Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the central questions of our age.

In an ideal capitalist free market companies are almost necessarily amoral (Friedmann doctrine ), they can only make choices based on profit. In real life you have barriers to entry and PR concerns that let companies at least pretend to waste some profit-making opportunities on doing good.

I don't know if the right answer is consumer unions, or benevolent government regulation, or giving up and making do with what we have, but this discuss I see on this issue seems so polarised (not unique) that progress will be hard to come by.

View on HN

It seems obvious that government regulation is the answer to me. That's how we got rid of child labor, created a minimum wage, and enshrined the 40 hour work week as standard in the US.

That said, decades of social pressure led up to those laws being passed. It's not enough to sit idly by and let Congress solve these problems on their own.

> This is one of the central questions of our age.

I think the question is what to do about it, not whether it's happening. We have reams of evidence that it's happening, and "doing good" for PR reasons is just more of the same - it's more important to look good than to be good, and looking good without being good is more profitable and thus more desirable.

Unfortunately, because so much of our media runs in the same system, it can be difficult to have a clear conversation on the topic.

You're right, the central question we are facing is how to structure our society, what values, incentives we should use as its foundation.

The current (capitalist) system uses self interest and profit as an incentive, and we see where that got us. We can mitigate some issues with tweaks like regulation, but it's also valuable to ask more fundamental questions. Is there a different incentive other than profit we can use? What are the effects on society of the incentives we use? What values do we want to promote? How can we do that?

The difficulty of having this complex and nuanced discussion shouldn't discourage us from having it. We must find our way together.

> This is one of the central questions of our age

Is it though? We've got a couple of hundred years of case history now and been proven time and time again they kind of depravity companies will do.

It seems we finally kind of got the balance right post world war 2 and it's all been backwards since.

I can usually see the other sides point of view but it's starting to feel like the other side are anti-vaxers where I understand their fears (the same corporatism fear I'm expressing here) but can't grasp how they reached their conclusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com