Scandals suggest standards have slipped in corporate America | Hacker News Reader

Scandals suggest standards have slipped in corporate America

economist.com

111 pointsjs241 comments

Nonsense. Trying to get away with whatever you can, has always existed as a principle. Nowadays, it is easy to forget Dow Chemicals, Philip Morris etc. which were nothing short of nefarious in their pursuit of profits. Bhopal still takes the cake in industrial disasters, not Chernobyl [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

The CEO of Dow chemicals was escorted off in Indian Prime Minister's official car.

If this refers to Bhopal, Dow Chemical didn't buy Union Carbide Chemical, the perpetrator, till 2001, 17 years after the Bhopal disaster.

Waiting it out and selling you company does not obsolve you or the buyer from crimes. Same thing is true for Monsanto no matter how hard Beyer will try to say it's not their fault. Dow and Bayer knew exactly what toxic assets they were buying.

Bhopal might have caused the most direct deaths or injuries but opioids have, IMO, surpassed that. Not to mention broken families, psychological problems etc etc. https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html

Indeed, the Sackler family is a scourge.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime...

We live in an era where it is very, very challenging to cover up scandals. Previously, we lived in an era where it was very easy to cover up a scandal and what was counted as a scandal was a much higher bar.

It is unlikely standards have slipped. Standards are likely rising.

Is that true? Or, have the scandals occurred in places on the edges?

It used to be that DuPont, etc..., would dump chemicals into rivers in the literal middle of America. Now, they seem to be operating in more remote places, i.e., like Down Chemical in central/southern Argentina, where information, perhaps, doesn't flow quite as readily or quite as quickly.

When will we start recognizing fake surprise as an enabling linchpin of the current economic system? These "bad apples" aren't outliers, they are the very essence of the system.

Is there a good way to measure this?

I can't remember a time when I didn't read some article ... just like this one.

This seems like a very easy sentiment to sell / belive at anytime.

You certainly can't say air travel is more dangerous than it used to be.

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

Well you shouldn't say that.... someone probabbly is selling it though.

The paywalled article cites Boeing, Wells Fargo and Facebook.

They seem like different situation.

Boeing is the more significant topic and it actually seems similar to the rise and then decline of the American life expectancy. In this instance, a continuing increase in medical technology can no longer keep up with declines in living standards and the increases in unhealthy behavior.

Boeing's problem come as a highly competent company pushes tech to the limit and then resorts to variety of unhealthy shortcuts to guarantee cost savings.

In both these cases, you have systems with a vast array of competent people, often making the locally optimal decisions but pushed by global pressures until they can't make things work.

Another analogous situation would be Intel.

The about these situation is the pressures aren't likely restricted to the US and aren't likely to go away.

> Boeing's problem come as a highly competent company pushes tech to the limit and then resorts to variety of unhealthy shortcuts to guarantee cost savings.

No. It is just that managers “sold” what’s beyond physical limits.

With addition of more incompetent decisions in implementing basically wrong selling point.

No. It is just that managers “sold” what’s beyond physical limits.

Selling what's beyond physical limits is pretty much what I'm talking about. The pressure to do this selling came because Airbus was selling nearly equivalent claims - but with planes that required some retraining. So you had both push and pull. Moreover, the pressure for selling what's beyond physical limits comes as you previously had a steady stream of progress pushing physical limits. Not exactly analogous to the end of Moore's law but it seems like there are some similarities.

im shocked. shocked.

the company i work for is 100% ethical, never even once have i whiffed a sense of even the most brief impropriety.

at least thats what they told me to say if i didnt want to be fired, blacklisted, and have my career destroyed.

Is this specific to corporate America? Scandals are all over from Vodafone to Nestle.

I am not convinced. Also, the fact that America houses larger percentage of Fortune 500 corporations, there will be more examples of American vs non-American due to the population size.

This is a generic problem with large corporations.

Me thinks this is allowing for some crap that old corporates used to try. That is to say, older companies weren't exactly saints.

If anything, we are starting to show that we do hold corporations to a high standard. Hell, have we ever held cigarette companies truly to task for all of the crazy additives they did simply to make things more addictive?

Now, there is some irony that some industries that came into being with intense regulations are showing the value of those regulations as they lose them. But that is a different story than corporate America slipping in standards. Quite the contrary, that is a fairly predictable story that regulations can serve a purpose.

“Slipped” implies unintentional. A better headline is corporate America is getting away with more.

I would say that is hardly true. Corporate America is getting more scrutiny than ever.

Scrutiny alone does not imply any real consequences.

But lack of scrutiny surely implies lack of real consequences. Anyway, I would say that in terms of consequences, even there corporations face more of them, simply because the public gets to know more.

Why not? It’s economically rational even for the company now. It used to be rational just for the executives.

"For critics of capitalism none of this will be a surprise. They argue that firms controlled by private shareholders are especially unethical. Yet it is easy to poke holes in this."

The existence of a handful of outliers does not a thesis disprove.

We had 8 years of Republicans curbing back regulatory oversight, increasing regulatory capture. The sitting President won on "draining the swamp" and proceeded to hire lobbyists to his staff because "they know how the system works" and yet there's been only further deregulation and destruction of government entities. If Americans want it to stop they will stop voting for people who literally base their party platform on destroying government oversight. There was literally an article yesterday about how when the IRS went after the wealthy for tax evasion, their budget was cut by Congress. The solution to this is a political one. Vote in people who believe differently if you want different outcomes. Otherwise quit complaining, you've got the government the people voted for.

Can you not make this a political party issue?

I'm not going to get into the details of his theory, but if he believes it is a political party issue, then he's not "making" it one.

You should get into the details. Why do you agree it’s a political party issue?

I didn't say it was, neither did the other person.

I have no doubt that democrats can and will do some stupid crap. Evidence is pretty heavy on the republicans being the main party pushing through this kind of policy for the relevant part of history.

Now, if you don't think regulatory rollback is to blame, that is a different thing. Attack that. Attacking the detail that republicans have been the main ones rolling back? That is actually making it unnecessarily partisan. I say that as someone that agrees that the point is stronger without bringing up who did it.

If I were to increase regulatory capture while cutting back regulations how exactly would I do that?

Cut the good regulations, keep the bad ones.

"subject to approval by $DEPARTMENT on the basis of $VAGUE_SUBJECTIVE_CRITERIA"

EPA is a good example, but in any event regulatory capture doesn't imply more regulation, it's just descriptive about the manner in which a regulator behaves institutionally.

Huh?

Regulatory capture (i.e., capture by whatever's being regulated) and cutting back regulations both have the same effect: weaker regulation.

Sadly it is often not so simple. Complex regulations can advantage large incumbent firms by making it harder for newer entrants to their markets.

Ajit Pai: Regulatory capture by serving corporate interests and destroying net neutrality.

Also Ajit Pai: Destroy net neutrality, which was seen as a "regulation" in the way of a free market.

I don't have an MBA but I imagine it involves hiring a few of the folks who currently regulate your operations while leaning on your political friends to cut regulation funding and spinning up an "independent" company prepared to shoulder the regulatory burden for a fraction of the cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/politics/boeing-faa.ht...

Imagine thinking that you could vote out the corruption in U.S. politics...

>We had 8 years of Republicans curbing back regulatory oversight

What about the 8 years before that? Clinton did a fair amount of deregulation, and holds more of the blame for the financial meltdown:

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...

That's because he was really a Republican, and just pretended to be a Democrat.

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