The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our society, we have to "earn our living" or be left behind.
Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in place?
This right here is one of the main reasons why I've worked so hard to achieve financial independence.
Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to do something I'm uncomfortable with, 'or else', they've simply been trying to cover the fact that I'm being exploited. Every. Time.
I'm quite happy to have reached a place in my life where I can tell someone 'No' with whatever level of politeness they deserve.
And so we mortgage our agency every time we believe them. Advertising was part of the military industrial complex during world war 2. Maybe we should take umbrage at that.
There is a self-selecting process where people promote other people who make those small decisions in a particular way.
If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a promotion, or become the patsy.
Often you can avoid this (if that's your desire) by frequently and vocally asking about the audit requirements of a particular business process...
Whistleblowing is and will always be considered an act of treason, or direct disloyalty, against those who are expecting you to support the enterprise.
Ultimately it comes down to your own conscience and being able to sleep at night.
I think that's actually a much bigger factor in some of these situations than any profit motive. Profit motive doesn't push rational people to keep doubling down no matter what; there is room for risk management concerns. But a corporation is not a single mind, it's a bunch of individuals acting in their own interest. Individuals' concern for their social capital within their teams tends to be a much more immediate and pressing motive than relatively remote and abstract things like shareholder profit.
That's what ultimately makes our society turn. If we could get to a true StarTrek replicator, then I think we're off to a good start!
Regarding Italy:
We have social housing that is crippled by bureocracy and corruption, you have to wait years in line to get a flat, so I can't really say we guarantee that.
We guarantee education, but we couldn't guarantee the same (good) level of education to everyone yet. Also we don't guarantee post high school education. If you need to work because you're poor and you don't have time to pursue a degree, that's mostly your problem.
Food is not guaranteed either, although we have several monetary aids to partially reduce the issue.
Healthcare is guaranteed, and excluding waiting times that are a bit long, I can say that healthcare really worked well for us. Nothing is perfect, but nobody is left to die because of preventable disease. No matter how poor you are, you will be treated.
So I wouldn't say in Italy we ever experienced what I propose, just a tiny taste of it.
It's pretty hard to test that out, though, when one side of the political spectrum is so convinced it will happen that they devote a significant amount of political effort to making sure it happens, preventing us from ever finding out what a well-funded and run socialist experiment would look like in the US.
But it's false.
Vietnam works for example, it even handled covid much better than other turbo capitalist powers.
And every socialist experiment has been characterized by different approaches and circumstances.
Rather than a factual argument, it's more an uninformed generalization, that sounds too close to the propaganda we are pushed on by media/politicians.
Do you want a strong factual argument?
Despite their claims, not a single capitalist nation has managed to solve poverty. And they won't ever, because without poverty there can't be the hierarchy much needed to force people to behave like cogs into the capitalist machine.
For example, at the end of the current month I "spent" five chicken and twenty bushes of lavender (I live in the countryside :D) and acquired two dogs and fifty kilos of grain. Was that good? Can I keep doing the same thing next month, or should I change my "prices"?
Do not dismiss money lightly, it's far more important than you might think.
> Was that good?
Only you can tell. Has your quality of life improved? Do you have what you need to live well? Then it was good, otherwise not. Money won't help you at all to understand this. Only you can tell the value something has for you.
And I'm sure you do this already all the time. How many times were you advertised a great deal (in terms of price/product value) that you decided wasn't necessary?
That was you overriding the value money gives to something. Even though just looking at the price it seemed like a great deal, you realized that maybe you didn't need a third washing machine.
Seems like you're trying to say something in a roundabout way.
These tropes make for easy internet virtue points but "just shun all risk" is a terrible heuristic for decision making and it's rarely clear without hindsight if/when/to what extent the risks are meaningfully greater than some previously agreed upon acceptable level. (Challenger blew up because the decision makers didn't understand how risky things actually were during a normal low temperature launch and decided to cut things even closer)
If everyone in the supply chain padded their estimates to reduce risk and cover their ass we wouldn't have space flight.
I heard this sentence so many times, that by now I'm convinced people who believe we are free don't really know what freedom means.
Today, you are free to choose in the same sense that you are free to commit crime. You can kill the next random person you meet on the streets, you can do that as long as you're ready to pay the consequences.
Does that mean we have freedom to commit homicide?
For the same reason, we aren't free to choose between keeping a job or starving our family and ending under the bridge.
Especially in a corrupt economy that relies entirely on people being in debt to live under modern standards.
Abolish debt, guarantee the basic needs to everyone, then we can talk about freedom of leaving a job.
You can quit and find a new job. Most would do it in a heartbeat for a tiny change in total comp, but struggle to make the decision when lives matter but might come at an economic cost?
That seems problematic and extremely self serving.
An interesting insight into the tech industry and its lack of 1. moral character 2. engineer accountability in general.
If by "you" you mean tech/white collar skilled worker, perhaps. But you're failing to consider the majority of low wage workers who don't really have this privilege.
I also believe in personal responsibility, like you do, but the biggest issue is in the system, rather than in individual behaviour.
It takes courage to take actual risks and make actual sacrifices to do the right thing.
You are right that it takes a lot less courage if you are sure you can just "quit and find a new job" and end up just fine. I'm sure most people would do the right thing when there is no cost to them at all of doing so and they are confident that is so, that's not the issue.
Honestly your confidence that of course you would do the right thing always just makes me think you've never faced a hard decision, or have always convinced yourself that no decision that would involve a significant personal sacrifice or loss was ever the right thing.
The latter is what lots of people do, it's not that they say "oh yeah I'm going to kill the astronauts because my career is more important", all those other people who overruled McDonald convinced themselves that it's not gonna kill the astronauts at all, so they didn't have to face the choice.
But its not a zero sum game, its a game that ecourages corruption
You can always justify it to yourself -- well, I'm not sure the thing will blow up, all these other smart people disagree, do I really want to risk being unemployed and my family living in poverty for it? We have an immense capacity to convince ourselves that doing the right thing coincides with our personal advantage and convenience.
What can do we do to make it more likely that we'll do the right thing when it matters? Only practice. One can ask oneself, when was the last time I risked personal advantage or security to do the right thing, when was the last time I gave up something to do the right thing for others? If one hasn't been practicing it when the stakes are smaller, one possibly hasn't built up the muscle to do so when the stakes are huge.
What if it's simply a probability though? 1%? .1%? .01%? Look at auto companies. They make decisions all the time that will kill 1 out of 1,000,000 people. Hell, the EPA and other regulators do this math every day. A coal power plant will kill x number of people over it's lifetime. Every time they make a regulation, they do this math and determine that saving a life is worth the economic cost.