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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

Decades ago, someone's reputation was in a large part based on their ethics. Nowadays, with globalization, money and rank act as substitutes for a reputation; ethics and morals are seen as hurdles to achieving a desirable reputation, not as its foundation. This is a radical shift.

Humans were not meant to compete on the world stage. This level of competition is too intense. On the world stage, there will always be someone willing to compromise all principles and ethics to achieve their goals; such a person is much more likely to win.

If you break it up by industry, you will get the same result across all industries. All industries will end up being headed by people who aren't impeded by moral hurdles. It's terrible for society.

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I think it's orthogonal to scale.

Most of the horribly unethical things I've witnessed happened in hyper-local markets.

Ugly corruption is rampant in small or medium businesses that dominate the economic output of isolated and localized geographic regions.

As a distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomenon, "warm fuzzies corruption" is also incredibly common in hyper-localized markets. "Family owned and operated for three generations" is literally a re-framing of "nepotism in the C-suite and boardroom" as a good thing!!! Find me a multi-national that brags about bloodline continuity, please.

On the flip side, with the rise of persistent social networks and the long memory of the internet, people may be thinking about their overall ethical image "globally" in the same manner, and it being hard to wrap one's head around.

Of course with government spying, China probably isn't the only one with a "good citizen index" calculated based on the monitoring. All it takes is for once three letter security agency to want to assign "danger" scores to citizens, as well as "importance".

Your are also correct that if capitalism and its inherent sociopathic reward system promulgating to some form of reproductive reinforcement or selection, then in the long term bad things will happen.

Yes but its a neutrality index

Any solutions? Can't really ignore globalization, because you fall behind the rest of the world who's embracing it. The genie is out of the bottle.

> Any solutions?

don't compete with morale-less losers!

you can be a ethical company and let others follow your example

IMO, the solution is to either:

- Stop money printing globally. Switch to a deflationary monetary system like Bitcoin or other.

- Change the mechanism of money printing globally. Distribute all newly issued currency via UBI indiscriminately to citizens (instead of the current trickle-down approach of currency issuance which gives an advantage to corporations).

We need to get rid of the centralized streams of new currency because it artificially concentrates all of a nation's competition to small areas. Those who are closer to the money printers have a huge competitive advantage over those who are far. We need to get rid of Cantillion effects.

Maybe if globalization was done in a decentralized way, we would have smaller tribes wherein reputation would matter more and competition would be less intense.

Currency printing is essentially a form of government subsidy via dilution. It takes wealth from PersonA, PersonB and PersonC who are on the periphery and uses it to subsidize PersonD who is in the middle. It's not difficult to figure out why PersonA, PersonB and PersonC are not able to compete against PersonD - Their own money is weaponized against them. The subsidy allows PersonD to offer lower prices.

You forgot the single most important piece: outlaw usury. Lenders should earn from the value they create by underwriting, which is to say identifying parties that will increase general wealth and well-being if found creditworthy, not by collecting rents.

I don't know if it's the most important. I think monetary policy is the most important.

But I agree that it could go a long way if governments would make the distinction between value-creation and value-extraction. The way things are now, people simply do not acknowledge that there is a difference at all.

The reason why I think that monetary policy is the most important thing is that it naturally favors value-extraction (rent seeking). Why bother creating value for consumers when you can just tap into easy money from banks and government contracts?

I basically agree. Here’s why I think interest is so odious though: barring rounding errors like minted coins and federal reserve notes, our civilian money supply is bank created deposits. Anyone who borrows at interest from a bank will have to get more money than the bank initially created when it originated the loan. In aggregate it’s clear that it’s impossible for all borrowers to pay back usurious loans. It’s a fundamentally unjust system that guarantees that no matter how well they manage their finances, some borrowers must be forced to default.

Agreed. I guess it could be said that usury is an integral part of our current monetary system.

It looks amazingly profitable from the bank's perspective. You just print money, loan it out to PersonA to buy a house, then collect interest payments on that for 20 years, then PersonB comes along, you print even more money, loan it out to PersonB to buy the same house from PersonA at a higher price, then collect interest payments on that for another 20 years... Repeat ad-infinitum.

> Any solutions?

I think people's frustrations with this is part of the reason we currently have a cancel culture.

Part of the risk of unethical behavior IS getting cancelled. Of course as soon as people bring up their pitchforks, a company always backtracks with a "we remain committed to bringing the best experience for our customers"

We should have made free trade require ethics and labor standards to participate.

Lulz.

Even trade within a nation rarely met that bar in the past.

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