, I don't want to be too cynical. I do definitely agree that the fundamental purpose of business is to do good, i.e. create true wealth. Optimistically, if such an ideology can be spread effectively we could eliminate money, since computer technology gives us much more efficient ways to quantify transactions. This in turn would increase wealth significantly, since money is a big overhead.

we could eliminate money, since computer technology gives us much more efficient ways to quantify transactions.

For example?

Do you have any links or even just names of source material? I'm curious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

:-\

Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

Is it just me, or are pg's many draft-readers (and presumably fact-checkers) sleeping on the job here? I mean, c'mon,

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/510.html

or, specifically, the company that more-or-less cured malaria (indirectly), until the efforts were quashed by goody-two-shoeses,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geigy_Pharmaceutical

He did not argue that self-interest is always good; he merely argued against the view that self-interest is necessarily bad

I think the essay covers different ground than Mr. Smith by explicity stating it is in your self-interest to be good.

I wish I could answer this because I know I've run across it many times. Unfortunately, it's all blended into a vague impression. The "power of thought" authors of whom Napoleon Hill is the most famous certainly wrote about this, but so did more conventional writers. Anyway, the only specific thing that comes to mind is this useless, but hilarious example of an old IBM company song:

  OUR I. B. M. SALESMEN
  Tune: "Jingle Bells"

  I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
  Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
  I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
  In his service to mankind-that’s why we are so gay.

It happened to be fresh in my memory because I submitted a link about it the other day. Lots of jaw-dropping stuff from a bygone era: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/songs/ibm-songs/index.ht...

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