> Of course, I would be willing to pay more if it meant the type of abuses that Walmart does would stop, but that is not the choice I am given.
Are there no small, family-run businesses you could patronize, since you said you're willing to pay more?
Are there no small, family-run businesses you could patronize, since you said you're willing to pay more?
Me choosing to shop somewhere else is not even a rounding error in Walmarts profits. My choice will not bring about any change, but it will hurt me.
I said I was willing to make the sacrifice IF IT MEANT WALMART WASN'T AROUND ANY MORE. I am not willing to make the sacrifice if it doesn't do any good.
I'm pointing out that you don't rule the world, and Walmart will exist whatever you do. Some people seem to like it.
Your only other option is to lobby publicly for the changes you favor.
My only choice is whether I get to enjoy the cheap prices Walmart offers; you say "some people seem to like it", and I am clearly agreeing... everyone likes cheaper prices! I hate the way Walmart treats its workers, but I love the cheap prices... so I either shop there and get the cheap prices or I pay more to shop somewhere else, but either way the workers are going to be treated the same way. Given that, why wouldn't I choose to shop there? If they are going to be abusing their workers no matter what I do, I might as well at least get cheap prices.
And that is why "the free market" will never stop the types of abuses that Walmart commits.
Your last sentence is EXACTLY WHAT I AM ARGUING FOR. I am saying if we want to change Walmarts behavior, we can ONLY do it through legislation; we can't "vote with our wallet" and expect Walmart to change its behavior. We have to vote with our actual vote.
My argument is with people who think we shouldn't regulate businesses because we can use our wallet to change them; I am saying we can't use our wallet for all the reasons I laid out.
.. and yet, millions of people do exactly that. Consumer boycotts happen every day. Sometimes they even have an effect.
This is the point
After all, almost no election is ever decided by one vote.
(If it did happen, they'd have a recount because there are probably counting errors.)
You are absolutely right, though, that pure game theory says voting is not important, and I believe that is why voting is not how we make changes to our society (at least not directly). It takes organizing.
This isn't really true, either, though. Even a small mom-and-pop shop won't be kept in business by a single customer choosing to shop there. Unless we are talking about a speciality shop that only has a few customers, one customer is never going to make or break a retailer.
Now, of course you can argue "yeah, but if 50 other people do the same thing then the store will survive!", which is true, but again, my choice doesn't really change anything. My choice to shop there or not doesn't have any affect on the other 49 people, and if the store would survive with 50 customers, it will survive with 49. My choice doesn't matter to either store.
It’s just good ethics hygiene. And shopping at locally-owned stores always pays off in the long run. You meet interesting people who actually care about where they live and their neighbors.
The effects only add up if a significant number of people make the same decision.
On the individual level, the cost of the local shop is detrimental compared to Walmart. The rational choice for any given individual is to go with the lower price. Choosing otherwise doesn't gain you anything other than that the local spot is a nicer place to visit.
At the macro level, nobody wins unless everyone cooperates. At the individual level, you can only win by not cooperating. It's just the prisoner's dilemma.
Happy thoughts don't really factor in here, it's not really an ethics problem, it's an economics problem.
It's the problem of collective action. A person wishes everyone would behave as he prefers. They have the difficult task of persuading enough others to follow their lead. No one said it would be easy or convenient. Why should it be?
We can find plenty of examples of people who do exactly that, today. There are boycotts active against thousands of organizations. It doesn't take "everybody" - just a loud minority who are organized.
As for "the rational choice" -- that's the myth of Economic Man, which has been thoroughly demolished by behavioral economics. People make choices all the time that do not maximize their financial return.
It's easy to see how if you take an example. Imagine there is a company selling a widget that really makes your life better, but manufacturing it really pollutes the environment. If everyone buys one of the widgets, in fact, so much pollution will occur that our lives will be MUCH worse off than if we never had the widget at all. So my (and everyone else's) preference is that no one has any widgets and we don't have the pollution.
Now here is where it is a prisoner's dilemma; if no one buys a widget, the company goes out of business and there is no pollution, but I also don't end up with a widget. If everyone else doesn't buy a widget, but I do, then the company goes out of business (yay!) and there is no more pollution AND I have a widget anyway (double yay!). I get the best of both worlds - no pollution and this awesome widget. If I don't buy the widget, but everyone else does, then I still get the pollution but I don't even have a widget (the worst of both worlds). If everyone buys a widget, then we have pollution but at least I also have a widget.
Just like a classical prisoner's dilemma, I am always better off defecting. If everyone else is buying a widget, I might as well buy one, too, because the pollution is happening no matter what, might as well also get the benefit of a widget. If no one else is buying a widget, then I might as well buy one because I can have the widget AND no pollution (which is better than just having no pollution).
Everyone has this same incentive, which is why free markets don't solve pollution - it only is solved by regulation, forcing people to cooperate.
I feel similarly, actually, and my gut reaction is revulsion to this fact, too. I hate the idea that my consumer choices actually don't have any affect on what type of business succeeds or fails. I want to believe that my choices matter to the world, but logical analysis clearly shows that it doesn't. We can't deny it, we can only ask, "ok then what do we do?"
My entire point is that we can't rely on the free market to fix these sorts of problems, because the free market relies on incentives, and those incentives won't solve problems like mistreating workers, polluting the environment, and any other externality of that sort. We can't simply hope that spending our dollars ethically will change anything, because it simply can't.
You might think I am immoral for pointing this out, but I feel like it is the opposite. The people who WANT us to believe that 'voting with our wallets' matters are the one's who want us to NOT do anything else. They know that our consumer choices aren't going to effect any real change, but they want us to think it can so that we don't do anything that could ACTUALLY make changes, like organizing politically. They want to promote the narrative that the free market is the way you change the world for the better, when it clearly isn't.
Honestly, this is the same as voting. People in power who want to maintain the status quo love to push the idea that you change the world by simply voting, but it isn't enough just to vote as an individual and hope it works out, for the same reason that an individual making a purchasing decision can't change things.
This is called the Paradox of Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting), because no individual vote actually matters.
We can only make change by organizing and coordinating action.
In Catch-22, Yossarian says, "I don't want to go out there and get shot at," and they say "What if everyone did that?" He says, "Then I'd be a fool not to do it." That's intended to be funny.
Everyone didn't act like Yossarian in WW II for some reason, and some paid with their lives. Voting is voluntary in the US, and yet large numbers of people do vote.
So you need to figure all that out.
So you are saying you can make a measurable difference. It's not a super hero story where you save the world on your own.